Noise. Footsteps on metal. Metal meant refined ores, and that in turn
meant intelligence. Yet he _couldn't_ inhabit an intelligent mind!
Jerry opened his eyes and took in the scene before him. His vista was
oddly diverted into vertical panels, and then, as his mind settled into
full control, he knew that the panels were spaces between bars.
The thought crossed his mind that bars must be vertical everywhere
in the universe. Horizontal ones would hold a prisoner as well, but
the origin of bars lay in primitive stockades, stakes plunged into
the ground about a prisoner. Primordial tribal habits were not easily
broken, even after attainment of civilization.
Through the bars he saw--well--men. They were at least bipedal, and
walked upright, and had two upper limbs with facile digits at the ends,
all in keeping with the nearly universal rule of bilateral identity.
Beyond that, the resemblance to man ceased.
The creatures he saw were clothed in satiny uniforms, yet something
about the material told him it would hold up under heavy stress.
Wherever their actual bodies showed--head and hands, mostly, though
a man of apparently lesser rank was bared to the waist, working on
a machine set against one wall--they were covered with short (or
cropped) white down. Jerry could detect on the heads no sign of
ears or nose, but in the midst of the furry expanse of face, tiny
green-glinting beads of jet were eyes, and a thin, wide blue-gray slit
further down was the mouth.
The hands, he noted with interest, were furred even within the
palms. Or so he thought until one of the creatures, idly flexing a
hand, showed Jerry that the fingers bent on double joints in either
direction. There were no nails as such, but each digit on those
deceptively soft-looking hands terminated in a tapering cone of some
hard black material, as shiny as the eyes in those coconut-frosted
faces.
Jerry once more had cause to regret the impossibility of Contact
within a mind of an intelligent creature. Intelligence equated with
impenetrability, so far as Contact went. You could learn of an
intelligent race only so much as their words and gestures and behavior
cared to let you know.
Jerry knew he was in a sea-region, but whether over it, on it, or under
it--No. The room, so far as he could see, was windowless. It could mean
that the vehicle was carrying its own atmosphere, in order to keep the
riders alive, whether the outside surface of the ship were within
inimical gases or liquids, or the deadly nothingness between planets.
Then again, he might simply be within a fortress, or below sea-level in
a ship. Jerry gave it up, and concentrated on himself, and his barred
container.
* * * * *
The cage was as high as one-fourth the height of any of the men before
it, so Jerry reckoned his own size as about one-sixth. If they were all
six-footers, then he must be about rabbit-sized. He glanced down his
body and saw hard gray scales over a curving belly, with a pair of hind
feet that seemed to be all phalanges and no metatarsals. From "heel" to
foot-tip, Jerry had three long, hard-looking black spikes. "Something
like a swan's foot with the webbing removed," he mused.
A look at his forepaws before his face showed him three similar
phalanges, though only two-thirds the length of the hind ones, and
having in addition a sort of stubby rudimentary thumb. His forearms
were scaly, too, and possessed a wicked spur of the same black material
jutting downward from the elbow.
Happily, three sides of his cage were polished metal walls, so he was
able to get an inkling of his facial characteristics in the warped
uncertain mirror of the surfaces. He saw startled-looking eyes, round
as quarters, with red irises that dilated greatly with each tilt of
his head toward the shadowy rear of the cage, and narrowed the orifice
about the pupil to a pinprick when he turned near the front. He seemed
to be noseless, also. When he tried to sniff, nothing happened. The
attempt made his head feel stuffed up, but he knew that the feeling was
only inside his mind, and not an actual sensation.
Jerry looked at his mouth. It was just a wide slit in his round,
earless head--no, not earless; there were auricular holes under a
flange of gray scale--just a wide slit with a glint of sharp-pointed
bright orange teeth.
"Well," he thought, "I'm at least a carnivore, possibly an omnivore,
with teeth like that. The light in this room is apparently not
intolerable to those fur-faces out there. So--if the slight shooting
pains in my head plus the shutting of the irises when I face into the
room are any criteria--I must be a nocturnal beast of some kind. Eyes
like this would be blinded by sunlight."
He decided he was, in the ecology of the fur-faces, something along
the lines of a raccoon, even if his flesh were scaly as a pangolin's.
"Maybe I'm a pet," he hoped. "But there's something about the
atmosphere of this room--"
Something rustled and clacked against the wall of his cage.
Jerry withdrew his control a fraction to let the host's mind tell him
what it might be. The mind of his host was atingle with antagonism.
