Through the Eye of a Needle n-2

by Hal Clement

  No rocks were carried.

  Seever suddenly decided that he owed himself a pleasant ride on the water, and went along. Bob objected to this, saying that the Hunter should be kept under a medical eye, but the doctor insisted that there was nothing more he could do for the alien. In fact, he was much more worried about Bob, who now was deprived of his alien partner, lacked infection resistance of his own, and was otherwise not at his best. He refrained from mentioning this reason to either Mrs. Kinnaird or her son, and decided not to remind them of the situation by taking his bag along. He regretted this omission later.

  It was mid-afternoon when they reached the out rigger on North Beach and embarked. The swell had increased since morning, and everyone was wet by the time they were afloat. The mile to the site was covered quickly, with all but Bob at the paddles, and the final search for the buoy took a little longer than Maeta had predicted. She worked the craft into what she recalled was the right position with respect to the marker, told Seever and Mrs. Kinnaird to hold it there, and without further ceremony slid overboard with the bottle. For a moment she trod water between the canoe's hull and the outrigger as she took in air; then she upended and drove downward.

  Seever and Mrs. Kinnaird watched her as well as they could without interfering with their paddling. Bob did not. He was barely aware that she had gone at all he was becoming less and less conscious of any thing except pain. His limbs were sorer than ever, and his head felt hot. He knew the Hunter had been away from him for longer periods than this, but he felt far worse than the last time; and he was beginning to wonder whether the juggling act with his hormones was closing. He didn't know. He was beginning not to care. The sun hurt his eyes, even in the shadow of his hat brim, and he dosed them.

  Maeta surfaced, well within the ninety seconds she had allowed, and slid into the canoe as smoothly as she had left it. "No trouble," she said, after getting her breath. "You can see the outline of the ship under the mud, if you know what to look for. I felt into the stuff. It's very soft, and there are only a few inches of it over the top part of the ship. I felt the hard stuff, but couldn't tell by touch if it was metal or something else."

  "You left the message." Bob's mother did not put it as a question.

  "Sure. Neck of the bottle down against the hull, the bottom part with the paper sticking above the mud. If they look at all, or feel at all carefully, they can't miss it."

  "You shouldn't have taken the chance of touching the ship," the older woman said. "Bob was right about that. You might have gotten an electric shock, or something of that sort, as the Hunter seems to have done. Could that be what happened to him, Ben?"

  The doctor shrugged. "Noway to tell, until he comes to and tells us. I don't know what electricity would do to him; I couldn't guess even if his tissues were likeours. There's no simple way to tell; a man can stand a shock that will kill a horse. Did he ever tell you anything about that, Bob?"

  An incoherent mumble was his only answer. Mrs., Kinnaird gave a gasp of terror, but managed to retain her grip on her paddle.

  Seconds later Bob was stretched out on the bottom of the dugout while Seever checked him over as well as the cramped situation allowed. He could find only the deep flush on the face and a racing pulse, which might have meant several things. The women were already paddling back toward North Beach as hard as they could. After doing what little he could for Bob, the doctor picked up the remaining paddle and used it.

  At the beach, he issued orders quickly.

  "We can't hand-carry him all the way to the hospital. Annette, get to your house and see if Arthur is there. If he is, have him get a car-he can usually find one. Maeta, bike down to the village and try to find either him or a car, too. Check around the desalting stations first, then go out to the refinery. Never mind explanations, just say I need a car, capital NOW. As you pass my place, tell Ev to get my kit here as fast as she can. I should have known better than to come without it."

  With the women gone, Seever turned back to his patient. They had carried him into the shade, and it was now obvious even without a thermometer that he had a high fever. His face was flushed, and he was perspiring heavily. Seever was somewhat relieved by the latter fact, but be removed his own shirt and Bob's, soaked them in the sea, and spread one over the younger man's chest He improvised a turban with the other.

  It was almost sunset when a jeep appeared at high speed. Arthur Kinnaird was at the wheel, his daughter beside him, and Maeta in the back seat. They stopped a few yards short of where Bob was lying; Kinnaird was not the sort to take chances on being stuck in the sand at such a time.

  "Your wife wasn't home. I've told him everything," Maeta said before Seever could ask a question.

  "All right. Arthur, get us to my place as quickly as you can. I'll use the back seat, with Bob. Daph, crowd in front with Mae until we get to your house; you can get off there."

  "No! I'm staying with you. Bob's sick!"

  Seever was too busy even to shrug, much less argue. Maeta had shifted to the front seat and taken the child on her lap, and seconds later they were speeding back down the road. Bob's father said nothing as they approached his house, and did not slow down; the child was still with them as they approached the hospital. She tried to help carry Bob into the building; then Maeta took her out. Arthur Kinnaird remained as Seever went to work.

  The trouble was plain enough now. Bob's temperature was indeed high, and the broken left arm was showing the red streaks which indicated massive in fection. Seever removed the cast to reveal a red and black mess underneath.

  "Antibiotics?" asked Kinnaird.

  "Maybe. They don't work on everything, in spite of people's calling them 'miracle drugs'-they were doing that with the sulfa compounds a few years ago, too. I'll do the best I can, but he may not be able to keep the arm."

