Dieter headed the dobbin cart toward the wad of white. In a moment they had drawn up beside it and halted. The other cart followed. One of the dobbins sniffed at the white wad; without comment he began to nibble.
“Leave that alone,” Dieter ordered nervously. “Maybe it’ll poison you.”
Louis leaped down and strode over.
The wad was faintly moist. It was alive, all right. Louis got a stick and began prodding it experimentally. Here was a second life-form out of space, a rarer form, not as common as the smaller drifters. “Just two?” he asked. “Nobody’s seen any more?”
“There’s one over there,” Irma said, pointing.
A quarter of a mile away a third wad had recently landed. From where they stood they could see it sluggishly stirring… the wad was making its way slowly over the ground. Its movement slowed. Presently it came to rest.
“It’s dead,” Dieter commented indifferently.
Louis walked over toward it, across the spongy green surface of plant life. Tiny animals scuttled underfoot, hard-shelled crustaceans. He ignored them and kept his eyes on the looming wad of white. When he reached it, he discovered that it wasn’t dead; it had found a hollow depression and was laboriously anchoring itself. Fascinated, he watched it exude a slimy cement. The cement hardened, and the wad was tightly fixed to the ground. There it rested, obviously waiting.
Waiting for what?
Curious, he walked all around it. The surface was uniform. It certainly looked like a cell, all right: a giant single cell. He picked up a rock and tossed it; the rock embedded itself in the white substance and stuck there.
No doubt it was related to the drifters. Two stages, perhaps; that was the probable explanation. The drifters, he knew, were incomplete; they lacked the ability to ingest food, to reproduce, even to stay alive. But this thing was clearly staying alive: it was getting itself set up. A symbiotic relationship, perhaps?
While he was studying it, he noticed the drifter.
The drifter was coming down. He had seen it happen before, but it always fascinated him. The drifter was using the air as a medium: carefully it maneuvered itself like a weed-spore, first floating in one direction, then in another, keeping itself aloft as long as possible. The drifters didn’t like to land; it meant an end to mobility.
There it came, drifting down to its death, to expire fruitlessly. The senseless mystery of the interstellar creature: wandering millions, billions of miles, over centuries—for what? To wind up here, to perish without purpose?
The familiar cosmic meaninglessness. Life without goal.
In the last two years billions of drifters had been exterminated. It was tragic, stupid. This one, hovering momentarily, was trying to keep itself alive one last second, before it fell to its pointless death. A hopeless struggle; like all of its race, it was doomed.
Suddenly the drifter folded into itself. Its thin, extended body snapped together like a rubber band; one second it was spread out, catching air currents—the next second it was a thin elongated pencil. It had literally rolled itself up in a tube. And now, thin and tube-like, it dropped straight down.
The tube-like projectile fell expertly, purposefully, directly into the wad of white dough.
It neatly penetrated the white wad. The surface closed after it, and no sign of it remained.
“It’s a house,” Dieter said uncertainly. “That’s a dwelling, and the drifter lives in it.”
The white mass had begun to change. Incredulous, Louis saw it swell until it was almost double its original size. It couldn’t be; it was impossible. But even as he stood there, the wad divided into two hemispheres, joined, but clearly distinct. Rapidly, the white mass grew and formed four connecting units. Now growth was frantic; the thing bubbled and swelled like yeast. Two, four, eight, sixteen… geometric progression.
A chill, ominous wind eddied around him. The undulating shape seemed to cut off the sunlight; all at once he was standing in a darkening shadow. In panic, Louis retreated. His terror spread to the two dobbins; as he reached out to take hold of Dieter’s cart the birds suddenly unfolded their wings and bolted. Dragging the carts after them, they floundered away from the swelling white shape. He was left standing alone, impotent and stunned. “What is it?” Frank was shouting. Hysteria rose up into his voice; now they were all yelling. “What is it? What’s happening?”
Dieter leaped to the ground and stood with his feet braced apart, the reins gripped. “Come on,” he shouted to Louis. “Get in!”
