A Little More Caviar?

by CLAUDE VEILLOT

Mademoiselle Moreau had a funny look on her face that morning. When she went to the rear of the class to get the projector ready, we could tell she wanted to cry or something.

“Today, children,” she said, “we’re going to talk about Earth.”

Everybody said “Ah!” while she went to pull the shades down and darken the room. Everybody except Herbert, who looked bored, as if all that was an old story to him. Naturally, because he was taking the course over. So he knew already.

“You’ll see,” Herbert whispered, “there’s nothing interesting about it. It’s just like Bis-bis.”

The projector began to hum. Herbert was right. It was just like Bis-bis: a globe turning in space, a big greenish globe.

“I’ve already explained to you that Earth is one of the nine planets of the solar system,” said Mademoiselle Moreau, trying to get back to her everyday schoolteacher voice. “Its distance from the Sun is 149 million kilometers. It revolves around the Sun in 365 and one-quarter days, and it turns on its own axis once every twenty-four hours. . . .”

“If it turns around the Sun, like us, how’s it come we can’t see it? How’s it come nobody’s ever showed it to us in the telescope?” Tina asked in her little voice.

Tina has two little stiff pigtails behind her ears, with pink bows. That’s why they call her Pigtails. Tina always asks lots of questions.

“We’re not speaking of this sun, dear,” Mademoiselle Moreau answered quietly. “Your mother and father must have explained that to you. We’re speaking of a sun far, far away, a beautiful yellow star billions and billions of kilometers from here. ...”

“Phuh! A star of the second magnitude,” said Herbert. “My dad explained it to me. Just a candle, compared to Sirius.”

You could see he was just repeating it without understanding it; but all the same, the little kids, the ones under seven, were looking at him respectfully.

“That’s true, Herbert,” said Mademoiselle Moreau. “There are many larger and brighter stars. But there are none more beautiful.”

On the screen appeared another globe, a smaller one, which turned around the first one. A line of dots winked on behind it to show its path.

“That is the Moon,” Mademoiselle Moreau explained. “It is Earth’s satellite. It revolves around Earth in twenty-seven days…”

‘Then it’s like Bis-bis!” Tina squealed.

Herbert made a scornful hissing noise with his lips. We saw Mademoiselle Moreau smile in the shadows.

“Not exactly,” she answered patiently. “The Moon is a little globe turning around a big one, Earth. Whereas Biskupek and Biskupek-bis are two big globes of equal dimensions, each one turning around the other.”

“I know about that,” Tina said confidently. “Daddy let me look at Bis-bis the other day in his telescope. When it first got dark it was, uh, on the left—”

“In the west,” Mademoiselle Moreau corrected her.

“Yes, in the west. And then it climbed up in the sky little by little. It’s a big ball—oh, a very big ball!”

Last time Mademoiselle Moreau tried to explain to us about Earth, it was just the same. At the beginning, they were all interested, then after five minutes they were talking about something else. The Earth is so far away . . . close to nine light-years, Dad says. It’s way off there in the stars. We’re never going out there in the stars, so why talk about Earth?

“Mademoiselle, is it true there’s flowers on Bis-bis, like here?”

“Oh, gee, what a dumb question!” Herbert said, shuffling his feet on the floor. He made a face in Tina’s direction and banged his desk-top down. Mademoiselle Moreau got mad.

“Herbert, you’re not nice at all, and I must add that you’re not very smart, either. When someone takes a course over, it’s a little too easy to show off. You have nothing to boast about.”

Herbert looked down. He gets on Mademoiselle Moreau’s nerves a lot. One time I heard her talking about him to Captain Boulanger. She said, “That stupid, boastful little American—

The Captain laughed and said, “Annie dear, how can you think in such archaic concepts? Americans, British, French, Russians, Italians, Yugoslavs— Do you really think all that still has any meaning in our situation?”

“At any rate, it’s their fault we’re here, isn’t it?”

“How’s that?”

“Well, the Ship—was it the Americans who built it—yes or no?”

The Captain put a hand gently on her shoulder. “You’re bitter, Annie, because you feel trapped here. Trapped forever, probably. You haven’t been able to accept that idea yet, have you?”

“No, that’s true, I haven’t accepted it. I think I’ll never accept it.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I know what you’re going to tell me: I’m a volunteer. When the Allied Nations decided to build the Ship and launch it, they didn’t force anyone to go aboard.”

“And even if most of the work on the Ship was done by Americans, they didn’t do it alone. The Ship was the work of all Earthmen, Annie, you know that. That’s why the crew and the scientific teams were recruited from all the civilized nations. That’s why we all talk Interlingua, and we’re so used to it that we don’t even think about it any more. This isn’t an American expedition, Annie. It isn’t even an international expedition. It’s purely and simply an Earth expedition.”

