"I will if there's an entrance."
"But darling, don't you see? If anything happened to you I wouldn't
want to go on living. You think of what could happen and all that
unrealistic nonsense about shielding a woman, not letting her share a
danger with a man she loves more than her own life, breaks down."
"It hasn't broken down with me," Loring said. "I'm sorry, darling, but
you're staying here."
"Please, David--"
"No chance. You're staying right here."
Before she could protest again he kissed her and turned quickly, not
trusting himself to prolong the embrace. He walked to the edge of the
building, rounded it and moved forward cautiously, keeping a short
distance from the wall. The side of the structure was as wide as the
facade, quite possibly a little wider.
The vague fear, the sense of danger, remained with him, but so far he
had encountered nothing alarming. His uneasiness angered him a little,
made him impatient with his own perhaps wholly unjustified caution. He
came to a sudden decision. If there was an entrance at the rear of the
building he would not hesitate but would go immediately inside.
There was an entrance at the rear of the building; an unlighted,
oblong-shaped opening without ornamentation, twice the width of a
man's body and eight or nine feet in height. Although the structure
was metallic, the entrance had a stone-carven look, as if it had been
chiseled with precision from a block of solid granite.
Having come to a decision, the swift dwindling of his dread surprised
him. It was as if a point of pressure had been removed from his mind,
leaving him free to walk without restraint into the structure.
The falling away of tension gave him no satisfaction. He mistrusted it,
feared it, for it strengthened his belief that his thoughts were under
scrutiny and an effort was being made to influence his emotions. Had
he won a momentary victory or was that, too, an illusion?
The tension started mounting again the instant he had passed through
the aperture. The darkness was just as bad as he had imagined it might
be, totally unrelieved by the faintest glimmer of light. It was a
smothering blackness, shroudlike and all-engulfing.
He stood very still a few feet within the entrance. The aperture was
faintly filmed with light, but the dim glow did not penetrate for more
than a foot or two into the darkness. Beyond that slight penumbra of
light there was an impenetrable wall of darkness hemming him in on all
sides.
The odor which came to his nostrils was equally unnerving. It was
sharp, acrid, but with a faint mustiness about it which made him think
of tomb rot.
For a moment there was no sound at all, no faintest stir of movement.
Then he heard a rustling sound that seemed to come from deep within the
darkness. A rustling, a shuffling, the kind of sound that could have
been made by a snake unwinding its coils, or someone dragging a heavy
sack over a stone floor, or by nothing more unnerving than the slow
backward and forward movements of a broom.
Loring did not think it was a broom. The fear which came upon him
was primitive, elemental. In some respects it was the kind of fear
which a man in a dark wood would experience if he came upon a nest
of copperheads while exploring a foliage-choked crevice in search of
edible mushrooms. Expecting to find some poisonous varieties perhaps,
but hardly death staring up at him out of the opaque eyes of a snake
poised to strike.
He moved slowly backwards, keeping the same distance from the entrance
but putting as much space as possible between himself and the
shuffling. He kept backing away until he came up against a firm metal
barrier which he quickly explored with his hands. It had the solid feel
of a wall.
His breathing became a little less strained. With a wall at his back he
was at least in no danger of being attacked from two directions. And if
the wall made further retreat impossible the danger had not increased,
for he was still the same distance from the entrance and could still,
if he wished, make a very swift dash for it.
He had no immediate intention of doing so. He stood listening,
motionless and alert, his shoulders barely touching the wall. The
shuffling sound did not seem to be coming any nearer. It even stopped
for an instant. The silence closed in about him and he became aware of
the over-loud beating of his heart. When the sound started up again it
seemed to come from another direction, closer to the entrance.
Now it _was_ nearer. Unmistakably louder and nearer, very close to him
in the darkness. He strained his eyes, but could see nothing. He had to
depend on his hearing alone, and hearing, he knew, could be deceptive.
It was often very difficult to determine the precise location of a
sound, to pinpoint it with any certainty.