  "This is a fine time for the Hunter to be out of action."

  "Probably not coincidence," pointed out Seever. "If he were there, this wouldn't have happened at all. Look, I'll give the boy a shot of what seems best- I'll make some tests first-and then, if I can, I'll wait six hours before doing anything else. Of course, if things get obviously worse I won't be able to give all that time. Then well have to decide about the arm.

  "And I'm going to do one more thing."

  Kinnaird noddedin understanding as the doctor put a smaller table beside the one on which Bob was lying, placed the basin containing the Hunter on it, and put Bob's right hand in the basin. They watched as the hand sank slowly into the jelly. Then Seever got out his microscope, and took scrapings from the tissue of the other arm.

  12. Joker

  That was the situation when the Hunter woke up. It took him a little while to catch up with reality, though he knew well enough what had happened at the ship. It had obviously been found by the search expedition, identified, as being the onestolen by the Hunter's quarry, and booby-trapped against the possible return of that individual. The alien recalled Seever's question about standard police procedures, and would have blushed had he been equipped for it.

  He was perfectly familiar with the immobilizing agent which had been used, and if he had been properly alert would never have been trapped by it.

  He became aware of the basin which held him, and of his host's hand immersed in his substance. That was presumably what had allowed him to wake up. The agent itself would have held him for months; but he had absorbed an equilibrium amount of it while separate from his host's body; and his own four pounds of tissue would have been saturated by a very small total quantity of the substance. Since it was designed to be absorbed rapidly by tissues similar to those of the Hunter's usual host species, which were biochemically fairly similar to those of humanity, and since Bob massed thirty-five or forty times as much as his symbiont, enough had now diffused into Bob's body to clear the Hunter's nearly completely. Returning to Bob seemed safe enough, since the concentration of the substance would be so much smaller.

  Without bothering to check on his surroundings
by forming an eye, the Hunter began to soak his way into the hand and spread through his host's body in normal fashion. He had completed about a quarter of the job when he heard Arthur Kinnaird's voice.

  "Ben, Look! The level is going down in the Hunter's dish, and he's higher around Bob's wrist than before! He must be awake!"

  The alien extended a finger-sized pseudopod from the basin and waved it to let the speaker know he had been heard. The doctor's voice promptly responded.

  "Hunter, get in there and get to work! Bob has picked up a very bad infection that my drugs don't seem to be touching, and he needs you. We'll ask you what happened later; first things first."

  The Hunter waved again in acknowledgment. He was already aware of the trouble, and was working on it.

  It was real work. Destroying the infecting organisms was a minor task, finished in minutes; but the toxins they had produced were far more difficult to neutral ize, and much of the tissue in the arm where they had entered was totally destroyed. The fracture had not been responsible; neither the Hunter nor Seever had made any professional errors there. A tiny wooden splinter had gotten into Bob's left hand just beyond the end of the cast. It had clearly entered after the Hunter's departure; Bob himself might not have noticed it, but the alien could not possibly have failed to. With his personal resistance to infection long since destroyed and his symbiont absent, Bob was a walking culture tube; a few hours had nearly destroyed his arm. The Hunter had not realized that his host's general self-reparability had become so poor, but the facts seemed beyond dispute. It was not the first time he wished he had studied biochemistry more thoroughly on his home world. He trusted contact with the check team could be made soon; they would certainly have specialists in tins field among their numbers.

  But he had to get back to work. He could clean up the ruined arm and expect it to be replaced, however slowly, by normal healing. The real worry was Bob's brain. Some of the bacteria as well as their toxins must have been carried to that organ by his circulatory sys tem, and it could not be taken for granted that nothing had left the blood vessels to lodge in nerve tissue.

  The Hunter had always been afraid to intrude into this material himself, though he had maintained a network of his own tissue in the capillaries. Brain cells were the objects where he was most afraid of making a mistake based on differences between human biochemistry and what he was more used to. Now it was necessary to take the chance, and he took it; but he worked very, veryslowly and very, very carefully.

  The situation was one he had never been able to explain at all clearly either to his host or to Seever who had been curious about it. The Hunter did possess the ability to sense directly structures down to the large-molecule level. At the same time he could be aware simultaneously of the trillions of cells in a living organism, and work on them all at once with the same attention to each that a jeweler could give to a single watch. When he tried to describe this to a human being, however, it seemed to involve a contrast for his listener; the human seemed to think of him as a whole race of beings instead of an individual. This tended to bother the Hunter, because be could only think of himself as an individual.

  Sometimes, facing problems which seemed beyond his ability, he wished there were more of him.

  He did solve this one, for the time being. Relatively few bacteria had actually reached Bob's brain cells, and the alien managed to destroy these with comparatively little damage to nearby cells. He knew that these would not be repaired or replaced; it was the same with every humanoid species he knew, and was assumed by the scientists of his own kind to be an evolutionary byproduct of overspecialization of the brain cell. However, the brain itself was a highly redundant structure, and even though Bob was losing thousands of its cells every day, it would be many years before the cumulative effect became serious.

  And at the moment, there was little point in worrying years ahead.