“Of course, you’re right and I’m stupid. But if you only knew, sometimes . . .”

She looked over at the window. “Look at those miserable shacks. It looks like the flea market! After ten years on Biskupek, see what we’ve turned into—derelicts, idling our lives away. We aren’t a success; you might as well admit it. We trained ourselves to roam gloriously through the galaxy, but not to drive nails or dig a garden. We’re cut off from our culture and our technology, our racial drive—we can’t even make a good imitation of normal Earth life. Here we are, twelve hundred specialists of all fields, fifty of us are geniuses, but we’re scratching out a bare existence in a virgin forest, with the childish conviction that all this is temporary, that it’s just a bad period to get through, and that we’ll be out of it soon. I think that illusion is going to kill us all.”

“Others have said the same thing before, Annie. The realists among us say we should forget Earth completely, make a serious study of Biskupek for a permanent installation. They’re fighting against what they call our geocentrism. The geocentrism you’re still practicing when you teach the terrestrial globe to these kids who’ve never seen it—and probably never will.”

“I know all that,” Mademoiselle Moreau admitted. “But these feelings aren’t logical, you know that. They’re purely sentimental, almost visceral.”

“All of us who have known Earth are condemned to the same tortures,” the Captain said again. “Only the generations to come may be free of them.”

Then Mademoiselle Moreau raised her head and saw I was still in the room.

“Hervé, why aren’t you out playing? Go outside with your little friends.”

As I went out, she went on with her conversation with the Captain, but this time I couldn’t understand a word of what they were saying. They must have been using one of those complicated languages that the big people sometimes talk when they’re alone. It must have been—what did they call it?—French. It sounded like some of the things Dad and Mom said to each other sometimes when they didn’t want me to understand. But French wasn’t the only one. Herbert’s parents had another one, and Tina’s still another one. Imagine it, every big person had their own language. What good was that, when everybody could talk to everybody else in Interlingua?

. . . “Well, Hervé, don’t you hear me? What was I just saying?”

Oh-oh! The picture had changed. On the screen now there were trees, but they certainly weren’t our trees. They were too little. You could tell by the people walking under them. They could almost reach up and touch the lowest branches. And besides, these people were all dressed funny. Instead of wearing pants and little boots, the ladies had a kind of puffy apron wrapped all around them, with designs on them—dots, stripes. . . . You could see their legs. It was kind of ridiculous, I must say, and Herbert was trying to keep from laughing. This must be more pictures of Earth.

“Well, Hervé? Why don’t you answer? What is the springtime?”

The sound of the door opening got me out of it. Captain Boulanger stood there. There was something scary about how still he was.

Mademoiselle Moreau turned off the projector automatically and went to open the blinds. In the grayish daylight you could see his face, and it was all hard-looking.

“What’s the matter?” Mademoiselle Moreau said nervously.

The Captain walked over as far as the old black plastic blackboard, all worn out by synthetic chalk.

“It’s Penn,” he said. “He’s come back.”

Right away everybody started talking and yelling at once. Mademoiselle Moreau, standing in front of the Captain, didn’t even turn her head to tell us to be quiet.

Colonel Penn was back from Bis-bis. That was news!

* * * *

Colonel Penn’s beard was already long when he left, the year before, but now it was all the way down to his stomach, and it was all white. His hair was very long too. It came out from under his old helmet and hung in ringlets behind his ears. Lots of the men in the colony had let their hair and beard grow that way.

I ran across town in hopes of getting there first, but there was already a crowd ahead of me. People were running out of all the houses. You could see officers hurrying down the wooden stairs, trying to put on their patched tunics.

“Children, children!” Mademoiselle Moreau called behind us. But nobody listened to her. I don’t know if even a kangaroo-tiger jumping out of the woods and popping up at the end of the street would have stopped us.

I never saw so many people at once. There must have been five hundred. I knew Dad would laugh when I told him that. He says down there on Earth, there are millions and millions and millions of people. If that’s true, I wonder where they put them all.

The ground had been cleared not far from town. That was where the cargo rockets took off for the Ship with the relief crews. That was where I’d gone lots of times with Mom, to wait for Dad when he’d finished his time in space.

The grass had begun growing back already, and vines were crawling all over. But it was only last week that the maintenance crew had burned it all clear. In town, too, you had to keep the plants from growing up everywhere. The other day, Tina’s house cracked and raised up a little. A big root had pushed its way right underneath.

