"Tell me, can't you? Have you found out anything?"
His words snapped the thin strand of her strength, and she staggered
back to the couch and collapsed onto it. Her bloodstained hands hung
over the side, making a strangely terrible contrast to the whiteness
of her skin.
"I'm sorry, Brion," she said. "But there's nothing, nothing at all.
There are minor differences, organic changes I've never seen
before—his liver is tremendous, for one thing. But changes like
this are certainly consistent within the pattern of homo sapiens
as adapted to a different planet. He's a man. Changed, adapted,
modified—but still just as human as you or I."
"How can you be sure?" Brion broke in. "You haven't examined him
completely, have you?" She shook her head. "Then go on. The other
organs. His brain. A microscopic examination. Here!" he said,
pushing the microscope case towards her with both hands.
She dropped her head onto her forearms and sobbed. "Leave me alone,
can't you! I'm tired and sick and fed up with this awful planet. Let
them die. I don't care! Your theory is false, useless. Admit that!
And let me wash the filth from my hands...." Sobbing drowned out her
words.
Brion stood over her and drew a shuddering breath. Was he wrong? He
didn't dare think about that. He had to go on. Looking down at the
thinness of her bent back, with the tiny projections of her spine
showing through the thin cloth, he felt an immense pity—a pity he
couldn't surrender to. This thin, helpless, frightened woman was
his only resource. She had to work. He had to
make
her work.
Ihjel had done it—used projective empathy to impress his emotions
upon Brion. Now Brion must do it with Lea. He had had some sessions
in the art, but not nearly enough to make him proficient.
Nevertheless he had to try.
Strength was what Lea needed. Aloud he said simply, "You can do it.
You have the will and the strength to finish." And silently his mind
cried out the order to obey, to share his power now that hers was
drained and finished.
Only when she lifted her face and he saw the dried tears did he
realize that he had succeeded. "You will go on?" he asked quietly.
Lea merely nodded and rose to her feet. She shuffled like a
sleepwalker jerked along by invisible strings. Her strength wasn't
her own, and the situation reminded him unhappily of that last event
of the Twenties when he had experienced the same kind of draining
activity. She wiped her hands roughly on her clothes and opened
the microscope case.
"The slides are all broken," she said.
"This will do," Brion told her, crashing his heel through the glass
partition. Shards tinkled and crashed to the floor. He took some of
the bigger pieces and broke them to rough squares that would fit
under the clips on the stage. Lea accepted them without a word.
Putting a drop of the magter's blood on the slide, she bent over the
eyepiece.
Her hands shook when she tried to adjust the focusing. Using low
power, she examined the specimen, squinting through the angled tube.
Once she turned the sub-stage mirror a bit to catch the light
streaming in the window. Brion stood behind her, fists clenched,
forceably controlling his anxiety. "What do you see?" he finally
blurted out.
"Phagocytes, platelets ... leucocytes ... everything seems normal."
Her voice was dull, exhausted, her eyes blinking with fatigue as
she stared into the tube.
Anger at defeat burned through Brion. Even faced with failure, he
refused to accept it. He reached over her shoulder and savagely
twisted the turret of microscope until the longest lens was in
position. "If you can't see anything—try the high power! It's
there—I know it's there! I'll get you a tissue specimen."
He turned back to the disemboweled cadaver.
His back was turned and he did not see that sudden stiffening of her
shoulders, or the sudden eagerness that seized her fingers as they
adjusted the focus. But he did feel the wave of emotion that welled
from her, impinging directly on his empathetic sense. "What is it?"
he called to her, as if she had spoken aloud.
"Something ... something here," she said, "in this leucocyte. It's
not normal structure, but it's familiar. I've seen something like it
before, but I just can't remember." She turned away from the
microscope and unthinkingly pressed her gory knuckles to her
forehead. "I know I've seen it before."
Brion squinted into the deserted microscope and made out a dim shape
in the center of the field. It stood out sharply when he
focused—the white, jellyfish shape of a single-celled leucocyte. To
his untrained eye there was nothing unusual about it. He couldn't
know what was strange, when he had no idea of what was normal.
