A tunnel world, the creature thought in terror, a narrow, enclosed space that went on and on forever, reeking with its odors and filled with murky talk and awash with fear.
There were openings, it saw, all along the tunnel, and some of them were closed with a dark material, while there were others open, leading, more than likely, into other tunnels that went on and on, as endlessly as this.
Far down the tunnel a creature, huge, misshapen, terrible, came from one of the openings. It made a clicking sound as it walked and it turned toward the creature, coming down the tunnel. It screamed and something that it carried clattered on the floor and the sound of its wrenching terror, welling from its brain, bounced back and forth like shrieks along the tunnel walls. It turned and ran, moving very rapidly, the vocalization of its fear combining with the bouncing reverberations of the terror that welled within its brain to fill the tunnel to bursting with the turmoil of the sound.
The creature moved, its toenails scratching desperately on the hard material, its body flashing toward the nearest opening that led outward from the tunnel. Inside its body its viscera curled and tightened with the panic that surged through it and its brain grew dim and limp with fear and it felt the darkness coming down upon it like a great weight which dropped from some great height. And suddenly it was not itself, it was not within the tunnel, it was back again in that place of warm, black comfort which had been its prison.
Blake skidded to a halt beside his bed and in the moment of his skidding, wondered why he ran and why his hospital gown should be lying on the floor and he naked in the room. And in that second of his wonder there was a snapping in his skull as if something inside his head, too tightly bound, had ripped, and he knew about the tunnel and the fear and those other two who were one with him.
He dropped down to sit upon the bed and happiness gushed through him. He was whole again: he was the creature he had been before. Now he no longer was alone, but with the other two.—Hiyah, pals, he whispered and they answered back, not with words, but with a huddling of their minds.
(Clasped hands and brotherhood. Sharp, cold stars above a desert of drifted sand and snow. The reaching out and snaring of the data from the stars. The hot and steaming swamp. The long weighing of the data inside the pyramid that was a biological computer. The swift, mutual pooling of three separate pools of thought. The touch of minds, one against another.)
—It ran when it saw me, Quester said. There’ll be others coming.
—This is your planet, Changer. You know what to do.
—Yes, Thinker, Changer said, my planet. But our knowledge is one knowledge.
—But you’re the quicker at it. The knowledge is too much, there is too much of it. We follow you, but slowly.
—Thinker’s right, said Quester. The decision’s up to you.
—They may not know it’s me, said Changer. Not right away. We may have a little time.
—But not too much.
—No, Quester, not too much.
And that was right, thought Blake. There would be little time. The screaming nurse racing down the hall would bring the others tumbling out—internes, other nurses, doctors, the maintenance men and the people in the kitchen. In just a few more minutes the hospital would become a churning turmoil.
—The trouble is, he said, that Quester looks too much like a wolf.
—Your definition, Quester said, means one that eats another. You know that I would never …
No, Blake told himself. No, of course you wouldn’t, Quester. But they will think you would. When they see you they will think you are a wolf. Like the guard that night at the senator’s, seeing you outlined against the lightning flash. And filled with the old folklore of wolves, reacted instinctively.
And if anyone should see Thinker, what would they think of him?—What happened to us, Changer? Quester asked. Twice I broke free, once in wet and dark, again in light and narrow.
—Once I broke free, said Thinker, and I could not function.
—Later we will think of that, said Changer. Now we’re in a jam. We must get out of here.
—Changer, Quester said, we must stay as you. If, later, we need running, I can run.
—And I, said Thinker, if we need it later—I can be anything at all.
“Quiet,” said Blake aloud. “Quiet. Let me think a second.”
13
First, there had been himself, a human—a simulated human, an android, a man made in a laboratory, the open-endedness, the werewolf principle, the biological and intellectual flexibility which shaped him as he was.
A man. A man in everything but breeding. And a better man than a normal man could ever be. Immune to illnesses, self-healing, self-repairing. With the same intellect, the same emotion, the same physiological processes as any other man. But a tool as well, an instrument—a man designed to do a certain job. An infiltrator of the alien form. And so psychologically balanced, so unhumanly logical, so flexible, so perceptive that he could change into an alien form and assume an alien intellect and alien emotion without the mental violence that might tear a normal man apart.
Second, there had been the Thinker (what else could one call it?)—a formless mass of flesh that could assume any shape it wished, but which through long convention preferred a pyramidal shape as the optimum for function. A dweller in the raw savagery of a swampland planet—a primal place where a new-born sun poured out a withering flood of light and energy. Monstrous forms crawled and swam and shambled through the swamps, but the Thinkers had no fear of them or any need of fear. Drawing their very sustenance from the overpowering storm of energy that lashed the planet, they had their own unique defense, an envelope of interlocking lines of force which walled them in against the ravening world they inhabited. There was, for them, no thought of life or death, but only of existence—for there was no record nor remembrance of birth, no instance where one had ever died. Brute physical forces, under certain circumstances, could dismember them, scattering the flesh, but from each piece of sundered flesh, packed with the genetic memory of the entire creature, a new entity would arise. Not that this had ever happened, but the knowledge that it could happen and its consequences was a part of the basic mental information with which each Thinker was equipped.
