He opened his eyes. Six eyes. In two rows of three eyes each.
He did not, however, see six images. The widespread belief in the
multitudinous images seen by the faceted eyes of a housefly had been
debunked the first time a helmeted biochemist had intruded upon
that insect's puny brain. As with human eyes, the images were fused
into a whole when they reached the mind. Save for the disconcerting
sensation of possessing a horizontal and vertical peripheral vision of
approximately three hundred degrees sight was comfortably normal.
Jerry looked over his surroundings and noted one slightly annoying
side-effect of his hexafocal outlook. As a human will see--as when
looking at the tip of a pencil pointed at the face--two images at
the far end of any object looked upon, so Jerry, while able to zero
in anywhere he chose, could see six ghost-images corresponding in
their angle of perspective to the positions of his six eyes. Had he
a pencil-tip to stare at, it would have appeared, beyond the tip, to
be vaguely like a badminton bird seen head on, with images of the
pencil-body comprising the "feathers."
A few moments of glancing about soon took care of the primary
irritation of this unfamiliar sensation, and Jerry began to study his
surroundings carefully.
He was inside a circular cavity of some sort, facing toward brightness
at the opening ahead of him. The walls of the cavity were dark,
sandy-smooth and slightly moist, so he reasoned he was in some sort of
burrow in the soil. Beyond the opening, there was light and warmth and
a hint of greenery which his host's eyes could not bring into sharp
focus.
"I wish I knew my size," he thought. "Am I some small insect awaiting
a victim, or a rabbit-souled mammal hiding from a predator, or a
lion-sized carnivore sleeping off a heavy meal?"
Attempts to turn his head for a look at his host's body availed him
nothing. Jerry relaxed for a moment, and tried to sense his body by
_feel_. He had, he knew in a moment, no neck. Head and torso were a
one-piece unit, or at least inflexibly joined.
Carefully, Jerry moved his right "hand" out before his face for a
look. He saw a thin, flesh-covered bony limb, with a double "elbow,"
terminating in a semicircular pad which seemed suited for nothing but
support. No claw, talon or digit on the pad; just a tesselated rubbery
bottom, the tesselations apparently acting as treads do on a tire.
"Whatever I am," Jerry sighed, "I'm non-skid." He considered a moment,
then added, "I can't be an insect, then. Insects can't rely on weight
to keep them rightside up, and need gripping mechanisms. Okay,
insect-size is out."
* * * * *
Jerry extended the pad before him and cautiously leaned his weight on
it, then removed it back beneath his torso and studied the earth where
it had rested. There was a concavity there, corresponding to the pad.
It was not especially deep.
"Well, that lets out elephant-size," he reasoned, "and most oversize
forms. I must be somewhere between a mouse and a middle-sized wolf.
But _what_ am I?"
Jerry tried breathing. Nothing happened; there was no sense of dilation
anywhere in his body. "Odd," he thought. "Unless I get oxygen--or
whatever gases this creature breathes--through my food.... Or maybe I
have air-tubes like an insect's.... No, I'd have to shift my body now
and then for air circulation, and I feel no discomfort remaining still.
Besides, I have flesh, and that tube arrangement only functions well in
a body with an endoskeleton. Must be dependent on food intake, then.
Stores its oxygen or whatever."
He extended the tesselated pad, and rubbed it cautiously against
the soil. There was a dim sensation of touch in the pad. But it was
subordinate to a soma-centric sense of location. His pad "knew" where
it was in relation to his body, but had no great tactile capacity for
his surroundings. "Well," Jerry thought, "that lets out _feeling_ my
body to determine shape or function."
As it sometimes did when he was enhosted, his mind went back to old
Peters, his instructor, who had taught "Project C" to the eager young
zoologists. Project Contact had been mostly devoted to giving the
student an open mind on metabolism and adaptability to environment. A
Learner had to be able to reason out--and quickly--the metabolism of
his host. It was little use knowing a Terran life-ecology; man lives
on combustibles and oxygen, the oxygen combining with combustibles to
provide heat, and plants live on carbon dioxide and water and sunlight,
renewing the atmospheric oxygen. So old Peters had always stressed the
student's learning their Basic Combinations.