"Do you see those spherical green shapes grouped together?" Lea
asked. Before Brion could answer she gasped, "I remember now!" Her
fatigue was forgotten in her excitement. "
Icerya purchasi
, that
was the name, something like that. It's a coccid, a little scale
insect. It had those same shapes collected together within its
individual cells."
"What do they mean? What is the connection with Dis?"
"I don't know," she said; "it's just that they look so similar. And
I never saw anything like this in a human cell before. In the
coccids, the green particles grow into a kind of yeast that lives
within the insect. Not a parasite, but a real symbiote...."
Her eyes opened wide as she caught the significance of her own
words. A symbiote—and Dis was the world where symbiosis and
parasitism had become more advanced and complex than on any other
planet. Lea's thoughts spun around this fact and chewed at the
fringes of the logic. Brion could sense her concentration and
absorption. He did nothing to break the mood. Her hands were
clenched, her eyes staring unseeingly at the wall as her mind raced.
Brion and Ulv were quiet, watching her, waiting for her conclusions.
The pieces were falling into shape at last.
Lea opened her clenched hands and smoothed them on her sodden skirt.
She blinked and turned to Brion. "Is there a tool box here?" she asked.
Her words were so unexpected that Brion could not answer for a
moment. Before he could say anything she spoke again.
"Not hand tools; that would take too long. Could you find anything
like a power saw? That would be ideal." She turned back to the
microscope, and he didn't try to question her. Ulv was still looking
at the body of the magter and had understood nothing of what they
had said.
Brion went out into the loading bay. There was nothing he could use
on the ground floor, so he took the stairs to the floor above. A
corridor here passed by a number of rooms. All of the doors were
locked, including one with the hopeful sign TOOL ROOM on it. He
battered at the metal door with his shoulder without budging it. As
he stepped back to look for another way in, he glanced at his watch.
Two o'clock! In ten hours the bombs would fall on Dis.
The need for haste tore at him. Yet there could be no noise—someone
in the street might hear it. He quickly stripped off his shirt and
wrapped it in a loose roll around the barrel of his gun, extending
it in a loose tube in front of the barrel. Holding the rolled cloth
in his left hand, he jammed the gun up tight against the door, the
muzzle against the lock. The single shot was only a dull thud,
inaudible outside of the building. Pieces of broken mechanism jarred
and rattled inside the lock and the door swung open.
When he came back Lea was standing by the body. He held the small
power saw with a rotary blade. "Will this do?" he asked. "Runs on
its own battery; almost fully charged too."
"Perfect," she answered. "You're both going to have to help me." She
switched into the Disan language. "Ulv, would you find some place
where you can watch the street without being seen? Signal me when
it is empty. I'm afraid this saw is going to make a lot of noise."
Ulv nodded and went out into the bay, where he climbed a heap of
empty crates so he could peer through the small windows set high in
the wall. He looked carefully in both directions, then waved to her
to go ahead.
"Stand to one side and hold the cadaver's chin, Brion," she said.
"Hold it firmly so the head doesn't shake around when I cut. This
is going to be a little gruesome. I'm sorry. But it'll be the
fastest way to cut the bone." The saw bit into the skull.
Once Ulv waved them into silence, and shrank back himself into the
shadows next to the window. They waited impatiently until he gave
them the sign to continue again. Brion held steady while the saw
cut a circle completely around the skull.
"Finished," Lea said and the saw dropped from her limp fingers to
the floor. She massaged life back into her hands before she finished
the job. Carefully and delicately she removed the cap of bone from
the magter's head, exposing his brain to the shaft of light from
the window.
"You were right all the time, Brion," she said. "There is your alien."
Ulv joined them as they looked down at the exposed brain of the
magter. The thing was so clearly evident that even Ulv noticed it.
"I have seen dead animals and my people dead with their heads open,
but I have never seen anything like that before," he said.
"What is it?" Brion asked.
"The invader, the alien you were looking for," Lea told him.
