Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  There was plenty to watch. The red head of Kenny Rice’s father was visible to them, where he bent over the power saw. Mr. Hay was occupying himself with plumb line and level where the props were being nailed to the retaining wall; Mr. Kinnaird was busy with steel tape and slide rule, supplying the sawyers with advance information on the sizes of boards required; and Malmstrom’s father, with a separate crew of men, was directly below the station occupied by the boys, applying a special glaze to the concrete of the south wall to increase its resistance to the bacterial waste products it would soon have to withstand. Colby, the only one whose father was not present, was most interested in this operation, and inched down the hill to the brink of the wall in order to watch it more closely.

  Malmstrom followed—after all, his father was in charge of that particular job, and it would never do if a friend were to ask him something about it which he couldn’t answer—and presently all five of the boys were lying on their stomachs with their heads projecting over the lip of the concrete, watching the work in progress thirty feel below.

  The glaze was actually one of the fluorine-bearing synthetics, a descendant of one of the extremely inert materials developed a couple of decades before during the frantic search for a means of handling uranium hexyfluoride. It was contained in drums, in the monomeric form, mixed with one of the standard volatile inhibitors. The men were spraying this rather gummy brew onto the concrete, and boiling out the inhibitor with blowtorches; polymerization took place very rapidly, and a good deal of the wall was already coated with the glassy shield.

  The men were masked, as the fumes of the vaporized inhibitor were rather poisonous. The boys were, fortunately, far enough away to be out of most of the danger—which was just as well, as none of them knew of its existence. An occasional whiff from the scene below would cause the five noses to wrinkle in distaste, but that was all the effect produced at that range. The Hunter liked the smell no better than his host, but he also failed to detect anything dangerous in it. He watched with the others, though most of his attention was still occupied with the problem of Charles Teroa.

  “First a sunburn that nearly toasts you alive, and now this. You don’t care much what happens to you any more, do you?” Bob turned in surprise, as did his friends. Mr. Kinnaird’s tall form loomed over them, though none of them recalled seeing him leave the mold. “Why do you suppose Mr. Malmstrom and his crew are wearing masks? You’d better come along with me. You may be safe enough at this distance, but you have no business taking a chance on it.” He turned away along the edge of the tank and the boys arose and followed him silently.

  At the west end of the wall, Mr. Kinnaird waved an arm down toward the end of the mold. “I’ll meet you down there in a couple of minutes,” he said. “I have to drive home to pick up something, and if you’d care to load up your loot in the jeep I could drive it down to the creek for you.” He turned and walked nonchalantly along the narrow top of the mold, thirty feet above the hard earth of the hill on the other side. Bob’s throat tightened as he watched, and he stole a glance to make sure the other boys were watching, too. It was good having a father you could boast about, even if he sometimes did scare you to death.

  Thirty or forty yards out on the mold, Mr. Kinnaird swung over the edge And shinned rapidly down which braced the retaining wall reaching the floor at a point near the power saw. He exchanged a few words with Mr. Rice, placing his tape, square, and slide rule under the saw bench, and walked over to the end of the mold—or rather, to the farthest point which the builders had reached. At this point, though it was well out from the south wall, the floor was still but a short distance above the hillside; and Mr. Kinnaird jumped the few feet difference without trouble. The jeep was parked a few feet farther up the hill; the boys were not in sight, having headed for their lumber pile at full speed as soon as Mr. Kinnaird had reached the floor.

  Bob’s father, who missed little that went on around him headed directly for the same point, and found the boys waiting. The scraps of wood were quickly piled into the back of the jeep, and Mr. Kinnaird headed the vehicle down toward the road, followed by the five bicycles. He drove slowly—for him—but left them behind as soon as he reached the hard road. He knew, however, the place where the boys kept their own boat, so he stopped and waited for them about a quarter of a mile from his house, at the point where one of the small creeks went under the road through a culvert before emptying into the lagoon. The boys caught up with him in a few minutes, strung out over fifty yards or so of road.

  Bob was well up toward the head to give his full attention to the race after they had passed the Teroa house and seen Charles at work in the garden, thus relieving the boy of most immediate worry. The Hunter had said nothing more, but Bob assumed the orders to keep track of the Polynesian youth still held good.

  It was not possible to get the jeep down to the lagoon at this point, so the lumber had to be carried some distance down the creek. The boys had long since cut and trampled a path through the dense underbrush, so the transfer did not take too long. Mr. Kinnaird assisted, following the example of the boys in removing his shoes first. He discovered the reason for this when they splashed through several shallow salt pools with their loads before reaching the spot where the boat was drawn up on the beach of coral sand. When the wood was piled beside it, and Mr. Kinnaird spent a few minutes looking it over, some repair work had already been done. It was quite evident that much more would be needed before the craft could be trusted in rough water. Pie did not insult the boys by telling them so; he confined himself to a few helpful comments, and returned to the jeep. He turned back to the group just before leaving for good, and said, “I’m dodging one mistake you made, Bob; I’m getting these feet back into shoes before they’re fried the way you were. I’d stay and help you, but there’s work to be done elsewhere.” He turned and disappeared toward the road, followed by the farewells of the boys.

