"I'm coming to that," I told him. I was feeling cramped from sitting so
long in one position on the bunk, and I stood up and stretched.
There isn't much room to stretch in an asteroid tug and my hand hit
against the pistol resting in the clips on the wall. I said, "What's
the pistol for, Blake?"
He shrugged. "Rules. Has to be one hand weapon on every space-craft.
Heaven knows why, on an asteroid ship. Unless the council thinks some
day an asteroid may get mad at us when we tow it out of orbit so it
cracks up another. Say, did I ever tell you about the time we had a
little twenty-ton rock in tow and--"
"Shut up Blake," Charlie said. "He's just getting to those damn
earrings."
"Yeah, the earrings," I said. I took the pistol down from the wall
and looked at it. It was an old-fashioned metal project weapon,
twenty-shot, circa 2000. It was loaded and usable, but dirty. It hurts
me to see a dirty gun.
I went on talking, but I sat back down on the bunk, took an old
handkerchief out of my duffle-box and started to clean and polish the
hand-gun while I talked.
I said, "He wouldn't let us take the earring off. Acted just a little
funny about it when Haynes wanted to analyze the metal. Told Haynes he
could get one of his own if he wanted to mess with it. And then he went
back to rhapsodizing over the superior knowledge the Ganymedeans had
shown.
"Next day all of them wanted to go to the village, but we'd made the
rule that not more than three of the six of us would be outside the
ship at once, and they'd have to take turns. Since Lecky could talk
their grunt-lingo, he and Hilda went first, and Art went along to guard
them. Looked safe enough to work that proportion now--two scientists
to one guard. Outside of that one native that had thrown a spear at
Art and me, there hadn't been a sign of danger. And he'd looked like a
half-wit and missed us by twenty feet anyway. We hadn't even bothered
to shoot at him.
"They were back, panting for breath, in less than two hours. Hilda
Race's eyes were shining and she was wearing one of the rings in her
left ear. She looked as proud as though it was a royal crown making her
queen of Mars or something. She gushed about it, as soon as she got her
wind back and stopped panting.
"I went on the next trip, with Lecky and Haynes.
"Haynes was kind of grumpy, for some reason, and said they weren't
going to put one of those rings in his ear, even if he did want one for
analysis. They could just hand it to him, or else.
"Again nobody paid much attention to me after we got there, and I
wandered around the village. I was on the outskirts of it when I heard
a yell--and I ran back to the center of town but fast, because it
sounded like Haynes.
"There was a crowd around a spot in the middle of--well, call it the
compound. Took me a minute to wedge my way through, scattering natives
to all sides as I went. And when I got to the middle of things, Haynes
was just getting up, and there was a big stain of red on the front of
his white linen coat.
"I grabbed him to help him up, and said, 'Haynes, what's the matter?
You hurt?'
"He shook his head slowly, as though he was kind of dazed, and then he
said, 'I'm all right, Hank. I'm all right. I just stumbled and fell.'
Then he saw me looking at that red stain, and smiled. I guess it was a
smile, but it didn't look natural. He said, 'That's not blood, Hank.
Some native red wine I happened to spill. Part of the ceremony.'
* * * * *
"I started to ask what ceremony, and then I saw he was wearing one
of the gold earrings. I thought that was damn funny, but he started
talking to Lecky, and he looked and acted all right--well, fairly all
right. Lecky was telling him what a few of the grunts meant, and he
acted awful interested--but somehow I got the idea he was pretending
most of that interest so he wouldn't have to talk to me. He acted as
though he was thinking hard, inside, and maybe he was making up a
better story to cover that stain on his clothes and the fact that he'd
changed his mind so quick about the earring.
"I was getting the notion that something was rotten in the state of
Ganymede, but I didn't know what. I decided to keep my yap shut and my
eyes open till I found out.
"I'd have plenty of time to study Haynes later, though, so I wandered
off again to the edge of the village and just outside it. And it
occurred to me that if there was anything I wasn't supposed to see, I
might stand a better chance of seeing it if I got under cover. There
were plenty of bushes around and I picked out a good clump of them and
hid. From the way my lungs worked, I figured I had maybe a half hour
before we'd have to start back for the ship.
"And less than half that time had gone by before I saw something."
I stopped talking to hold the pistol up to the light and squint through
the barrel. It was getting pretty clean, but there were a couple of
spots left up near the muzzle end.
Blake said, "Let me guess. You saw a Martian traag-hound standing on
his tail, singing Annie Laurie."
"Worse than that," I said "I saw one of those Ganymede natives get his
legs bit off. And it annoyed him."
