And he sat up on the couch, back in the solarium.
* * * * *
Jana hurried over to him.
"Did it work? Did it work, sir?" she cried. "Is Bob--"
Jerry patted her hand. "Bob's all right. He was on time. _Just_ on
time."
"I still don't understand, sir," said the nurse, sinking onto the couch
beside him without waiting for an invitation. "I don't understand _any_
of this!"
For an instant, Jerry resented this familiarity, then felt slightly
overstuffed, and slipped an arm paternally across her slim shoulders.
"I'll explain," he said. "It'll pass the time till he gets back."
Jana nodded.
"The alien," Jerry said softly, "was a mimic. A perfect mimic. It
was, while non-intelligent, of an abnormally well developed mind in
one function: telepathy. That's how it could carry on apparently
intelligent mental conversation with me, during my first contact.
It could sense my questions, then probe my mind for the answers I
wanted most to hear--and play them back to me. For my forty minutes
of contact, it told me only what I wanted to know, like a selective
echo. It needed no understanding of my questions, nor of the answers it
plucked from my mind. It had one instinct: self-preservation. It could
sense my question, select an uncontroversial answer from my mind and
feed it back to me, without really understanding how it warded me off
as a menace to it, any more than a dog understands why lowering its
ears and hanging its head as it whines can fend off the wrath of its
master. It works; that's all the creature cares about."
"But how did you _know_--?" Jana asked.
"I didn't," Jerry replied. "It fooled me completely. Until the
Ensign--Bob told me that my full forty minutes in Contact had elapsed,
despite my knowledge that the sun and clouds had remained motionless
during my Contact. That threw me, I'll admit, for quite a while. It
just didn't make sense."
Jana's eyes widened as she suddenly understood. "And then you realized
that you had seen the sun and clouds motionless because that was what
you _expected_ to experience when enhosted in a baby!"
"That's it," Jerry nodded. "It made an error with the baby, though. It
was able to duplicate it in almost every respect except two: Size and
appearance."
"Why?" asked Jana. "And why appear as a baby at all?"
* * * * *
"I'm coming to that," said Jerry. "The size was off because the first
thing I saw when I blinked open my eyes was a distant copse of trees,
which I took to be an upright pile of leafy twigs. Since my mind
possessed information regarding the relative size of babies and twigs,
the alien immediately made sure my mind saw other things in the same
perspective. By the time it realized it had made an error, it was too
late to normalize the baby's dimensions; that would have given its
fakery away."
"But why did the thing choose a baby?"
"Because that was the thing's protection! It had a powerful hypnotic
power, one that worked on its victims' minds directly through its
telepathic interference with sensory perception. It always appeared as
the thing the victim would be least likely to harm. In my case, a baby.
But it made a slight error there, too. I'm a bachelor, Jana. There's
only one baby with whom I ever had any great amount of experience:
myself."
"And the invisibility?"
"I have no recollection, even now, of my body when I was a baby. I may
have stared at my toes, played with my fingers, but they just never
registered on my consciousness as being part of _myself_. So the thing
was stuck when it came to reproducing me visually, since it depended
upon my own memory for details. But it was able to supply the way I'd
_felt_ as a baby. Every baby has an acute awareness of its own skin; it
will cry if any particle of its flesh is bothered in the slightest. So
the alien fed the 'feel' of my baby-body back to me, if not the view.
Which is why the electronic brain on the ship was able to duplicate the
detail into an almost perfect replica of my babyhood likeness."
Jana nodded, as she finally understood the meaning of that strange
illusion. "And this time? That post-hypnotic suggestion you had the
doctor give you, I mean: that you'd think you were a gray rat until
such time as the light of the arc-torch caught you directly in the
eyes...."
"Duplicity, Jana. It had to be that way. The alien was very sure of its
powers. If I returned, and it were a baby again, I couldn't attack it
or thwart its ends. And such an attack was necessary. I had to be able
to fight it, to hold it in place for that last moment before it was
destroyed. Which is why I chose a gray rat, an animal I cannot bear the
sight of. When the light struck my eyes and I became myself again, I
caught the alien unawares. Then, before it could change to a baby, and
start lulling me back into camaraderie, it was too late. Bob had given
the order to fire. And here I am."