The magter's brain was only two-thirds of what would have been its
normal size. Instead of filling the skull completely, it shared the
space with a green, amorphous shape. This was ridged somewhat like a
brain, but the green shape had still darker nodules and extensions.
Lea took her scalpel and gently prodded the dark moist mass.
"It reminds me very much of something that I've seen before on
Earth," she said. "The green-fly—
Drepanosiphum platanoides
—and
an unusual organ it has, called the pseudova. Now that I have seen
this growth in the magter's skull, I can think of a positive
parallel. The fly
Drepanosiphum
also had a large green organ, only
it fills half of the body cavity instead of the head. Its identity
puzzled biologists for years, and they had a number of complex
theories to explain it. Finally someone managed to dissect and
examine it. The pseudova turned out to be a living plant, a
yeastlike growth that helps with the green-fly's digestion. It
produces enzymes that enable the fly to digest the great amounts
of sugar it gets from plant juice."
"That's not unusual," Brion said, puzzled. "Termites and human
beings are a couple of other creatures whose digestion is helped
by internal flora. What's the difference in the green-fly?"
"Reproduction, mainly. All the other gut-living plants have to enter
the host and establish themselves as outsiders, permitted to remain
as long as they are useful. The green-fly and its yeast plant have a
permanent symbiotic relationship that is essential to the existence
of both. The plant spores appear in many places throughout the fly's
body—but they are
always
in the germ cells. Every egg cell has
some, and every egg that grows to maturity is infected with the
plant spores. The continuation of the symbiosis is unbroken and
guaranteed."
"Do you think those green spheres in the magter's blood cells could
be the same kind of thing?" Brion asked.
"I'm sure of it," Lea said. "It must be the same process. There are
probably green spheres throughout the magters' bodies, spores or
offspring of those things in their brains. Enough will find their
way to the germ cells to make sure that every young magter is
infected at birth. While the child is growing, so is the symbiote.
Probably a lot faster, since it seems to be a simpler organism.
I imagine it is well established in the brain pan within the first
six months of the infant's life."
"But why?" Brion asked. "What does it do?"
"I'm only guessing now, but there is plenty of evidence that gives
us an idea of its function. I'm willing to bet that the symbiote
itself is not a simple organism, it's probably an amalgam of plant
and animal like most of the other creatures on Dis. The thing is
just too complex to have developed since mankind has been on this
planet. The magter must have caught the symbiotic infection eating
some Disan animal. The symbiote lived and flourished in its new
environment, well protected by a bony skull in a long-lived host.
In exchange for food, oxygen and comfort, the brain-symbiote must
generate hormones and enzymes that enable the magter to survive.
Some of these might aid digestion, enabling the magter to eat any
plant or animal life they can lay their hands on. The symbiote might
produce sugars, scavenge the blood of toxins—there are so many
things it could do. Things it must have done, since the magter are
obviously the dominant life form on this planet. They paid a high
price for the symbiote, but it didn't matter to race survival until
now. Did you notice that the magter's brain is no smaller than
normal?"
"It must be—or how else could that brain-symbiote fit in inside
the skull with it?" Brion said.
"If the magter's total brain were smaller in volume than normal
it could fit into the remaining space in the cranial hollow. But
the brain is full-sized—it is just that part of it is missing,
absorbed by the symbiote."
"The frontal lobes," Brion said with sudden realization.
"This hellish growth has performed a prefrontal lobotomy!"
"It's done even more than that," Lea said, separating the
convolutions of the gray matter with her scalpel to uncover a green
filament beneath. "These tendrils penetrate further back into the
brain, but always remain in the cerebrum. The cerebellum appears to
be untouched. Apparently just the higher functions of mankind have
been interfered with, selectively. Destruction of the frontal lobes
made the magter creatures without emotions or ability for really
abstract thought. Apparently they survived better without these.
There must have been some horrible failures before the right balance
was struck. The final product is a man-plant-animal symbiote that is
admirably adapted for survival on this disaster world. No emotions
to cause complications or desires that might interfere with pure
survival. Complete ruthlessness—mankind has always been strong on
this anyway, so it didn't take much of a push."