Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  “As far as not liking it goes, neither do I; but would you prefer the present state of affairs to a few minutes of mental anguish for your father? And you need have no fear of his not stopping in time; if he fails to do so on his own, our friend would take care of the matter to save himself.”

  “How?” asked Bob instantly. “Neither you nor any of your people could do it by muscular strength—you haven’t any to speak of. The only other way I can see would be to block blood vessels going to the brain, or tighten up on motor nerves, or something like that; and I shouldn’t think that creature would be very careful not to hurt Dad in the process.” Bob had learned quite a number of anatomical terms from his reading since becoming “acquainted with the Hunter.

  “But he would. His idea would be to stop your father from going on; he would interfere with his sight, perhaps, as I do in talking to you, only more so. Then, since your father would certainly go on, he would use the nerve pressing technique in an attempt to head him off, as we do in training the perits; since not even that would stop your father, I should say from what I have seen of the man, our friend would leave. There is a standard spinal-cord massage for paralyzing refractory animals temporarily, and his natural tendency would be to use that. Since you are an intelligent person, it would be fruitless to deny to you that there is some risk; but my considered opinion is that the danger is less than if that creature were permitted indefinite residence in your father’s body.”

  Bob was tense and worried now, his face set in a frown of concentration that made him look older than his fifteen years. He was silent again for a minute or so; then, “I want you to work that standard paralyzing trick on me, right now. You don’t know yet how it works on a human being, and it’s one thing on which we don’t have to trust to luck.”

  “You are trusting to luck in such a test,” pointed out the Hunter.

  “If you are too doubtful of it to risk me, I’m too doubtful to risk Dad,” was the answer.

  The Hunter was in a spot, with his inhibition against harming his own host almost paralyzing him. In their general engineering, the human and Allanese bodies were very similar, and almost every Allanese organ had an equivalent structure in man. The Hunter was reasonably sure that the technique he had mentioned would result in no permanent harm to Bob; but there was always that little bit of doubt—the sort of doubt a test pilot feels as he starts the first take off of a plane he has seen through its wind-tunnel tests. He hesitated; then—well, a little pressure could do no harm. He agreed.

  Bob sat back on the bed and waited. For a moment nothing happened; then without warning, he lost his balance and fell over backward. For a moment he was able to move his arms and legs; then they refused to respond, and he lay inert.

  “I have stopped pressing,” the Hunter’s words flowed across the ceiling. “It took more pressure for you than for my old host, and you are recovering faster. I was very careful, and touched only your motor nerves; you can still feel, you will note.”

  Bob was not in a position to consider the incredible discriminatory ability the Hunter had displayed; for the moment he was too anxious to determine whether or not the alien were correct about his imminent recovery. He was; and in two or three minutes the boy was able to sit up and use his limbs normally.

  “It was a funny sensation,” he remarked, “but nothing seems to be wrong. If I can take it, I guess Dad can.”

  “Easily,” replied the Hunter. “If he relaxes at the first pressure, the criminal may not take time to make sure he is totally paralyzed—as I said, your people seem to take more pressure than our usual hosts.

  “There is another possibility on which you might work, as well. While there should obviously be no chance taken betraying our plan to his guest, perhaps you know some means of letting your father understand in advance that the whole thing is going to be a joke. That would eliminate his worrying, and the danger of our friend’s failing to stop him in time.

  “I can think of no means of doing that, myself; but family life here seems rather similar to that on Allane, and perhaps you and your parents have some private means of communication. If so, and you are sure our friend has had no chance to learn it, go ahead and make use of the fact. Remember, we cannot read minds.”

  Bob brightened up considerably at that suggestion, and without further remark finished dressing. The Hunter did not interrupt; though not a mind reader, he could tell the boy was thinking, and knew from the tension of the muscles responsible for facial expression that his ideas were pleasant.

