itself in here to avoid what happened to the rest of its crew…”
She broke off, and Prilicla called urgently, “Friend Cha, why are you feeling
like that? What happened to you?”
“Nothing happened to me,” she replied, fighting to control her disappointment.
“I am holding the FGHJ now. There is no need to hurry. It is dead.”
“That explains why my sensors didn’t register,” Fletcher said.
“Friend Cha,” Prilicla said, ignoring the interruption, “are you quite sure”! I
can still feel the presence of a deeply unconscious mind.”
Cha Thrat drew the FGHJ toward her so that she could use her upper hands, then
said, “The body temperature is very low. Its eyes are open and do not react
tolight. The usual vital signs are absent. I’m sorry, it i dead and…” She
broke off to look more closely at th creature’s head, then went on excitedly.
“And I think know what killed it! The back of the neck. Can you s< it?" "Not clearly," Prilicla replied quickly, obviously feeling her own growing excitement, and fear. "One of those disklike objects is in the way." "But that's it," she said. "I thought at first that one of them had drifted against the cadaver and stuck to its head. But I was wrong. The thing attached itself deliberately to the FGHJ with those thick white tendrils you can see growing from the edge of the disk. Now that I'm looking for them, I can see that they all have the tendrils and, judging by their length, the penetration into the cadaver's spinal column and rear cranium is very deep. That thing is, or was, alive, and could have been responsible for—" "Technician," Fletcher broke in harshly, "get out of there!" "At once," Prilicla said. Very carefully Cha Thrat released her hold on the dead FGHJ, removed her vision pickup, and attached its magnetic clips to a clear area of wall. She knew that the medical team would want to study this strange and abhorrent life-form that was infesting the ship before deciding how to deal with it. Then she turned toward the entrance, which now seemed to be very far away. The disks hung thickly like an alien minefield between the door and herself. Some of them were still moving slowly in the air eddies caused by her entry or by the blows with which she had so casually knocked them aside, or perhaps of their own volition. They presented views from every angle—the smooth surface of the mot-tied side, the gray and wrinkled reverse side, and the edges with their fringe of limp white tendrils. She had been so busy searching for an FGHJ survivor that she had scarcely looked at the objects she had mistaken for cakes of food or dried wastes floating in the room. She still did not know what they were, only of what they were capable, which was the utter destruction of the highly trained and intelligent minds of their victims to leave them with nothing but the basic and purely instinctive responses of animals. The thought of a predator who did not eat or physically harm its prey, but gorged itself on the intelligence of its victim, made her want to seek refuge in madness. She was desperately afraid of touching one of them again, but there were too many of them for her to avoid doing so. But if any of them got in her way, Cha Thrat decided grimly, she would touch it, hit it, very hard. The gentle, reassuring voice of Prilicla sounded in her earpiece. It said, "You are controlling your fear well, friend Cha. Move slowly and carefully and don't—" She winced as a high-pitched, piercing sound erupted from the earpiece, signifying that too many people were talking to her at once and had overloaded her translator. But they realized immediately what was happening because the oscillation wavered and died to become one voice, the Captain's. "Technician, behind yourBy then it was too late. All of her attention had been directed ahead and to the sides, where the greatest danger lay. When she felt the surprisingly light touch, followed by a sensation of numbness on the back of her neck, a cool, detached part of her mind