With a snarl of aversion, the dobbin shuddered away from Louis. Ignoring it, he clambered into the cart and sat hunched over, lips moving, face white. Dieter leaped back in, and the cart began to move away.
“It’s an egg,” Syd said faintly.
“Was,” Louis corrected. “Not now. Now it’s a zygote.”
The cosmic egg had been fertilized by the micro-gametophyte. And Louis, watching, knew what the drifters were.
“Pollen,” he whispered, stricken. “That’s what they’ve been all the time. And we never guessed.”
The drifters were pollen, radiating in clouds across space between star systems, in search of their megagametophytes. Neither they nor the white wad was the final organism; both were elements of the now visibly growing embryo.
And he realized something else. Nobody had guessed, but Jones must have known this—and for some time.
The team of biologists spread out their reports. Jones barely glanced at the collection of papers; he nodded and moved away, deep in brooding thought.
“We were afraid that might be it,” Trillby, the head of the team, said. “That explains their incompleteness; that’s why they don’t have digestive or reproductive systems.” He added, “They are a reproductive system. Half of it, at least.”
“What’s the word?” Jones asked suddenly. “I forget.”
“Metazoon. Multi-celled. Differentiated into various organs and special tissues.”
“And we haven’t seen the final stages?”
“God no,” Trillby said emphatically. “Nothing like it. The organism uses the planet as a womb; the most we’ve observed is the embryo and what might correspond to the fetal stage. At that point, it bursts off the planet. The atmosphere, the gravitational field, are a medium for early development; after that it’s through with us. I suppose the final organism is non-planetary.”
“It lives between systems?” Jones inquired, frowning. His face was wrinkled and preoccupied; he only half-heard the man. “It breeds on planets… sheltered places.”
Trillby said: “We have reason to believe that all the so-called drifters are pollen grains from a single adult plant—if those terms have any meaning. Maybe it’s neither plant nor animal. A combination of both… a plant’s immobility and using a plant’s method of pollination.”
“Plants,” Jones said. “They don’t fight. They’re helpless.”
“Generally speaking. But we shouldn’t assume that these—“
Jones nodded absently. “Of course… it’s absurd. We can’t really know anything about them.” Wearily, he rubbed his forehead. “I’ll keep your report here. Thanks.”
He left them standing there, surrounding their report like a cluster of anxious hens. Offices danced past him, and then he was out in the barren, drafty corridor that connected the administrative wing with the police wing. Glancing at his pocket watch he saw that it was almost time. Time. Infuriated, he stuffed the watch away, hating to see its placid, contemptuous face.
For one year, he had mulled the report over in his mind. He had memorized it word for word—and then sent out the team to collect it. They had done a good job: it was an exhaustive study.
From outside the building came sounds. Shuddering, Jones halted, aware of them in a vague way, conscious that the unending murmur was still there. Shakily, he ran his fingers through his hair, smoothing it back as best he could. Putting himself in some semblance of order.
He was a plain little man with steel-rimmed glasses and thinning hair. He wore a simple gray uniform, with a single medal on his sunken chest, plus the regulation crossed-flasks armband. His life was an endless procession of work. He had a duodenal ulcer from tension and worry. He was conscientious.
He was licked.
But the crowd outside didn’t know that. Outside the building, it had grown to monumental size. Thousands of people, collected together in an excited clot, yelling and waving their arms, cheering, holding up banners and signs. The noise drifted and eddied, a distant booming that had been going on—with few respites—for over a year. There was always somebody outside the building, screeching his head off. Idly, Jones considered the various slogans; in an automatic, almost bureaucratic way, he checked them against the program he had laid out.
WE HAVE FAITH
NOT YET BUT NOT LONG
JONES KNOWS—JONES DOES
Jones knew, all right. Grimly, he paced around in a circle, arms folded, impatient and restless. Eventually, after tramping down the hedges around the police building, the crowd would disperse. Still cheering, still shouting slogans at one another, they would drift off. The organization die-hards would go take ice-cold showers, would return to their various posts to plot the next stage of the grand strategy. None of them realized it yet: the Crusade was over. In a few days the ships would be coming back.