  There was a slight hitch in the plan to start action immediately; it was not yet Saturday, and Bob had to go to school. There seemed little chance that they could be attacked there, but the Hunter could not keep from worrying about the delay. The moment school was dismissed, however, Bob went to work, without waiting for direction or advice from his hidden guest.

  Telling the other boys that there was “something he wanted to look up” by himself, he left his bicycle by the schoolhouse and struck off on foot toward the east. For perhaps half a mile he passed among the houses and gardens that made up the “village” before his course carried him over the ridge of the island, which was at its lowest at this point. Where the gardens ceased, heavy undergrowth began; all the volcanic soil of the island that was not directly under human cultivation was covered with a conglomeration of tropical and temperate vegetation, some of it natural and some of it originating from the biological laboratories—the company which operated the oil producing tanks had experimental labs oh several islands of the Tuamotus, and sometimes the seeds of a new variety got out of hand.

  There were a few paths through this dense growth, but Bob did not bother with them. As soon as he was sure that he was out of sight from the village, he turned northeast, paralleling the shorter leg of the island, and made the best time he could under cover. The ground began to rise slowly; village and lagoon were soon hidden by the swell of the ground on his left, while on the other side he began to catch glimpses of the line of surf that marked the reef to the southeast of the island.

  After about a half a mile of this shallow climb, he reached a small brook, and turned directly uphill—almost due north; and another three or four hundred yards brought him to the hilltop, the highest point on the island. The sounds of men working and talking were distinctly audible here, for he was only a short distance above the new tank. He crawled cautiously through the brush until he could see clearly all that lay below, and examined the situation carefully.

  Down the hill to his left, between him and the nearest part of the lagoon, were five completed tanks. These were in normal operation, and nobody was around them. Still further to the left, near the end of the road, was a small group of corrugated iron storage sheds; and it was these which claimed most of Bob’s interest. They were concealed from direct view of any of the workers by the completed tanks; and none of the workers showed signs of leaving the new installation in the near future, so that he might glimpse what was going on near those sheds, That was all to the good.

  At first, Bob could see no sign of his father, and he waited about fifteen minutes for that reason. Finally, however, the jeep popped into view from behind a corner of the new flooring, where it had been hidden from the boy’s view; and he was able to recognize Mr. Kinnaird behind the wheel as the little vehicle jounced down toward the road. There was an empty drum in the back seat, and Bob, after watching the jeep vanish down the road, and a few minutes later, reappear on the causeway headed for the loading dock, made the rather obvious deduction that he had gone for a refill. He was quite correct; the glazing compound, in spite of its inhibitor, did not keep very well and was in consequence prepared as needed in one of the smaller processing vats, and Mr. Kinnaird had gone for a fresh supply. The point that interested his son, however, was that he would shortly be coming back the way he had gone; and with a little reasonable speed and a little more luck the stage could be set for his arrival.

  Bob withdrew into the undergrowth and work
ed downhill as rapidly as he could under cover. Opposite the storage sheds he emerged and darted across the track the jeep and the construction machinery had left between the road’s end and the new tank, and ducked into the first shed.

  It was empty, which caused him to wear a worried expression for a moment; then he nodded as he saw how this would fit in with his plan. He checked all the buildings in turn; all except the first had at least some oil in storage—and some were so full there was barely room to move storage drums in and out. Bob knew the code in which the containers were stenciled, and kept his eyes open for a particular type of liquid.

  He had confided no details of his plan to the Hunter, but that being remained inactive as the search progressed—he was willing to believe that his host could handle the present situation at least as well as he.

  The boy’s haste—he stopped frequently to make sure the jeep was not returning—delayed him somewhat; but finally he located the articles he wanted, and set to work with them. First, he stacked a number of empty five-gallon cans by the door of the shed nearest the track. The ground around the pile he soaked with the contents of a similar can—a liquid about as volatile and inflammable as kerosene. A can of much heavier oil was poured over the stack of empties, and one or two full ones added to the pile. It was, on the whole, a rather good bit of showmanship, and anyone examining it would readily have admitted that Bob was familiar with the island products. He had the makings of a very showy and smoky bonfire, with a negligible risk of explosion. An oil worker seeing that stack of containers, which were used principally for light fuels, surrounded by flames would undoubtedly be deeply moved—to put it mildly. If he did not know the storage shed behind it was empty, his feelings should be even more profoundly stirred; and Mr. Kinnaird had nothing to do with the storage and shipment of the island products.