The cargo rocket’s reactors had just shut off when I got there. I squeezed in between dozens of legs until I ran into Tom Cusack’s back. He turned around and grabbed me by the neck. “No farther, Hervé! It’s forbidden!”

I saw he was doing his hitch on the police; he had the blue armband on. Other armbands were forming a chain with him to keep people away.

Steam was rising from the wet ground around the old rocket.

“It’s hardly believable,” somebody said, “to think that scrap heap could get to Bis-bis and back.”

“Yes, but it was reconditioned. They worked on it for five years.”

That was when the cabin door opened and I saw Colonel Penn’s beard. I thought about the stories Mom sometimes tells me, stories about Earth. Father Christmas—that must be something like Colonel Penn.

The people around me didn’t shout, or applaud, or anything. You could see they were feeling too much emotion. Major Ivan Sokolov, the one who was in charge of the Administration Committee while the Colonel was gone, walked steadily up to the cargo rocket. Everything was happening very slowly and yet nobody seemed to get impatient. There was a waiting kind of feeling in the air.

“Digbee, the committeeman, told me everything was finished up there,” a voice muttered behind me. “But it seems they found some of the guys from lifeboat seven.”

“After ten years? Come on, that doesn’t make sense!”

Major Sokolov had climbed the little metal ladder. We saw him put his arms around Colonel Penn, then saw somebody else in the shadow of the airlock.

All of a sudden the Colonel’s voice came out real loud, as if he was right in the middle of us. He was talking into the landing-field microphone. Dad said later that his speech wasn’t the kind that would echo down the ages.

“Well, here we are back among you. We had our troubles up there. You probably know already that Langtree and Bordeneuve stayed on Bis-bis. They’re dead. But the expedition wasn’t a failure. We found lifeboat seven.”

You could have cut the silence with a knife. All around, you could hear the tiny rustling sounds of the roots, shoots, and seeds working their way through the humus of the forest.

“Of its forty passengers and crew, thirty-nine died over the years. But one man survived. We brought him back. He is safe and sound. It’s Piotr Hovcar, the biochemist.”

There was a terrible yell out of the crowd, a sound with so much unbearable emotion in it, such frightening joy, that it made my hair stand on end. Nobody, apparently, had stopped to think that the survivor might be married and that his wife might be there on the field.

* * * *

“There’s something that doesn’t hang together in Hovcar’s story,” Dad said. “Logically, he shouldn’t have survived.”

“Why not?” Mom asked. “Didn’t Penn say Bikupek-bis was a planet like this one? According to him, they’re actually twins. Two identical planets revolving around each other, three million kilometers apart. . ..”

“True, but you’re forgetting something. When we abandoned the ship in orbit around Biskupek, we had forty lifeboats and five cargo rockets. Seven boats were lost with all hands in space, five crashed on landing, but twenty-seven managed to get down safely. Plus the cargo rockets. That makes a total of more than fifteen hundred people. That’s why we survived—because of our numbers, because we had all the equipment we needed, and because we had the cargo rockets to get us back to the Ship whenever we wanted.

“One lone lifeboat headed for Biskupek-bis because of a piloting error: number seven. Hovcar says they made a very bad landing. Almost half of them were killed when they touched down. The rest died one after another, lost in quicksands, eaten by carnivorous plants, or just worn out by fever, or despair. Hovcar was all alone for six years on that damned planet. Six years, just think about it a minute!”

“What about it? Haven’t you read Robinson Crusoe?”

“A pretty poor analogy. Bis-bis isn’t an idyllic Terrestrial island where a man can just bend over and pick up whatever he needs. Anyhow, even Crusoe couldn’t have pulled through without looting the wreck of the ship that brought him there —whereas Hovcar never could get back to the Ship. No, if there are any Robinson Crusoes here, we’re elected. Swiss Family Robinsons, But Hovcar all alone on Bis-bis—that’s a man plunged living into hell. Do you know there are twenty-kilo mosquitoes up there? That’s how Bordeneuve died, Penn told me. And do you know there are octopus-lianas? It was one of them that sucked all the blood out of Langtree.”

I was stretched out on the rafters, with my ears open wide. It was easy to climb up there from my bed. The log wall didn’t reach all the way to the ceiling. There was an unfinished attic up there where Dad kept some old boxes, books, and supplies. A knot had fallen out of the rough flooring, and I could see them through the hole, finishing their coffee.

It seems that isn’t real coffee, by the way. To the big people, real coffee is what grows up there, on Earth. Well, the supply they brought on the Biskupek expedition was used up long ago. You wouldn’t find a bean of it in the holds even if you took the Ship apart piece by piece. But the botanists found a plant in the forest that has berries like coffee. Mom says it’s good enough to fool yourself with.