"It would annoy anyone," said Blake. "Even me, and I'm a pretty
mild-tempered guy. What bit them off?"
"I never found out," I told him. "It was something under water. There
was a stream there, going by the village, and there must have been
something like crocodiles in it. Two natives came out of the village
and started to wade across the stream. About half-way over one of them
gave a yelp and went down.
"The other grabbed him and pulled him up on the other bank. And both
his legs were gone just above the knees.
"And the damnedest thing happened. The native with his legs off stood
up on the stumps of them and started talking--or grunting--quite
calmly to his companion, who grunted back. And if tone of voice meant
anything, he was annoyed. Nothing more. He tried walking on the stumps
of his legs, and found he couldn't go very fast.
"And then he gave a gesture that looked for all the world like a shrug,
and reached up and took off his earring and held it out to the other
native. And then came the strangest part.
"The other native took it--_and the very instant the ring left the hand
of the first one_--the one with his legs off--_he fell down dead_. The
other one picked up the corpse and threw it in the water, and went on.
"And as soon as he was out of sight I went back to get Lecky and
Haynes and take them to the ship. They were ready to leave when I got
there.
"I thought I was worried a bit, but I hadn't seen anything yet. Not
till I started back to the ship with Lecky and Haynes. Haynes, first
thing I noticed, had the stain gone from the front of his coat. Wine
or--whatever it was--somebody'd managed to get it out for him, and the
coat wasn't even wet. But it was torn, pierced. I hadn't noticed that
before. But there was a place there that looked like a spear had gone
through his coat.
"And then he happened to get in front of me, and I saw that there was
another tear or rip just like it _in back_ of his coat. Taken together,
it was like somebody'd pushed a spear through him, from front to back.
When he'd yelled.
"But if a spear'd gone through him like that, then he was dead. And
there he was walking ahead of me back to the ship. With one of those
earrings in his left ear--and I couldn't help but remember about that
native and the thing in the river. That native was sure enough dead,
too, with his legs off like that, but he hadn't found it out until he'd
handed that earring away.
* * * * *
"I can tell you I was plenty thoughtful that evening, watching
everybody, and it seemed to me that they were all acting strange.
Especially Hilda--you'd have to watch a hippopotamus acting kittenish
to get an idea. Haynes and Lecky seemed thoughtful and subdued, like
they were planning something, maybe. After a while Art came up from the
glory hole and he was wearing one of those rings.
"Gave me a kind of shiver to realize that--if what I was thinking
could possibly be true--then there was only me and Dick left. And I'd
better start comparing notes with Dick pretty soon. He was working on
a report, but I knew pretty soon he'd make his routine inspection trip
through the storerooms before turning in, and I'd corner him then.
"Meanwhile, I watched the other four and I got surer and surer.
And more and more scared. They were trying their darndest to act
natural, but once in a while one of them would slip. For one thing,
they'd _forget to talk_. I mean, one of them would turn to another as
though he was saying something, but he wouldn't. And then, as though
remembering, he'd start in the middle of it--like he'd been talking
without words before, telepathically.
"And pretty soon Dick gets up and goes out, and I followed him. We got
to one of the side storerooms and I closed the door. 'Dick,' I asked,
'have you noticed it?' And he wanted to know what I was talking about.
"So I told him. I said, 'Those four people out there--they _aren't the
ones we started with_. What happened to Art and Hilda and Lecky and
Haynes? What the hell goes on here? Haven't you noticed _anything_ out
of the ordinary?'
"And Dick sighed, kind of, and said, 'Well, it didn't work. We need
more practice, then. Come on and we'll tell you all about it.' And
he opened the door and held out his hand to me--and the sleeve of
his shirt pulled back a little from the wrist and he was wearing one
of those gold things, like the others, only he was wearing it as a
bracelet instead of an earring.
"I--well, I was too dumbfounded to say anything. I didn't take the
hand he held out, but I followed him back into the main room. And
then--while Lecky, who seemed to be the leader, I think--held a gun on
me, they told me about it.
"And it was even screwier, and worse, than I'd dare guess.
"They didn't have any name for themselves, because they had no
language--what you'd really call a spoken or written language--of their
own. You see, they were telepathic, and you don't need a language for
that. If you tried to translate their thought for themselves, the
nearest word you could find for it would be "we"--the first person
plural pronoun. Individually, they identified themselves to one another
by numbers rather than names.