* * * * *
Hurrying footsteps sounded in the corridor. The door burst open and Bob
rushed in, his face anxious and creased with worry until he saw Jerry
sitting on the couch, alive and well.
"Whoosh!" The tech expelled a mingled chuckle and sigh as he sank into
a chair opposite the zoologist. "Well, sir, I can't tell you how glad I
am to see you. I couldn't be sure you'd gotten out of that thing alive
until I got back here. Glad you made it, sir. Damn glad!"
"That 'thing' you mentioned," said Jerry. "What did it _actually_ look
like?"
Bob jerked his head toward the corridor. "The other guys are bringing
it along. I kind of thought you'd want a peep at it."
As more footfalls were heard from the corridor, Bob bounced to his feet
again, and stepped to the door. "Hold it a minute, guys," he said,
then turned back into the room. "Jana, I don't think you'd better stick
around for this. It's not very pretty."
The girl hesitated, then flashed him a smile and shook her head.
"I'll stay. It can't look as ugly as a bad case of peritonitis on the
surgeon's table. If I can take that without upchucking, I can take
anything."
Bob shrugged. "Suit yourself, honey. Just remember you got fair
warning." He leaned back out the door. "Okay. Bring it in."
The crewmen, looking a little ill, came slowly into the room, bearing
a bloated, scorched object on a stretcher they'd contrived from two
long poles and their jackets. They set it onto the tiled floor before
the zoologist, then stepped away, all of them wiping their hands hard
against their trousers in ludicrous unison, though their grip on the
poles had not brought them into actual contact with the alien's corpse.
"There it is, sir," said Ollie Gibbs. "And you are very welcome to it."
Jana, to her credit, had not upchucked, but she went a shade paler, and
her mouth grew tight.
Jerry studied the burnt husk, from its sharp-fanged mouth--easily
eighteen inches from side to side--to its stubby centipedal cilia under
the grossly swollen body.
"Damn thing's all bloat, slime and mouth," said the tech, suddenly
shuddering. "I wonder if its victims felt those jaws rending them open,
or if it kept their minds fooled through to the end?"
"I don't think we'll ever know that, Ensign," said Jerry. "Unless you
feel like going out there and playing victim to one of this thing's
confreres?"
"No thanks, sir," said Bob, so swiftly that Jana laughed. "I'd rather
fall out an airlock in hyperspace."
* * * * *
"Well, here's what we do to get rid of this thing, then," said Jerry.
"Since it assumes a form that's the least likely to be harmed by
whatever presence stimulates its mimetic senses, we'll have to trick
it. Before this thing decomposes too far, rig it up with an electrical
charge, and stimulate its nerve-centers artificially. That ought to
give you an accurate microtape of its life-pulse. Then hook the tape
to a scanner-beam, and _send_ the life-pulse into the mine-area. When
the fellows of this creature react to it, they'll assume the safest
possible form: their own."
"I get you, sir!" said Bob. "Then all the miners have to do is see it
for what it is, and shoot it."
Jerry nodded. "It'll mean all miners will have to go armed for awhile.
But that's better than getting eaten alive by one of these."
"You sure their presence won't trigger the thing's mimetic power?"
asked Bob, uneasily.
"Not if you give full power to the scanner-beam," Jerry replied. "It'll
muffle their life-pulse radiations under the brunt of the artificial
one."
"Good enough, sir," said Bob. "I'll rig it right away."
Jerry shook his head. "No need. You could use some rest, I'm sure. The
morning'll be soon enough. Meantime, you can see this young lady home.
The rest of you," he said to the hovering crewmen, "are dismissed, too."
The men, eager to be away from the thing, saluted smartly and hurried
out of the solarium, buzzing with wordy relief.
Jana paused a moment, staring at the creature whose strange powers had
destroyed her father. Then she turned to Bob.