  Bob was conscious and, except for the arm, normal by Monday night. He was still in the hospital section of the Seevers' home-Mrs. Seever remarked that with two patients, the, place was more like a hospital than it had been, for years-and after dinner the en-tire group assembled to bring everything up to date. Even Bob's parents were present; Daphne was spending the night with a friend.

  The Hunter explained in detail what had happened to him, stressing the obvious fact that his people must be somewhere around, and mentioning as little as possible the lack of alertness which had led to such unfortunate results. The others told him of the message left at the ship, and its details, of which he approved. He agreed with the doctor that his entry into the ship had probably tripped a signal at the same time that it had released the paralyzing agent, so the check team was no doubt aware that the ship had been visited. What they would think when they found the small valve open but no prisoner on hand could only be guessed. Of course, if they found the message all would be well, but the Hunter agreed with Bob's pessimistic view that they had probably responded to the signal before the bottle had been placed. It would have been less surprising if they had arrived before the pipe containing his helpless form had been pulled up.

  "They would beable to get to any place on Earth in an hour or so, and wouldn’t have to wait until night to check the ship," the Hunter assured in his human friends.

  "Then we'd better get back to it as soon as we can," Maeta responded. "We'll try, or the Hunter will try, to tell whether the bottle message has been found and read; but more important, willleave a much more complete message in the Hunter's own language, with instructions on just where to meet him and how to recognize Bob. You didn't cover that in your note, did you, Bob?"

  "No, I didn't think of it. I was more concerned with getting the history down. If they've read it, at least they'll know the other creature is dead, and, there's no more need for booby traps."

  "They'll have heard, if they read it, that the other one is dead. Will they believe it?" asked Seever.

  "That's why the Hunter will have to supplement that message," Maeta pointed out. "He should be able to identify himself clearly in some way-a serial num ber, or something like that."

  "But I put my name on my note," Bob said. "They should be able to find me."

  "Why?" asked the dark-haired girl. "We can't take for granted that they know all about Ell and its people."

  "Why not? They must have investigated the island pretty well when they first came. They'd probably have found us then only I expect the Hunter and I weren't here."

  "But why would theyhave known the people by name?" Maeta countered. "I suppose they'd have used human hosts the way the Hunter did, but they wouldn't have gotten in touch with them, would they? Talked to them, and used their help the way the Hunter used yours?"

  "Definitely not," the detective said. "Unless some very special situation like minedemanded it, that would be extremely contrary to policy. I did it be-cause I didn't at the time think there was the slightest chance of help from home, and my quarry was a danger to your people."

  "Right," Maeta nodded. "And whoever is here, they haven't been hanging around Ell all these years just getting to know these particular people. For one thing, if they had, wouldn't we have more people on the island in Bob's condition? Hunter addicts, if you don't mind?"

  "Very unlikely," the alien replied. The group would have specialists able to forestall such events. That's why we're trying to get in touch with them, re member."

  "But you should still add something of your own to Bob's message."

  "He agrees," Bob relayed. "He says to get another bottle-a very small one will do-and something that will scratch glass. Do you have a carborundum scriber, or a small diamond, Doc?"

  "I can get a scriber," Bob's father said.

  "He doesn't want the whole tool, just the carbo tip. He's going to write on the inside of the bottle, and he probably couldn't maneuver the whole tool in there even if he could get it through the neck. He won't need a cork or sand ballast. He says he'll just tie the new bottle to the neck of the old one, to
make some thing sure to attract attention."

  "Then we can really count on being in touch with someone who can cure Bob, at last?" It was his mother, her voice not very steady. "It's been nice for those who could take this all as an intellectual problem, but I haven't been able to do that."

  Bob answered his mother with a simple affirmative, but the Hunter's honesty forced him to go farther.

  "If only police personnel like myself are on Earth, it may take longer. We might have to wait for a ship to go home and return with the specialist Bob needs."

  "I don't want to mention that," Bob muttered back. "Why give her any more to worry about?" "Don't be shortsightedly selfish," his symbiont ad-monished him. "If events disappoint her, you won't be in a position to care; but she has the right to reality. You know that."

  "I know you, anyway." Reluctantly, Bob relayed the Hunter's qualification. His mother took a deep breath and shook her head. Then she looked at her son and said, "Thanks, Hunter." Bob raised his eye brows. "And you, of course, Son."

  That ended the discussion. Bob was falling asleep, and his parents and Maeta prepared to leave.

  "When should I bring that carbide tip, Hunter?" Arthur Kinnaird asked as they reached the door. "Tonight? I can find one all right."

  "No," Bob relayed. "He'll have to leave me to do that job, and says he won't do that before tomorrow night. You can all go back to normal living for a day. He'll do the message tomorrow night if I'm all right, and it can go out to the ship on Wednesday." His father nodded understanding, and Bob was asleep a minute later.

  The Hunter spent the night as usual, going over and over his host's biochemistry in the endless effort to balance things better. The joint pains bad been absent that day, leaving the alien to wonder whether the infection toxins, the inactivity, Seever's antibiotics, or even the symbiont's own absence might be responsible. He ended the night in His usual mood of futility and frustration.