Yet, as Jerry heard a similar movement somewhere off to the far side,
the mind of his host grew suddenly tender and excited.
Jerry re-assumed control, having the information he needed. His
cage was one of at least three, possibly many more, housing animals
like the one enhosting him. The nearby cage contained an animal of
his own sex, the other contained an animal of the opposite sex,
possibly a mate. Whether male or female, Jerry had no idea. He had
in any Contact--barring a procreative arrangement beyond the simple
bisexual--a fifty-fifty chance of being male. The worm had been
self-generating, the unicornate lion-thing had been male. What Jerry's
present sex was, he had no idea. Even on Earth, scaly creatures
tended to baffle all but the experts as to sex. Jerry inspected the
mind of his host for a few moments, but could find out only that it
yearned for that other one in the other cage. The intensity of the
yearning gave no clue if the urge were man-for-woman, woman-for-man,
mother-for-child, child-for-parent or--it was barely possible--friend
for friend.
Jerry decided to ignore the yearning by taking full control of the host
once more. He took stock of his circumstances. Here he was, a nocturnal
carnivore, caged with many of his own kind in a vehicle moving through
space or water.
He was not just there for the ride, that was certain.
Being delivered somewhere? No, the room beyond the bars looked little
like a storage hold. Of course, these fur-faces might have alien ideas
about the way a storage hold should look. Still, they seemed to be
bosses of some kind. There was no mistaking the dressy look of their
uniforms. A high-ranking officer might go into a storage hold, but it
would be for an inspection only, and these creatures were busily doing
something in the center of the room.
* * * * *
There were three of them, discounting the bare-to-the-waist man working
on that odd-looking machine. They stood by some waist-high object--two
with their backs to Jerry, one in profile--very intently absorbed in
something on that surface.
Jerry twisted his head about, but could make out no relevant details on
that surface. "They could be studying a map laid out on a table," he
pondered, curiously. "Or maybe they are shooting dice at a crap table,
or--"
Further conjecture was suddenly, and horribly, obviated.
The man at the wall straightened up from his labors and announced
something, unintelligible to Jerry (the voice was an unbroken hum that
rose and fell in pitch, unarticulated into consonants or vowels), which
undoubtedly meant, "She's all fixed." The fur-face in profile turned
with quick attention and stepped to the machine. He pulled from its
slot a thing like the cable-supported arm of a small crane terminating
in a cone-shaped flexible surface, and arranged it over the thing on
the table which his movement to the machine had exposed to Jerry's gaze.
The thing on the table was the face of another of the white-furred men,
and Jerry suddenly knew that this was an operating room. These men were
doctors, involved in surgery.
The machine, so hastily repaired, was some sort of anesthetizing
gadget. They'd had to wait for it before proceeding. All this
information Jerry worked out with only a small part of his mind; the
majority of his concentration was focused upon the other thing he'd
seen upon the table, strapped wide-eyed into position beside the
patient.
It had scales, sharp orange teeth, and might have been a rabbit-sized
cross between a raccoon and a pangolin, and the wide eyes were tightly
irised into discs of coppery red, with no visible pupils, under the
light that overhung the operating table.
"What the hell is going on here?" Jerry thought, with dismay. "Surgery?
In the same room with cages full of animals? What about sanitation?
What about infection? The doctors are maskless. The room is only
passably clean--certainly not scoured with green soap, alcohol or live
steam. And that repairman is standing beside the table scratching his
stomach!"
Bewildered, yet drawn to watch with morbid fascination, Jerry ignored
the pain that staring into the room brought to his eyes, and gave full
attention to the proceedings.
* * * * *
They were--from a raccoon/pangolin's viewpoint--pretty ghastly. The
men, muttering to each other as medics the universe over must while
engaged in surgery, started snipping and plucking and sawing and
clamping with lackadaisical facility upon the two bodies strapped to
the table. One medic concentrated upon the man, the other upon the
animal, while the anesthetist merely held the cone lightly upon the
patient's face, and glanced now and then at dials upon the machine
proper, as if for reassurance, or possibly to show that they were
efficient and well-trained.
They did not trouble to anesthetize the animal.
As they shifted about in their work, Jerry got a better look at the
patient. All along his chest and belly, the white fur was gone. From
the edges of the empty region, Jerry could see that the fur had been
scorched away. The surviving fur in the periphery was stunted and
slightly carbonized. The "flesh" beneath that exposed region was
smooth, excepting a few blistered spots near the center. It resembled
thin, flexible green plastic, of the sort that seems to be translucent,
but is actually transparent, the darkness of the color tending to make
it seem opaque unless light could be placed directly behind it. Into
this surface went the scalpels and clamps and pins of the medics, until
they had a triangular flap lying back to expose the organs within.