Basic Combinations prepared the student--or so the school board
hoped--for a wide variety of chemical relationships between a host and
its environment. The students had to know what to do to survive should
the host, for instance, live in a chlorine atmosphere, and need large
amounts of antimony in its diet for proper combustion and survival.
There were a good many chemical elements in the universe; the student
had to know how to deal with any combination of them in a host's
metabolism.
For the most part, the instincts of the host would carry a Learner
through the Contact period. A species tended to keep its physical needs
not only in its mind, but in its body as well. Mr. Peters had a saying
he'd been fond of emphasizing to the students: "When in doubt, black
out." The saying became a cliche to the student body, but they had the
sense not to disregard it. A cliche is, after all, only a truth which
has become trite because it is vitally necessary to use it often.
"When in doubt, black out," meant simply that if a situation arose
which seemed impossible to handle rationally, the enhosted Learner's
last resort was reliance upon the instinctive behavior of the host. The
only thing to be done was to pull the mind into a tiny knot bobbing in
the host's own brain, and let the host itself, once more in control,
take the Learner instinctively to environmental victory. Or defeat.
* * * * *
There were dangers, of course. A Learner enhosted in a chicken, for
instance, would be a fool to trust the chicken's instincts regarding,
say, a snake. A chicken confronted by a snake tends to become
hypnotized by its deadly adversary, and to stand stupidly in place
until it is killed. In cases of that sort, the Learner would be safer
taking control and going clucking off to the nearest high ground.
On the other hand, a Learner inhabiting something with the hairtrigger
instincts of a bat would be much better off letting the animal's
instincts take over in moments of grave risk, such as flying through
the blades of a revolving fan. A bat could get through without
a second thought about those whirling metal scythes, but a man's
mind could not think fast enough to avoid a grim death by all-over
amputation.
"Maybe," Jerry thought hopefully, "I've got an _easy_ one." It was
possible, of course. His host might be in the midst of an afternoon
siesta, and Jerry could relax and "sit out" his forty minutes of
Contact. But such cases were few. At any moment a predator might come
down into that orifice in the soil, and Jerry would have to fight
for his host's life to preserve his own. Relaxed Learning was seldom
feasible.
"I'd better see what sort of fighting equipment I have," he decided,
wishing vainly that he could just turn his head and look his body over.
This proceeding by _feel_ was a slow, tortuous, and sometimes deceptive
process. Hollow fangs that seemed capable of injecting venom into an
enemy might--as in the case of the Venusian Sea Vampires--turn out to
be an organ for drinking water, the sacs above the fangs being for
digesting liquids and not for storing poisons.
Jerry stimulated what should be his tongue into action, checking for
the presence of fangs. Within the mouth of the creature, which felt
large in relation to its head, he sensed a rasping movement, a kind
of dull dry rustling, but could feel nothing with the tongue itself.
"Best have a look at it," he decided suddenly, and, opening his jaws,
extended the tongue.
* * * * *
Jerry was distinctly shocked by the thing that skewed and writhed
forward from beneath his eyes. His sensation was not unlike that of
a man who opens his mouth and finds a snake in it. And Jerry further
realized that he was now seeing with another sextet of eyes, at the end
of the tongue.
He was not one alien--he was two!
His primary six eyes took in the pink-and-gray horror extending ahead
of him. The tongue was almost like another animal, serpentine in
construction, and had two horny--what?--arms?--pincer-jaws?--at either
side of the "head". They were tubular, like a cow's horns, and lay at
either side of a wide slit-mouth in the tongue itself.
On impulse, Jerry swiveled the tip of the tongue back upon itself, and
gazed through the six eyes around the tongue-slit-and-jaws/arms at
the main body of his host. Then, suddenly feeling ill, he snapped the
tongue back into his mouth and shut his jaws.
It had been a horrible sight. Where he'd expected to see the abdominal
region of his host, just behind the thoracic section, there lay a wet,
red concavity, in the midst of gaping jaws. Jerry himself was enhosted
in a "tongue" of some still larger creature within that soft earthen
burrow! And some remaining fragment of his host's awareness told him
that the creature of whom he was the tongue was itself the tongue of
yet another creature. He was a segment of some gigantic segmented
worm-creature whose origin lay who-knows-how-far beneath the earth.