“In any case, Piotr Hovcar came back alive. That’s a fact.”

“I admit it,” said Dad with a smile. “I’m not that dogmatic.”

“Was it the best thing for him? Wouldn’t it have been better for him to die up there, like the others from number seven?”

Dad’s eyes went very sad and very soft. He took Mom’s hand under the table. “You’re taking this too hard, Minnie. You ought to be glad to see one of ours come back alive after all this time. You ought to be thinking about Helga Hovcar’s happiness. If you aren’t, you must be really down in the dumps.”

“It’s true, Georges. I’m in them up to my neck. I—I’m afraid of not being able to hold on. You know, seeing Piotr Hovcar, looking just the same—that took me back ten years all at once. More than that, even. I saw myself at the training base. You know Hovcar was paying court to me in those days? Even though he couldn’t speak French or English. I was the one who helped him with his Interlingua lessons....”

“You never told me that before, woman,” said Dad, pretending to be very angry.

“When I saw him, just now, a whole lot of memories came up to the top of my mind, higgledy-piggledy. I had them buried inside me for ten years; I thought they were dead. It’s nothing to do with Hovcar himself, naturally, just all the things that seeing him brought back to life. And I see myself the way I was ten years ago—a volunteer wild with enthusiasm, devoured with curiosity, bursting with pride. . . . All the newspapers were talking about us—’the subspace volunteers,’ ‘the galactic colonists,’ ‘the pioneers of spacetime,’ ‘the Mayflower of the cosmos.’ There must have been two thousand of us; they interviewed nearly all of us one after the other. . . . Then there was that excitement of the last preparations, the rocket taxis that took us up to the Ship, the final slogans from the radio: ‘Time is vanquished. . . . Thanks to the subspace drive, they’ll travel in three months a distance that takes nine light years. . . . They’ll be telling our great-grandchildren about the wonders of Sirius, Procyon, and Altair....’

“Oh, Georges, I thought I had accepted it all. To be years in space, never to see my family again, never to go back and see the Earth we knew, to find that centuries had passed. . . . Yes, I accepted all that because deep inside I had a calm certainty: someday, somehow, sooner or later, we would go back. There was no hurry, it could wait a long time. What I needed was simply to know it was possible.”

All I could see through the hole in the floor was the top of Mom’s head. There were threads of white in her black hair. Was Mom old? Thirty-five years, that seems like a lot to me, but the big people think it’s still young.

Her voice got harsh. She hit the table with her fist like a man. “Good God, Georges, how could we have let ourselves get into this rattrap? How could we have missed seeing that the Ship we were so proud of was only a scrap of iron in the sky, a filing, a speck of dust—nothing! How could we have let ourselves be so impressed by that miserable sphere of steel, its three hundred meters of diameter, its hundreds of thousands of tons, and its thirty-two concentric decks? How could we have been so presumptuous, not to foresee the unexpected—after three months in subspace, the Ship comes out on schedule in the region of Sirius—and breaks down. Breaks down, like an old Ford. Completely, irreparably.”

“You know very well that it isn’t irreparable.”

“I don’t believe it any more, Georges, not any more. Oh, I believed it a long time. I wanted to believe it very bard and very long. When Colonel Biskupek called us all together on board, that first time, when he said we might be able to make repairs but there was a danger of the Ship’s breaking apart, when he told us the expedition would land on the planet while a skeleton crew stayed aboard, then, yes, I believed it desperately. And then the repair crew came back, and a cargo rocket took up their relief. . . . And then that one came back, and so on. . . . Then Colonel Biskupek died and Penn took his place. Then Brücker died, then Mary McDougall, then Commander Kozintsev, then Professor Morgenstein, then Donald McDougall, then the little Cordelier girl. . . . Have you counted the gravestones in the clearing, Georges? I have. There are two hundred thirty-nine. That’s a lot, in ten years, out of a total of fifteen hundred.”

“When you look at it from that angle, obviously, there seem to be grounds for pessimism. The funny thing is, though, that the total is still fifteen hundred, pretty nearly.”

Mom was quiet for a moment. Then she let out a little laugh that was almost gay.

“You’re right at that, Georges. The children . . . more than two hundred children have been born here. Man is incorrigible.”

“Man is indestructible,” Dad corrected her. “I’m not worried about Man.”

They laughed together, and it was just then that the yelling burst out. It came out of the darkness, so strong that it seemed to drill through our walls. It was so awful that I jammed my mouth against my arm so I wouldn’t yell too. After it stopped, it was still sounding in my head.