  The Hunter was not in possession of all these facts, but enough was obvious to outline the plan to him. He had no fault to find with it, and the only suggestion he had to make when Bob finished and settled down to wait for his father was that another can of oil be kept ready near at hand. After all, if the fugitive did emerge, the whole point of the plan was to be able to do something about it.

  Bob seemed thoughtful when this was pointed out to him; as a matter of fact, he had given no real thought to the fact that his plans were aimed at the death of an intelligent creature. He had attended his share of movies, but the actual prospect of killing bothered him more than he would have liked to admit. It took several seconds for him to recover his earlier viewpoint—that he was eliminating in rather drastic fashion a deadly disease that had attacked his father.

  The Hunter did not have a very clear idea of what was going on in the boy’s mind, but wisely made no attempt to intrude on it. To his intense relief, the mood of hesitancy seemed to pass in a few seconds, and the two waited silently for the return of Mr. Kinnaird. They watched from a window of the storehouse, from, which they could see the causeway and a few sections of the road from it. Bob held a book of matches in his hand.

  It must have taken Bob’s father about twenty minutes to get the drum cleaned and refilled, but finally appeared on the causeway, driving at a pace that fully justified the Hunter’s deduction of his attitude toward personal injury. Even Bob nodded slowly as he saw the little vehicle racing toward the land. They watched until it reached the shore and disappeared among the sheds clustered near the end of the causeway; then they moved to the door of the shed and peered cautiously out, Bob holding a match ready to strike.

  They heard, and Bob interpreted, the sound of the little car coming up the road; the speed of the engine changed audibly as it reached the end of the hard surface, and Bob went into action.

  The first match he struck went out in the air as he tossed it out onto the oil-soaked ground; with hands that trembled with haste, he lighted another, held it until it was burning strongly, and dropped it from a height of a few inches at the edge of a puddle of oil beside the door. This time the fluid ignited, and the boy sprang back as a sheet of flame leaped into the air. In a second or two before the car came into sight around the lower sheds, the pile of tins was blazing merrily, and the doorway through which Bob and the Hunter were peering was blocked by a yard-wide pool of liquid fire.

  Mr. Kinnaird saw the blaze, and reacted instantly. He had no extinguisher large enough to cope with the situation in the jeep, and he shoved the accelerator down to the floor and headed up the hill to get help. Just before he passed the door of the shed, however, Bob called him from inside.

  “Dad!” He said nothing else—if his father wanted to conclude he was in danger, that was all right, but Bob was not going to lie about it. He expected his father to stop the car, start toward the shed on foot, and be stopped by the fugitive in the manner outlined by the Hunter; but he underestimated both the ingenuity and the reaction speed of his father.

  At the sound of Bob’s voice, apparently from the interior of an inferno, Mr. Kinnaird took his foot from the gas pedal and cut the wheels hard toward the shed. His intention was at once obvious to Bob and the Hunter; he meant to bring the vehicle’s hood right up to the door, gaining momentary protection for both Bob and himself from the flaming pool beneath, and back out again the instant the boy could leap aboard. It was a simple, flawless plan, and should have worked. Had it done so, Bob and his guardian angel would have had to provide a new plan of their own—and some rather detailed explanations.