Carefully, stilling a mental feeling akin to _mal de mer_, he
re-protruded his tongue and looked more carefully at it. Sure enough,
just behind the "head" of the thing were two stubby growths, not yet
mature. In time, Jerry realized, those growths would develop into a
pair of double-elbowed front "arms" with semi-tactile tesselated pads
at the base, and the curving jaws/arms would drop off or be resorbed,
while that "tongue" extended a "tongue" of its own.
"And then what happens to _my_ segment?" he wondered. "Do I simply lie
here forever with jaws agape?"
As he pondered this, there came a movement in the greenery just beyond
the burrow orifice. A squiggly thing with an ill-assorted tangle of
under-appendages came prancing with almost laughable ill-balance into
view. Jerry, intent on observing this creature--very like a landbound
jellyfish walking clumsily upon its dangling arms--relaxed his vigil as
regards control of the host.
Before he realized it, his jaws were flung wide, and that
self-determined tongue was leaping for its prey. The horny jaws/arms
clamped into the viscous body of the passing creature, and the
slit-mouth extended upper and lower lips like pseudopods to cover the
writhing, squealing victim. Then a huge lump appeared in the tongue,
just behind its "head." Jerry waited with a distinct lack of relish for
the still squirming "meal" to make its alimentary way back into his own
esophagous.
However, it did not. Just short of his lips, it halted. And after a few
moments, it ceased to struggle.
Annoyed, but uncertain just why he was, Jerry attempted to re-mouth his
tongue. It did not come back. His jaws lay open wide, and his tongue
remained where it had shot forward to grasp the tentacled creature.
Something clicked in Jerry's mind, and he once more tried "seeing" out
of the tongue's six eyes. He found that he still could, but dimly.
It took him about three seconds to figure out his peril.
* * * * *
The segment behind his own would never re-swallow _his_ segment, which
had been its tongue. It couldn't. It was dead. For the time-period in
which his own segment had existed as the third segment's tongue, it had
some control over it. It could extend the tongue, and could see through
the eyes in the tongue. But then Jerry's segment had fed, had grown,
and the parent-segment had died, as had its parent-segments before it.
The thing, whatever it was, grew fast, too.
That was the frightening part.
Even while he thought this, he saw that the lump was gone from his
tongue. But his tongue was twice the size it had been!
Repeated efforts on his part to withdraw it back within his jaws met
with failure. Again he tried looking through its eyes, and found his
tongue-vision even dimmer. Then with a tremor of shock, he realized
that his own vision was dimmer, too.
His host was dying. It was no longer needed to house the tongue.
Up ahead of him, the tongue-part was digging busily with those pincers,
erecting for itself an extension of the burrow. Like a mole in reverse,
it did not make a mound by tunneling through the soil, but by lying
atop the soil and erecting itself a circular tunnel in which to await
victims.
Jerry's mind brought to him a vision of what this section of this
unknown morass must look like, with miles and miles of curving tunnels,
each housing a hideous worm-creature, of whom all segments were dead
except the front one, which would in turn be dead as soon as its tongue
had fed a bit and grown to mature size.
Shivering within his mind, Jerry wondered how much of the forty-minute
period had gone by.
He had no way of estimating. His personal time-sense was overpowered
by that of his host. A man within a gnat, with the lifespan of a
day, would feel subjectively that he had lived a lifetime within it,
although only those same forty minutes would pass by until his return
to his own body, helmeted upon the couch.
Each new segment might take a day to grow, or it might take a few
minutes. Jerry could not tell. He could only wait until he was sent to
his next Contact. There was no method of self-release from Contact.
That was why survival was imperative.
A flicker of movement caught his dimming vision, and he realized that
his tongue had snared yet another of the jellyfish-things. The second
lump was quickly absorbed as he watched, and he found he could no
longer make contact at all with the six eyes of the tongue-tip. His own
six were blurring, with a rapidity he was able to observe, and he knew
that the life of the host could not last very long.