Suddenly his heart skipped a beat, and his breathing quickened. His
throat turned cold as he swallowed, and tightened as well, the muscles
stiffening, cording into knots. Unconsciously he gripped his leg, just
above the knee, and dug his fingers into the flesh, as if physical pain
alone could keep reality from taking on an aspect so nightmarish that
his sanity would be imperiled.
The creature was passing directly across the entrance. It was moving
so slowly that he could see it distinctly in the sharply sheared-off
glow from outside the building. The glow penetrated the darkness hardly
at all, but when the creature paused and half turned about even that
abruptly curtailed illumination was strong enough to bring it into
stark relief.
He saw the monstrous shape clearly. Saw the long, insectlike legs
with their tapering hairs, and the very slender, flylike body. Saw
its gauzy, tightly folded wings, the metallic glitter of its immense,
many-faceted eyes and the slow turning of the eyes as they sought him
out in the darkness.
The enormous flying insect framed for an instant in the glow was a
shape of terror. It was not its size alone which was making his flesh
crawl and his chest heave as his eyes remained fastened upon it in the
swimming darkness. He was quite sure of that.
There was something rapacious about it, a deadliness that could be
instantly sensed. It seemed intent on his destruction, its enormous
eyes filmed with a malignancy that made his blood run cold.
Its attitude was just as terrifying, the body poised as if for attack,
a rapier sharpness in the writhing mandibles, a wire-tight tension in
the rhythmically vibrating thorax, the slender abdomen, and the long,
hairy legs which terminated in rust-colored, cuplike disks.
Loring's thoughts went into a mind-chilling whirl. The human mind does
not associate ferocity with an ordinary fly. A house fly, a fruit fly,
even a blue-bottle fly hovering over carrion and evoking no more than a
slight, momentary shiver of disgust. But wasps and hornets are flylike
in aspect and they are equally graceful in flight. Winged insects of
great beauty, delicately constructed and the opposite of revolting. Yet
wasps and hornets can inflict stings that can paralyze and kill.
A long blue hornet in a drowsy woodland glade can be a flying torpedo,
a death-dealing precision instrument, as billions of fat, sluggish
caterpillars have discovered over a very long period of geologic time.
And if a hornet could become large enough....
A gigantic hornet might well find a man more to its liking on an alien
world, a far more delectable feast for its larvae when paralyzed with
care and stored in a clay-constructed hive. Or a metal-constructed hive.
The solitary wasps. The mud builders. Every schoolboy was familiar with
them, every young naturalist exploring the countryside near his home,
the autumn leaves turning red and yellow, the tang of woodsmoke in the
air. The small, gray, skillfully cemented-over openings to their nests
deep underground where unspeakable acts of insect vampirism took place.
The paralyzed caterpillar shrinking, turning sere, losing its substance
but remaining tormentingly alive while the gnawing, insatiable grubs
waxed fat and strong. Dying in the end, its substance liquefying....
And a human caterpillar?
Despite his terror Loring knew that he was letting his imagination
get out of control. He was taking too much for granted, letting his
thoughts lead him into a dark abyss which probably had no basis in
reality. The hideous thought had leapt unbidden into his mind and he
had elaborated upon it, filling in the total blankness of the unknown
with images so ghastly that they glowed blood-red. It was exactly what
an expressionistic artist might have been forced to do if his morbidity
became a genius-inspired flame and he could no longer restrain an
impulse to torture himself to win immortality for what could be, at
best, a purely symbolical vision of madness completely remote from
reality.
Again he was merely a very frightened man with no particular liking for
morbidity who had been trapped in total darkness on an alien planet and
had everything to lose by abandoning himself to wild conjecture when
only clear, logical, determined thinking could save him.
If he had thought at all of wasps and hornets, if he had instantly
seized upon such a comparison--there had to be a reason behind such a
forceful, almost irresistible distortion of thought.
He was almost sure that it was a distortion. The mere appearance of a
flylike creature close to him in the darkness, huge and malignant as
it appeared to be, would not ordinarily have started such a train of
thought in his mind and opened up vistas so specifically ghastly.
In all probability his thoughts had been deliberately guided. The
paralyzed caterpillar-feasting grub comparison had been firmly
implanted in his mind by a skillful mental manipulation of his
imagination.