  Colby grinned at Bob. “We should have figured out a way to make him stay a while. With his feet as white as they were, it wouldn’t take long to toast his insteps like a couple of lobsters—and he wouldn’t be rubbing your mistakes in!”

  Bob shrugged his shoulders. “Let him. I deserve everything he’s said for getting that burn; and anyway, he’s more fun when he’s not crippled.”

  There was a general murmur of assent to this remark, and the boys turned to their task. A number of tools were taken from their cache beneath the upturned boat, and the saw and the plane began reducing boards to appropriate sizes and eliminating the forests of splinters which had made the used pieces of wood so awkward for the unprotected boys to handle.

  Malmstrom and Bob, as before, handled these items, while the others began removing the most obviously rotten boards from the boat and tossing them over to the carpenters to be reproduced in sound wood. The work was by no means continuous; as soon as Mr. Kinnaird had left, the boys had stripped down to bathing suits, and they swam as much as they worked. The single week he had been on the island had darkened Bob’s skin sufficiently to obviate further danger of sunburn, and his feet had hardened enough so that the Hunter no longer swore silent oaths when the boy ventured onto the sharp coral sand.

  The Hunter had some amusement during the swims, as the sight of a crowd of pulpy disks in the water reminded him of his first fruitless attempt to get in contact with one of these boys. They still avoided jellyfish automatically, the alien noticed, except for Bob, who sailed through the group with complete indifference, and gave his invisible guest his first chance to learn why human beings did not like to touch the creatures. The poison cells of the Colenterates gave him a little annoyance, though his action in confining the poison to its point of entry and preventing its mixing with blood from the torn capillaries was almost automatic. He told himself once more that he must give a lecture to his host on the inadvisability of exposing himself too recklessly to minor injuries.

  After that, the boys went back to work, and the Hunter’s mind reverted to its main
problem—until the next swim. A professional carpenter would have fired the whole group in the first hour, but the boys were quite satisfied with their progress when the horn of the jeep sounded from the neighborhood of the culvert, reminding them that for one, at least, of the group it was about time for supper. They stowed the tools and wood, dressed hastily, and returned to the road, where they found Mr. Kinnaird with the fathers of Malmstrom, Rice, and Hay. The men had debated going down to see the boat, and to take a quick swim before supper; but they had decided against it, and had taken the easy means of attracting the attention of their offspring.

  The men and boys went on together, the jeep going slowly enough for the bicycles, until they reached the Kinnaird home, where Bob dropped out. His father went on to drop the others off at their respective dwellings, so the boy had a little time to himself before the family actually sat down to supper. He used it in an interview with the Hunter.

  “Have you figured out what to do about Charlie?” was his inevitable first question. He had himself devoted a good deal of thought to that matter; he had accepted as axiomatic the fact that the Hunter would neither leave nor reenter his body while he was awake, and he knew that the alien could hardly travel alone the two miles or more that separated his home from Teroa’s. That meant that he must contrive to sleep somewhere near the latter house; and he could see no reasonable excuse for doing so.

  It was fortunate for Bob’s peace of mind that the Hunter’s method of communication could not carry the overtones that tend to betray more of a speaker’s thoughts than he wishes. Had he acquired the slightest concrete inkling of what lay in the mind of the gelatinous being, Bob would not have slept that night. Believing as he did that the Hunter planned to leave his body, sleeping would be difficult enough in any case; but the alien’s carefully planned answer tended to lull any tendency the boy might have had toward undue excitement. The Hunter had learned a good deal of psychology—not necessarily general human psychology, but a very good working set of rules that applied to the personality of his own host.

  “I have worked out a plan,” he answered the boy’s question. “There is nothing you need do tonight, aside from your normal activities. I think I can make a test which will not require physical contact with Charles Teroa.”

  That statement was the undiluted truth, as far as it went, and Bob believed it. It served to ease the tension under which he had been laboring ever since the Hunter’s alarm of the afternoon; he immediately drew the false conclusion, which the Hunter’s words had been carefully chosen to foster, that the alien was referring to a test which could be used on anyone without the need of the creature leaving his host’s body at all. He wondered, of course, what the test could be, but he did not really expect to be told at that time; and so he settled into the frame of mind the alien had striven to produce. The Hunter felt that he had done a good job of choosing his words.

  It had been a good job; incredibly good, considering that the Hunter’s own mind was still whirling under a mixture of the chagrin which is felt by anyone who has overlooked the obvious and wasted much effort thereby, and the shock produced by the sudden revelation of a long-sought secret. The Hunter had indeed made his plans—and a physical check of Charles Teroa, as he said, did not enter into them.