  Fortunately—from their point of view—another factor entered the situation. Mr. Kinnaird’s hidden guest grasped the situation almost as rapidly as the man himself; but unlike his host the alien creature had no intention of risking itself any closer to a pile of flaming oil containers which from all appearance, might be expected to blast a rain of fire over the neighboring landscape at any moment. They were already within twenty yards of the blaze—man and symbiote alike could feel the heat—and there was literally no way on Earth by which the latter could force his host to turn the jeep around and drive in the opposite direction. Had the thing wasted even a second in thought, it might have done better than it did—had Mr. Kinnaird merely been blinded, as the Hunter had indicated was likely, he might have stopped the car. There is room for doubt, of course; he would have had a searingly clear mental image of his only son in the midst of the flames. No one will ever be certain, for the alien, in the panic of the moment, performed automatically the operation considered by his race the last resort in preventing suicidal action on the part of their domestic animals—only under unthinkable tension would most of them do it to their regular hosts, without permission. The web of alien cells about Mr. Kinnaird’s spinal cord constricted in certain, special areas, and the man sagged forward across the wheel of the jeep, paralyzed as completely as Bob had been a few hours earlier.

  The vehicle, however, was still in gear; and it continued forward with the man’s weight-holding the wheel in a shallow turn. Its speed was low, since his foot had slipped from the gas pedal; and that probably saved him a broken neck when the jeep sailed blithely into the corrugated iron wall of the shed, five or six yards from the door at which he had been aiming.

  Bob, of course, was startled by this unexpected development—everything had happened in too short a time for his wits. His first impulse was to leap the pool of fire by the door—a safe enough procedure, if he held his breath—and go to his father’s aid. The Hunter, however, interpreted correctly the tensing of his muscles, and stopped him almost harshly.

  “No! He is safe enough—he is farther from the fire than we are. Get out the window, where the other won’t see you, and have the oil can ready!”

  Bob was in no state of mind for calm thought, and almost anyone could have given him orders at the moment. He turned at once to follow the Hunter’s behest; but, remembering that his father was almost “Certainly conscious, he called as he went.

  “N’aie pas peur! ’L y a des fenetres” in the island French that still lingered on in the Tuamotus. He was reasonably sure tha
t the enemy would not have heard enough of it spoken to interpret the reference to windows, and infer the probability on an early rescue; in any case, he probably could not have kept silent, knowing the mental anguish his father must be suffering.

  As he spoke, he leaped for one of the windows—simply an opening in the sheet metal, in a wall at right angles to that in which the door was located. At the same instant, though the boy did not know it, one of the full cans in the stack was ruptured by the heat.

  Bob had chosen the liquid well. There was no explosion, which would have sent flaming oil out in a wide radius; the can simply gave along its soldered seam, and a tide of fire welled out, poured down the stack of cans, and, thinned by the heat, began to spread rapidly around the base of the pile. A moment later the other full can added its contents to the expanding lake of fire.

  Bob, fortunately for his peace of mind, did not see this; he was climbing through the window twenty yards away, still carrying his oil can, with several sheets of metal in between. Neither did Mr. Kinnaird, who had been blinded as well as paralyzed by his unsuspected guest; but the creator itself saw only too well.

  The plan of Bob and the Hunter had not quite gone according to schedule; but the situation they had hoped to bring about had finally occurred. Mr. Kinnaird, even if the nerve pressure were relaxed, could not possibly recover the use of his limbs for several minutes; there appeared no possibility of anyone’s reaching him in time to effect a rescue, though shouts from up the hill suggested that the pillar of black smoke from Bob’s bonfire had attracted attention; and the alien, true to the Hunter’s prediction, was faced with a problem which, to one of his proven temperament, offered only one solution.

  Bob, cautioned by the Hunter, peered carefully around the corner of the shed before following his natural urge to dash to his father’s rescue; and the Hunter, looking through the same eyes, saw what he did. Mr. Kinnaird was still slumped over the steering wheel; his eyes were open, but it was not possible to tell whether or not he could see. The body of the jeep concealed from the watchers the degree to which the puddle of oil had spread, and neither of them realized how close the flames had come to the car. Their eyes riveted on a point beside the paralyzed man.