"And just as they had no language of their own, they had no real bodies
of their own, nor active minds of their own. They were parasitic in
a sense that earthmen can't conceive. They were _entities_, apart
from--Well, it's difficult to explain, but in a way they had no real
existence when not attached to a body they could animate and _think
with_. The easiest way to put it is that a detached--uh--_earring god_,
which is what the Ganymedean natives called them--was asleep, dormant,
ineffective. Had no power of thought or motion in itself."
Charlie and Blake were looking bewildered. Charlie said, "You're trying
to say, Hank, that when one of them came in contact with a person,
they took over that person and ran him and thought with his mind
but--uh--kept their own identity? And what happened to the person they
took over?"
I said, "As near as I could make out, he stayed there, too, as it
were, but was dominated by the entity. I mean, there remained all his
memories, and his individuality, but something else was in the driver's
seat. Running him. Didn't matter whether he was alive or dead, either,
as long as his body wasn't in too bad shape. Like Haynes--they'd had to
kill him to put an earring on him. He was dead, in that if that ring
was removed, he'd have fallen flat and never got up again, unless it
was put back.
"Like the native whose legs had been cut off. The entity running him
had decided the body was no longer practicable for use, so he handed
himself back to the other native, see? And they'd find another body in
better shape for him to use.
"They didn't tell me where they came from, except that it was outside
the solar system, nor just how they got to Ganymede. Not by themselves,
though, because they couldn't even exist by themselves. They must have
got as far as Ganymede as parasites of visitors that had landed there
at some time or other. Maybe millions of years ago. And they couldn't
get off Ganymede, of course, till we landed there. Space travel hadn't
developed on Ganymede--"
* * * * *
Charlie interrupted me again, "But if they were so smart, why didn't
they develop it themselves?"
"They couldn't," I told him. "They weren't any smarter than the minds
they occupied. Well, a little smarter, in a way, because they could
use those minds to their full capacity and people--Terrestrial or
Ganymedean--don't do that. But even the full capacity of the mind of a
Ganymedean savage wasn't sufficient to develop a space-ship.
"But now they had _us_--I mean, they had Lecky and Haynes and Hilda
and Art and Dick--and they had our space-ship, and they were going to
Earth, because they knew all about it and about conditions there from
our minds. They planned, simply, to take over Earth and--uh--_run_ it.
They didn't explain the details of how they propagate, but I gathered
that there wouldn't be any shortage of earrings to go around, on Earth.
Earrings or bracelets or, however, they'd attach themselves.
"Bracelets, probably, or arm or leg bands, because wearing earrings
like that would be too conspicuous on Earth, and they'd have to work in
secret for a while. Take over a few people at a time, without letting
the others know what was going on.
"And Lecky--or the thing that was running Lecky--told me they'd been
using me as a guinea pig, that they could have put a ring on me, taken
me over, at any time. But they wanted a check on how they were doing
at imitating normal people. They wanted to know whether or not I got
suspicious and guessed the truth.
"So Dick--or the thing that was running him--had kept himself out of
sight under Dick's sleeve, so if I got suspicious of the others, I'd
talk it over with Dick--just as I really did do. And that let them know
they needed a lot more practice animating those bodies before they took
the ship back to Earth to start their campaign there.
"And, well, that was the whole story and they told it to me to watch
my reactions, as a normal human. And then Lecky took a ring out of his
pocket and held it out toward me with one hand, keeping the pistol on
me with the other hand.
"He told me I might as well put it on because if I didn't, he could
shoot me first and then put it on me--but that they greatly preferred
to take over undamaged bodies and that it would be better for me, too,
if I--that is, my body--didn't die first.
"But naturally, I didn't see it that way. I pretended to reach out for
the ring, hesitantly, but instead I batted the gun out of his hand, and
made a dive for it as it hit the floor.
"I got it, too, just as they all came for me. And I fired three shots
into them before I saw that it wasn't even annoying them. Damn it, the
only way you can stop a body animated by one of those rings is to make
it fix it so it can't move, like cutting off the legs or something. A
bullet in the heart doesn't worry it.
"But I'd backed to the door and got out of it--out into the Ganymedean
night, without even a coat on. It was colder than hell, too. And after
I got out there, there just wasn't any place to go. Except back in the
ship, and I wasn't going there.
"They didn't come out after me--didn't bother to. They knew that within
three hours--four at the outside--I'd be unconscious from insufficient
oxygen. If the cold, or something else, didn't get me first.
"Maybe there was some way out, but I didn't see one. I just sat down
on a stone about a hundred yards from the ship and tried to think of
something I could do. But--"
* * * * *
I didn't go anywhere with the "but--" and there was a moment's silence,
and then Charlie said, "Well?"