The Changer and the Thinker, and the Changer had become the Thinker—by the wiles and schemes and the tricky techniques of that other tribe of thinkers many light-years distance, a simulated man became another creature, with all that creature’s thoughts and memories, with all its attitudes and motives, with all its physiological and psychological equipment. Became, in effect, the other creature, but still with enough of man left in him that he recoiled and cringed away from the terror and the solemn greatness of the thing he had become, saved only by the mental armor that had been built into him on that planet so far off that, from this point in space, its sun could not be seen.
Cringed away, but only marginally—only in the hidden corners of the mind stuff that was the alien creature. For he was the creature and the human part of him was driven deep into the folds of solid flesh and mystic mind that made the creature of the swamps. But as time went on the human mind emerged to take its rightful place, the horror now submerged and finally forgotten, having learned to live in this new body on this different world, enraptured and thrilled and filled with bursting wonder at this new experience of two minds existing side by side, neither claiming ascendency of the other, not jockeying for position, not contending, for they both belonged to an entity that now was no longer purely human or purely creature of the swamps, but the two of them in one.
The sun blazed down and the body sucked in the energy and the swamp was a place of beauty because it was the creature’s home. A new life was there to touch, to explore and comprehend, to wonder at and appreciate—a new life and a new world and an added viewpoint for both the alien and the mentality of humanity.
There was a favorite Thinking Place and there was the Favorite Thought and at times (not often) a shadowy communic
ation with other fellow creatures, a hazy reaching out of minds that brushed against each other briefly, like a hand-touch in the dark, and then withdrew. For while communication was possible, there was little need of it; each of the Thinkers was sufficient to itself.
Time had no meaning, nor did space, except insomuch as either one or the both of them were considerations in the Thought. For the Thought was all—it was the reason for existence, it was the task and dedication, and it was pointed toward no end, not even the completion of itself, for there could be no end to it. It was a thing that went on endlessly and it fed upon itself and there was no belief nor hope that it ever would be done.
But time now was a factor, for the human mind was triggered to a time when it must return and it had returned and the Thinker became a man again. The data that the man had gathered was packed into a memory core and the ship leaped into space again and went on and on.
Now there was another planet and another creature and the Changer became the other creature as he had become the Thinker and went out upon the planet in the guise of the creature that he had become.
The planet was as cold and dry as the first had been hot and damp, with the feeble sun far off and the stars glittering like sharp, hard diamonds in the cloudless sky, the ground dusted with the white of snow and sand, drifted into dunes by thin and keening winds that swept the land at frequent intervals.
Now the human mind ran in the body of a Quester that ran in a pack of Questers across the frigid plains and along the rocky ridges, running with a pagan joy beneath the diamond stars and the lanterns of the moons, seeking out those holy places where by long tradition they held communion with the stars. But by long tradition only, for at any time or place, they could snare the pictures radioed out unconsciously by the many cultures that lived on other solar systems.
Not understanding the pictures, nor even trying or wishing for an understanding—simply grasping them and holding them for the esthetic value that could be gained from them. Like a human, thought the human mind inside the Quester body, might wander the galleries of an art exhibit, to stop and stare at some painting which held within its color and its composition a truth that spoke in silent tongue—a truth that could not be told in words, but that need not be told in words.
A human mind inside the Quester body, and another mind as well; a mind that came creeping out and a mind that should not be there, that should have disappeared when the simulated human had shed the body in which that mind was housed.
The clever men on earth had not planned it that way, had not dreamed that it would happen that way, had thought that alien mind and body could be gotten rid of and would not occur again, that the simulated human they had fashioned could be wiped clean as a slate is wiped and go on to something else.
But there was no wiping clean, there was no erasure. The memory and the pattern did not go away, could not be scrubbed away. They remained. They might be driven deep into the consciousness of the reawakened human, but they crept out again.
So not two creatures ran the plains of drifted sand and snow, but three, all three occupying the body of the Quester. And while the Quester snared the pictures from the stars, the Thinker absorbed the data and evaluated it and, asking questions, sought the answers. As if two parts of a computer operating separately, one the memory core that held the programmed data, the other that part of the system which performed the analyzing functions, had been finally brought together—and, now brought together, worked. The pictures were no longer merely something to touch the esthetic sense, but now held a deeper and a greater meaning, the jigsaw pieces gathered from all parts of the universe and flung on the tabletop, waiting there to be put together, to form a pattern, the many tiny, fragmented keys to what might prove to be a single overriding universal plan.