Jerry, well-versed in all the metabolisms available to the scientists
of Earth, was completely baffled by this one. None of the internal
organs was fastened to anything.
The abdominal hollow of the creature was filled with a clear
lemon-colored liquid. The organs just floated within the liquid. They
were, Jerry noticed with amazement, not even juxtaposed with any sort
of permanence. Even as the medic reached for them, they bobbed and
moved about each other in the yellow fluid, as impermanent of locale as
apples in a rainbarrel.
Then Jerry had it.
"They're colloidal!" he gasped within his mind. "A tough, flexible
outer shell! The whole thing hollow from cranium to fingertip to
toe, containing a liquid that acts as reagent, catalyst, suspensor
and electrolyte for the mineral crystals, cell globules and chemical
coagulates. These fur-faced creatures are nothing more than
ambulant, intelligent hunks of protein! The whole setup's there. The
lemon-colored fluid is the dispersion medium, and those 'organs'
they're lifting out are the disperse-phase. But ... what do they need
the raccoon/pangolin for?"
His fellow-creature, hissing in agony, was already a glittering, almost
formless thing under the grisly tools of the medic standing over it.
It was, Jerry realized, being laid belly-open with no more regard
than is given a lobster's tail-muscle by the gourmet with his tiny
three-pronged fork.
Jerry could only watch and wonder and wait to see the use to which the
animal would be put. He had not long to wait.
* * * * *
Once laid open, the animal's internal fluid, a pale gray solution,
was sucked out into a bulb-headed tube, much as a housewife gets
the turkey-drippings from under the bird for basting. The fluid was
dribbled into a row of transparent jars with calibrated sides, some
getting more, some getting less. Then a drop of liquid--a brown liquid
for this one, a red for that one, and so on--was added to each. While
Jerry gazed at the scene, fighting the headache that began to grow
with the brightness of the lights over the operating table, the medic
captured each jar and gave it a sharp, practiced shake.
And then the whole picture was clear to Jerry.
"Crystal-clear," he said, with bitter humor.
For that was the answer. The fur-faces were colloidal, the
raccoon/pangolins were crystalloid. Whatever fluid lay within the
bellies of the animals, it was a super-saturate, needing but the right
chemical additive before coming out of its liquid state to form the
right crystals.
In each jar, almost instantly after shaking, bright crystals had begun
to form within the liquid. Within but a few moments, the jars were
being uncapped and the medics, with neat little tongs, were lifting
the crystals from the solutions and placing them within the abdominal
cavity of their anesthetized patient. The flap was fastened down into
place with a gadget that seemed to work on the principle of a soldering
iron. As it slid along the angled edges of the incision the sides met
and fused, leaving only a tiny ridge to attest to the fact of the
operation.
One of the medics nodded to the bare-to-the-waist creature still
standing by. The man shoved over a wheeled cart, slipped the patient
onto it and wheeled him out of the room through an archway barely
within Jerry's field of vision.
Jerry's main concern, however, was for the fate of the crystalloid
creature, lying so still upon the table. One of the medics undid the
straps across the body, lifted it by a hind leg and shoved it through
a hinged metal flap against the wall, then stabbed a button....
A red flare went off beyond the still oscillating metal flap, and Jerry
had all the information he needed. A nice little incinerator, for
hollowed-out corpses.
"I wonder," Jerry thought dismally, "how long my forty minutes will
take in _this_ Contact!" His headache was growing worse, and it wasn't
just from the lights.
At that moment, a sudden lurch sent him crashing against the wall of
the cage. A clamor of alarm bells began throughout the vessel.
One of the medics yelled something, and threw a switch against the wall
opposite that housing the anesthetizing machine. A panel slid away,
revealing a large mosaic of close-packed little spheroids. As the medic
twisted a dial at the base of this arrangement, some of the spheroids
began to flicker whitely, while others remained dark.
Then Jerry recognized it for what it was. A form of television screen,
composed of individual lights instead of phosphorescing dots activated
by magnetically guided electrons from a cathode. The effect was the
same.
A picture, sharply etched by the alternation and varying intensities of
the bulbs, appeared on the mosaic-screen. Across the dream-like surging
of the black-gray-and-white heavy seas in the foreground, Jerry made
out an armada of strange-looking vessels coming across the ocean toward
wherever the pickup camera lay. Unlike Earth-vessels, they tapered
_inward_ as the sides of the vessels rose from the waters, then were
abruptly truncated near what would have been a peak by a railinged area
that was the deck.