  He strove, during the hours that followed supper, to calm himself; he was as excited and jumpy as a child who has seen the circus train pull in. Again and again he told himself that he might be wrong; that the evidence might point as well to others as to the one. He must prepare himself for disappointment; „ must, at least, calm down enough so that the hormones produced in his own gelatinous flesh did not keep his host awake. After all, why should he be right? He had been searching only a week, in a field of more than a hundred possibilities —and he could not, objectively, be sure the search object was in that field at all. Yet the idea that had burst upon him as his host worked that afternoon fitted too perfectly into all the facts—the known personality of a creature who had nearly killed one host and actually killed several others for purely selfish reasons; his own varied and unaccustomed problems in forming a working partnership with his present host; the fact that his own race was. so completely unknown on the Earth—everything; everything seemed to fit. He must be right. So his emotions said; and the stern mind that kept telling him this was an incredibly childish feeling, based on an equally childish jump at conclusions, got nowhere. He was excited, and stayed excited until he was calmed down from without—until Bob, who had returned to the village after supper and become involved in a baseball game, so tired out that the fatigue acids in his body became concentrated enough to affect the Hunter.

  It was dark when Bob reached home. He was curious about the Hunter’s plans for the night, if any, but was tired enough to accept without question the statement that there was nothing he himself need do before the next day. He sat in the living room with his parents for a while, reading and talking, and finally went to bed. The Hunter, who had been blessing the violent activity which had reduced the boy to such an easily manageable condition, now cursed it for the production of muscular wastes—fatigue acids—which were rendering the alien equally sluggish and unresponsive at a time when he particularly wanted to remain fully alert. At least, he comforted himself, he would be completely recovered before his host had thrown off more than a small percentage of the accumulation; but in the meantime, the Hunter had a number of reasons for disliking the situation.

  Once the boy was undressed and in bed, his eyes closed very quickly, cutting off the Hunter’s visual contact with the outside world. Neither made any attempt at conversation; and in a very few minutes Bob’s breathing, heart beat, and the actions of his involuntary muscles informed the alert watcher that he was asleep. The Hunter made no move, however, for some time after he was certain that an earthquake would be needed to rouse his host; instead, he listened, bending all his attention toward the detection, and isolation of every faint wave the air brought to Bob’s ears. He even extended a series of submicroscopic tendrils from the skin of the boy’s forehead, answering in function to the resonating hairs in the inner ear of a human being.

  He heard the birds and insects that formed the active part of the island’s night life; he heard, as did everyone on the island, the steady boom of breakers on the outer reef, though its closest point was a mile away and across the hill; he heard the much nearer, but much fainter sounds of rustling paper and cloth from the living room below, as one of Bob’s parents turned a page or shifted position slightly. It was these sounds to which he gave most of his attention; and he lay passive in Bob’s sleeping body for a full two hours while the adults below read and talked. He was able occasionally to make out their words, though they held little interest for him. The exception to that was when they discussed their son.

  “Do all boys get as careless as Bob has been lately?” asked Mrs. Kinnaird.

  “What do you mean?”

  “His general behavior. He knows better than to get that sunburn he had last week. I know that one mistake is nothing to worry about, but he is doing it all the time, and I’m getting worried. Haven’t you seen him race downstairs in the dark, or scoop up a handful of nails from the keg as though they were sand, or anything like that? I was down past the village today, and saw him run full tilt down the side of a heap of loose rubble that’s up at the diggings, as though he’d never heard of a turned ankle; even Hugh Colby came down after him, comparatively speaking, like a choir boy in church—and he’s certainly careless enough to be banged up pretty often. You’d think that accident to Bob’s ankle last fall would have made him more careful, not like this?”

  The Hunter listened with understandable interest for Mr. Kinnaird’s reply. It’s nature did not surprise him too much.

  “I hadn’t noticed it particularly. All the boys are fooling around the new tank a good deal of the time. I know there are lots of ways they could hurt themselves there, but I always sort of assumed they knew what they were about. Today was the
only time I saw them doing something I wouldn’t do myself—they were too close to the place where Rice was glazing, without masks—and I got them out of the neighborhood; but I can’t see the point of keeping them from climbing around and using edged tools.”

  “I didn’t mean exactly that. I don’t mind Bob’s taking the chances that come in ordinary jobs—too much, that is—but this … this sloppiness does bother me.”

  Mr. Kinnaird’s voice sank to a reassuring muttering, and when the Hunter next could make out their words, the subject had been changed. He had heard enough to crystallize his determination to give his host a stiff lecture on personal care—and to make firmer than ever his resolve to get a certain job done that night.

  At last sounds of motion and the increasing distinctness of their voices betokened that Mr. and Mrs. Kinnaird were coming upstairs. The mother opened the door of Bob’s room and glanced in, then went on, leaving it ajar. A moment later another door on the same floor opened and closed. Without further delay—his excitement had again risen to the point where he probably could not have waited even had there been considerably greater reason for doing so—the Hunter went to work.