Vaguely, he was aware that the stubby growths of his tongue had now
sprouted into appendages such as his own. The tongue could no longer be
called that, because it was nearly a full-grown segment. Within it, he
imagined, it was growing a new tongue of its own, the faster to hasten
its own eventual demise.
* * * * *
"I've got to stop it," he thought. "But how can I? It won't withdraw,
no matter how hard I try. And if it would, it's grown too large to fit
inside my jaws any more, even if I tried cramming it in with these
stupid pads of mine...."
He stopped the pointless line of reasoning and lifted his pair of
double-elbowed "arms" before his failing sextet of eyes.
"They look strong enough, but are they?"
He could feel his control slipping. His life would hang upon the
success or failure of his experiment, but there was no time to try and
reason out a better attempt at survival.
Swiftly, ignoring the wriggling protests of the segment before his own,
he encircled it tightly with those two-jointed "arms" and held it tight
and painfully taut. It was still soft, still relatively raw from its
rapid growth, and was not equipped to fend off attack from the rear.
Jerry, straining terribly, ignoring the searing pain that licked his
consciousness, cruelly and methodically tore out what had been his
tongue.
The dripping end of the thing flopped once, then lay still. And Jerry's
vision, after swimming in gray haze for a moment, coalesced once more
into sharp focus and he knew his host was alive again.
"Whew!" he gasped, grateful to shut the great jaws once more. "It'll be
tough, but I know how to survive, now. My segment's low enough on the
evolutionary scale to regenerate lost parts; it will grow itself a new
tongue. If I don't get lifted to a new Contact in the meantime, I'll
simply tear _that_ one out, too, and hang on until I get _out_ of this
damned thing!"
Then the segment ahead of him moved, and Jerry knew cold fear.
At the mouth of the burrow, one of the squiggly jellyfish-things had
inserted a tentacle into the burrow and was busily ingesting the
torn-out segment into a gaping hole in its underside amongst the
shiny, wiggling arms. Even as he watched, it had completed its meal,
and with a shiver of gustatory pleasure, readjusted its relative
dimensions until it was three times its former size.
"This," said Jerry, bitterly, "is one hell of an ecology. Each creature
is the other's chief natural enemy!"
Then his fright grew as he saw that the jellyfish--he could no longer
think of it as anything else--was methodically ripping down the walls
of the burrow, and coming for _him_.
Frantically, Jerry tried getting at the thing with his tongue, but the
raw stump within his jaws was still in the process of generating a new
head-and-eyes part. A mere stub shot forward to wag futilely at the
approaching enemy.
Jerry shot his tesselated pads forward, trying to push and pummel the
thing away, but the few blows that landed rebounded from that shiny
body like pith-balls bouncing from an electrostatic plate.
Then the jellyfish grappled with, and held onto, one of Jerry's arms,
and began calmly to tuck it into its digestive cavity. If the pad had
been only lightly tactile before, it became supersensitive now, as
the creature's digestive juices began to erode it into its component
chemicals.
Jerry felt as if he'd rammed his hand into an open wood fire. He
tried to scream; nothing emerged between his jaws except that futile
tongue-stump. The jellyfish, climbing in a leisurely fashion down the
limb it was ingesting, flicked out a tentacle and began doing something
horrible to Jerry's upper right eye. It sent waves of pain into his
mind, and almost blotted out all thought, except for a maniac notion
that urged Jerry to laugh at the creature's ambition. For its highly
maneuverable tentacle-tip was diligently attempting to _unscrew_ the
eye.
Jerry's right arm was gone. Tentacles flipped and floundered all about
his head-section. The digestive cavity of the jellyfish was widening,
trying to take in Jerry's head at a single swallow. He saw, with the
five usable eyes remaining, a crystally concavity, the sides glinting
with digestive fluid tinted beautiful emerald by the foliage out beyond
its semi-transparent body. Then the thing closed over his head, and the
last of the eyes began to sear and sting.
Jerry's mind cried out in anguish ... and lightning flashed across his
consciousness. White, silent lightning.
Pain ceased.
The time of Contact had passed.