Three minds trembled, poised tiptoe on the brink that opened out into the soul-wrenching gulf of all eternity. Shaken, unable at first to grasp the implications of the possibility that all the answers to all the questions which ever had been asked might be within their grasp, that a totaling up of the secrets of the stars might yield finally the equations of understanding which would allow one to write a single sentence and say: This is the universe.
But the time clock inside one of the minds rang the loud alarm and the insistent summons and it was time to go back to the ship again. There was no denying the cleverness which the men on earth had wrought and the body of the Quester went back to the ship. Back to the ship to empty out the mind of the simulated human and then it would be time for the ship to leap into the sky again and head out for other stars. To go from star to star, to send out the simulated human time and time again in the bodies of intelligences that might be found on other planets and thus to gain, from first hand observation, the information that would enable men, in another day, to deal with these intelligences to mankind’s best advantage.
But when Changer came back to the ship, something had gone wrong. Something had happened.
One microsecond of warning that there was something wrong, then a nothingness—a nothingness till now. A half-awakening, but with only one awake, awake and very puzzled. But now, finally, after a time, the three of them together once again, blood brothers of the mind.
—Changer, they were afraid of us. They found out what we were.
—Yes, Quester. Or perhaps they only thought so. They couldn’t know it all. They could only guess. A quiver on a dial. A seepage of a current …
—But they didn’t wait, said Quester. They didn’t take a chance. They saw there was something wrong and then they let us have it. They simply let us have it.
—That, Changer told him, is the way men are.
—Changer, you’re a man.
—Thinker, I don’t know. You tell me what I am.
Down the hall came the sound of running feet and one voice calling loudly: “It went in there. Kathy said she saw it go in there.”
The feet made frantic scuffling turns and white-jacketed internes came boiling through the door.
“Mister,” shouted one of them, “did you see a wolf?”
“No,” said Blake, “I did not see a wolf.”
“There’s something damn funny going on,” said another interne. “Kathy wouldn’t lie. She saw something. It scared the hell …”
The first interne advanced threateningly.
“Mister, if you’re kidding. If this is some sort of joke …”
Panic ran wildly in the other minds, a tidal bore of panic—the panic of minds faced with a threatening situation by aliens in an alien situation. Insecurity, failure of understanding, no basis for the assessment of a situation—
“No!” yelled Blake. “No! No—wait …”
But he was too late. The change already had begun, the mind of Quester taking over, and once that had happened, once the change had been triggered into action there was no stopping it.
You fools! Blake cried in his mind. You fools! You fools!
The internes surged back, jamming through the door into the corridor.
Facing them stood Quester, his hackles raised, the silver-greyness of his coat shining in the light from the ceiling lamp, crouched to spring, his lips rolled back to reveal the gleaming fangs.
14
Quester crouched and growled, fear rumbling in his throat.
Trapped and no way out. No opening behind or on either side. The only way to go was the opening into the outer tunnel and that was jammed with a howling pack of alien things that walked on two hind legs and were draped in artificial skins. They stank of body and their minds were pouring out at him a brain-wave so intense that it was like a moving wall and he was forced to brace his feet against it. A brain-wave of no intelligence that he could sense, but made up of primal fears and hates that were jumbled and chaotic.
Quester took a slow step forward and the pack shrank back and at that backward movement, he felt a sense of triumph go flaring through his body. Inherited from some remote ancestor, an ancient racial memory buried deep
inside his mind burst full-fledged into a warrior-pride and the rumble that was bubbling in his throat erupted into a roaring roll of savage sound—a sound that ripped deep into the alien pack and sent it scattering.
Quester moved. His legs blurred with speed as he leaped into the tunnel and made a quick turn to the right. One of the alien creatures lunged out from the wall toward him, a weapon of some sort raised above its head, poised for the downward stroke. Quester flung himself off stride to close in on the creature. His massive head swung, slashing, a swift and terrible slash that struck the flesh and ripped it and left a tottering creature that screamed as it collapsed.
Quester spun around and faced the creatures that were charging him. His toenails clawed great scratches in the floor and he hurled himself full-speed at the pack. His head swung right and left and his teeth met flesh and tore and the tunnel seemed to fill with the red haze of his rage.
The creatures all were fleeing now except for those upon the floor and some of these were crawling while others only lay and moaned.
Quester skidded to a halt and half-sitting, his back legs bent, but his hindquarters not quite upon the floor, threw up his head and bayed—a cry of triumph and of challenge, the old, unknown-till-now ancestral cry of triumph and of challenge, that in olden days had rung across that far-off planet of drifted sand and snow.
The tunnel was blotted out and he seemed to smell again the clean, dry air of home rather than the strange stinks of this place where he found himself. And he was, most strangely, a very ancient Quester, one of the old proud warrior race that in other days had battled far and deadly against the hordes of now almost forgotten scaly things which had contested with the Questers the dominance of the planet.