"I think I'll go to Jim's place," she said. "I want him to know." She
moved her gaze to Jerry. "I owe you a lot," she said. "We all owe you a
lot."
Embarrassed by the warmth of her praise, Jerry could only mumble
something diffident and look the other way. He was taken quite by
surprise by the pressure of cool moist lips against the side of his
face.
When he looked back at the pair, Bob and Jana were on their way out
the door.
Only when he heard the elevator doors at the end of the corridor
close behind them did he move to the still-warm corpse of his onetime
adversary, with a look of deepest compassion on his face.
"Well," he said gently, "you've lost. The planet goes back to
the invaders. Once again, Earth has successfully obliterated the
opposition."
He reached out a hand and touched the hulking thing on the floor.
"Good-by," he said. "And I'm sorry."
Jerry Norcriss wasn't thinking about the deadliness of the thing,
nor of the deaths of the hapless miners, nor of the billions of
dollars he'd saved the investors holding Praesodynimium stock. He was
thinking of a voice that--even unintelligently, even in the course
of deception--had said, "Poor Jerry. Rest.... Relax. You're safe....
Secure...."
"You really had me going for a while, baby," he said, then blinked at
the sudden sharp sting in his eyes, and hurried from the room.
* * * * *
Outside, the sun was glowing pink against the black eastern sky, and
the air was cool and fresh in his nostrils. As he crossed the street
from the hospital, heading toward the landing field and his shipboard
bunk, a hurrying figure from the end of the block caught up with him
and began to pace his stride, panting slightly.
"Talk about happy," said Bob, glumly. "When Jana told her boy friend
the news, they went into such a clinch I didn't even stick around to
be introduced. Seemed a nice enough guy, I guess. Hope she'll be happy
with him."
Jerry recognized the gloominess of the tech's mood, and its cause, so
didn't say anything. After a moment, Bob seemed to recover himself a
little.
"Sir," he said, "there's one thing still bugs me about this alien."
"Oh?" said Jerry, halting. "What's that, Ensign?"
"How'd the initial roborocket miss the thing and its kind when it
circled the planet before colonization began?"
"That's a moot question," said Jerry. "But my conjecture is that the
scanner always caught it when it was assuming some other form. Since
its victims were always indigenous to this planet, the things familiar
to them were also of this planet, and the scanner-beam couldn't detect
any life-pulses which were dissimilar to already-known species."
"I'll be damned," said Bob. "It's almost childishly simple when you
explain it." Then, as Jerry went to start off again, Bob stopped him
with an exclamation.
"What about that melting mine car I read about on the translation
sheets? Was that for real, or wasn't it?"
Jerry shook his head. "Part of the general mimetic illusion, like the
motionless clouds and unmoving trees. It let me see what I expected to
see. In reality, I was just in the woods near the mine area, where you
came upon the creature to destroy it." Jerry started slowly moving away
once more.
A few steps further, and Bob halted again. "One final point, sir. That
life-pulsing reading of point-nine-nine-nine. If the thing's pulsation
was that powerful, I should think it would've been a lot harder to
knock off than it was."
"You're right," said Jerry. "It would have been. But its life-pulse
wasn't nearly that high."
"But the scanner-beam--" Bob protested. "When the colony sent up
that roborocket, after those miners vanished, it reported an unknown
life-pulse of point-nine-nine-nine. If that wasn't the alien's
life-pulse, what the devil was it?"
Jerry patted Bob on the shoulder. "You're forgetting the mimicry. The
roborocket they sent up caught the alien off-guard, in its own shape,
not imitating some other life-form's pulsations. It detected the beam,
since a scanner picks up mental pulses, and it instantly assumed the
life-pulse of a creature it assumed no roborocket would worry about."
"What? What life-pulse, sir? What kind of life?"
"Atomic life, Ensign," said Jerry. "That bright green blip you and I
studied so assiduously was the life-pulse of an atom-powered creature.
It was another roborocket."
And as Bob stared after him, stupefied, Jerry Norcriss made his way
across the landing field toward a well-earned bed--and oblivion.