"Unless I'm much mistaken," thought Jerry, grimly, "I am on a ship
which--be it alone or one of many in a convoy--is about to be attacked
by those vessels out there."
* * * * *
A second later he knew he was right.
From the approaching fleet there had come no sign of armament, no flash
or flame or belch of smoke or blaze of ray, but the room he was in
jolted violently, then canted crazily for a sick moment before righting
itself. The alarm bells grew louder in their metallic clangor.
Footsteps pounded down the corridor. The bare-to-the-waist man
or another like him--Jerry could not distinguish between the
creatures--came into the room shouting something. The surgeons shouted
back and then the man raced out again.
Another jolt made the room tremble, but this time it felt different,
as though the room were built to take that sort of stress. Jerry
recognized that his ship was in the process of firing back, with
whatever strange weapons these fur-faces employed. Even as he reasoned
this out, one of the enemy vessels on the screen shuddered, split into
almost-matching halves and plunged beneath the waves amid much flame
and confusion.
The medics were not watching. One of them had moved out of Jerry's view
and now stepped back into it, carrying the wriggling form of one of
the animals from the cages. As Jerry watched, the animal, its orange
teeth snapping vainly at those hard black fingertips on the medic's
white-furred hands, was lashed to the table in the gray-smeared spot
where its predecessor had perished. Then the bare-chested man was
coming back into the room, wheeling a man on a cart. This one was
missing fur from an arm and part of the chest area. Jerry was able to
confirm his earlier theory that the hollowness of the creatures was
extended throughout the flexible green body-sheaths.
"Sonics," thought Jerry, all at once. "They're using sonic rays
on each other. A good dose of heavy infravibration could _ruin_ a
collodial creature! The loss of the fur through subsonic friction is
only a side-effect. The main damage is the breakdown of those colloid
organs when the beam focuses on a man."
That would explain the way the other ship had simply sundered.
Artificially induced metal-fatigue, by the application of controlled
vibration.
"Damn," thought Jerry, "this is _dangerous_!"
Other alien vessels were visible now on that granulated "screen,"
heading away from the camera. At least Jerry's ship was not alone in
the face of that armada. His ship was one of at least a dozen--with
more, possibly, outside the pickup range of the camera--involved on his
side of the battle. Some of them shattered silently apart and boiled
into the churning waters with a violence so great that Jerry could
"feel" the sound with his eyes.
Apparently the medics, while anxious about the course of the fray, did
not want their surgical endeavors bothered with the actual noise of
the battle. Or perhaps the technology which had evolved this type of
TV screen had never stumbled upon the familiar-to-Earth methods of
transmitting sound by electromagnetic radiation.
* * * * *
"How long can forty minutes _last_?" Jerry wondered in growing concern.
By his own time-sense, warped by the lifespan of his host, he felt he'd
been present in that room well over an hour. And still he was captive
to the environment of the scaly crystalloid raccoon/pangolin creature,
and doubly imperiled of survival. Even if "his" side took the lead in
the struggle, many fur-faces would need this treatment--which destroyed
one of his species with each operation.
Jerry did not know whether or not the animals were chosen in any
special order. But his mind told him that even were his host the last
so chosen, his odds for survival were dwindling fast.
Assuming the wall against which his cage was stacked with the others
were the same size as the wall opposite his cage--and symmetrical
construction of rooms seemed a strong likelihood--then, judging by his
cage-size, the maximum number of cages that could be so stacked was six
high and four across, or twenty-four cages. Figuring one animal per
cage, that left some twenty-one animals ahead of him.
Possibly--barely possibly--this tier of cages might _not_ be against a
wall. It might be the forefront of hundreds of rows of similar stacked
cages. But no medic hurrying to save a life would walk to Row #2 when
Row #1 was still undepleted.
"So if I just sit here," he thought, gloomily, "I'm bound to end up
alongside a fur-face on that table. My life gone so that his may
survive. 'It is a far, far better thing I do' and so on, but I don't
know as I'm ready to lay down my life for a fur-face without even being
given the _choice_, damn it! Let's figure a way _out_ of this mess!"
The ship went _whooomp_, suddenly. The room gave a crazy tilt again
before--rather sluggishly, Jerry noted with alarm--righting itself. At
the same moment the TV screen blanked out.
"Well, there goes the camera," he thought, his insides feeling oddly
cold and upset. "That may mean that if I don't die on the operating
table, I may well be forced to succumb to a watery grave. Damn! _When_
will those forty minutes be _up_?"
He was jerked from his thoughts by the appearance of a huge
white-furred hand fumbling with the catch on his cage.
Hard, pointed black fingertips reached in through the opened door for
him. Jerry snapped and clacked his teeth upon them in vain, as he was
carried toward the strap-sided concavity beside a new fur-scorched
patient on the operating table.
"Use your head!" he screamed at himself. "These fur-faces aren't
expecting an _intelligent_ attack from a lab-animal! The other
crystalloid creatures have the paltry instinctive self-preservation
mechanism to bite at the objects gripping them, those impervious black
fingertips. But you know better, right?"
And with that thought, Jerry tilted his head just a bit further
forward, and let his orange fangs crackle through the thin chitinous
green "flesh" beneath the stiff white fur on the alien's wrist....
* * * * *
Yellow dispersion-medium spurted with a satisfactory gush from the
scalloped gap in the alien's forearm.
Jerry landed nimbly on his hind feet on the metal floor as the
shrieking medic dashed to a confrere for whatever first aid is given
when a colloidal creature's liquid contents are spilling out.
While a minor part of his mind wondered idly if they'd employ a
tourniquet or just a cork, the rest of his mind concentrated on
directing those fore-paw-and-foot phalanges to carry him swiftly up
the face of the stacked cages. There were twenty-four of them, all
right, against the wall. He perched precariously on the top, in the
cage-roof-to-ceiling space that was too small for another layer of the
same.
As the fur-face medic fiddled around with the wrist of the man Jerry
had bitten (it was the raccoon/pangolin medic, of course), the
anesthetist dragged a small stool over to the base of the stacked cages
and began climbing up after him.
"Oh, hell," thought Jerry, cowering weakly against the wall. "If I had
a piece of chalk or a charcoal stick I could write something. Or draw
a picture, maybe, on the ceiling. Then they'd know I was intelligent,
and--They'd probably use me anyhow. The middle of a battle is no time
for writing learned scientific papers about new zoological 'finds.'"
Those black fingertips were coming for him, too carefully for a repeat
wrist-crunching performance. If he were taken this time the bearer
would handle with care.
Jerry skittered and scrabbled for the corner near the
wall, hoping to engage the anesthetist in a game of
you-climb-up-at-_this_-point-and-I-run-back-to-_that_-point. But the
fur-face had too long a reach to make it practical. As Jerry cowered
helplessly, those black fingertips gripped him about the throat with
strangling force. It apparently made no difference if he died on the
top of the cages or under the scalpel. He could only fend feebly with
his paws at the creature as he was lifted down to the table and set
into the concavity, dizzy and sick.
"White lightning?" he begged. "Come on, white lightning! Please, test,
be over. How long can forty minutes _last_?"
Then the room gave a horrible shudder and all the lights went out.
Jerry, not yet strapped in place, heard the cries of the medics, and
then the terrifying sound of rushing seas in the invisible corridor
as the room canted swiftly onto its side. This time it did not right
itself. A thick, falling-elevator feeling bunched up inside Jerry. He
knew that the warship was plunging beneath the heaving surge outside.
He scrambled about on the floor--no, it was the wall now--almost
brained by the crashing bulk of the operating table. He kept jumping
futilely upward, hoping somehow to escape to the corridor and get
outside the ship before all that water got inside this room.
Then icy tons of fluid crashed down upon him, flattening him against
the wall beneath his feet. The cries of the medics were suddenly
gurgles, then a brief, faintly heard sound of bubbling.
Jerry, trying to swim against the swirling pressures of the flood that
now lifted him from against the wall and spun him end over end, could
hold his breath no longer.
In despair, he felt his jaws widen and take in the chill liquid in
which he was whirled.
It went in without gagging him, and did not come out. Not through his
mouth, at any rate. It came out through long slots just in front of
those auricular vents in his head.
Gills! Jerry was an amphibian.
Webbing, hitherto folded away, appeared on his feet. "I'll be damned,"
he sighed, with weary relief.
Then he paddled determinedly about in the utter blackness until he
found a cage lying on its side, the door sprung open. Jerry got inside,
closed the door until it caught as well as its broken catch would allow
and settled himself for a nice wait.
"At least I won't have to worry about getting gobbled by a natural
underwater enemy," he figured.
He had to wait another subjective hour before the silent flash of
white lightning lifted him out of his third, and last, Contact on
Arcturus Beta.