Mom stood up, her lips white. “Good heavens, what’s that? An animal?”

I felt something like an icy prickling between my shoulderblades. That was no animal. I knew that voice; I’d heard it that afternoon on the landing field. It was Helga Hovcar’s.

* * * *

Nobody saw me. While they were gathering in front of Piotr Hovcar’s house, I ran across the path, bruising my feet on the pebbles. I was in my pajamas, and I hadn’t had time to put on my shoes, but I wasn’t going to miss whatever it was.

I pulled myself up the trunk of the mealie tree that overhung the front door. The floodlight didn’t reach that high. Hidden by the darkness, I slid out along the branches, and a lot of pods burst, scattering their powdery whiteness all over me.

Dad walked forward firmly in the circle of the floodlight. Dad is brave. He’s always the first one to step forward. He was in the first rocket. Not when the colony was set up, no, long before that, when they had to explore. Mom told me about it. Colonel Biskupek knew the planet had an atmosphere and that the gravity was nine-tenths Earth normal, but somebody still had to go and see. It was Dad that commanded the first reconnaissance rocket. They landed and explored for days and days. There were thirty of them, and Dad was in charge of them all. The others were waiting back on the Ship. According to Mom, I wasn’t born then. That must be why I don’t remember it. That’s an old story, but it goes to show Dad is brave.

He knocked hard on the door and shouted, “Hovcar! It’s me, Sidaner. What’s going on?”

We couldn’t hear any sound inside, and it was all dark. There were fifteen people around the floodlight; they had all dressed in a hurry before they ran over—the nearest neighbors.

“Better break the door down,” said Sean Finney. “There’s no rhyme or reason to wait standing here.”

As he said that, there was a commotion behind the floodlight and Colonel Penn came up beside Dad. At the same time, the door of Hovcar’s house began to open.

“Hovcar!” Colonel Penn called in a harsh voice.

It seemed to me his voice was more strained than it needed to be, for Piotr Hovcar strolled out on the doorstep and didn’t seem upset at all. He had his coat off and his sleeves rolled up, and he was smiling with an inquiring expression.

“We heard a yell,” Dad said. “Is Helga—”

Then he stopped, because Helga had just appeared behind Hovcar, a thin scarf thrown over her shoulders. Hovcar turned his head toward her. “They say you gave them a scare,” he said, affectionately reproachful.

Helga had a confused smile on her face. “I don’t know how to apologize,” she said. “I was—I had a dream. An awful nightmare.”

“She thrashed around so in her sleep that she woke me up,” Hovcar explained. “I tried to calm her, and then, before she had her eyes open, she let out that yell.”

“I’m terribly sorry,” Helga said. “I don’t know how to explain. ... It must have been all the emotion today, Piotr coming back . ..”

She seemed to be caught between laughter and tears. She hid her face against her husband’s shoulder.

“See how your wives will welcome you if you stay away for ten years,” Hovcar joked.

There were a few laughs. Most of the tight feeling had gone out of the air.

“Faith, Helga, what a voice!” said Sean Finney. “The service crew must have heard you up on the Ship. Lieutenant McKay probably fell out of his bunk.”

They started to leave. Then everything happened so fast that it seemed to me the three things came all at once. Hovcar put his bare arm around his wife’s shoulder, Dad stepped toward them as if to say good night, and Colonel Penn fired.

The thermic pistol made the noise they always make, the loud hiss of gas under pressure. But it almost seemed that the hissing came from the two bodies. Piotr Hovcar and Helga, struck point-blank by the heat-beam, stood welded together. Then, without a sound, they began to melt.

I can’t think of any other word: they began to melt. I’ve seen a thermic pistol fired before. One time, Dad killed a kangaroo-tiger that came to eat the sheep in the pen, down by the arroyo. The beam made a black hole and the animal fell down. That was all.

But here, Hovcar and Helga were melting. Without separating from each other, they sagged down slowly and got all soft. I saw an eye and some teeth sliding down the pasty mass, and the two bodies began to spread out over the ground.

Dad had leaped back. The only expression on his face was amazement, like someone who couldn’t believe his eyes. Then he threw himself at Colonel Penn, who was still playing the heat-beam on the two bodies,

“My God, Colonel—”

“Don’t go near that, Sidaner. Take my word, don’t go near it.” His voice was tight and hard, but it did not shake at all. He seemed to have everything under control, and the rest of them didn’t even move.

Anyhow, they were too busy looking at what was happening on the ground. And what was happening was unbelievable. The thing that had been Hovcar and Helga was spread out in the middle of their burnt clothing, and it was moving. It had turned into a shapeless mass, quivering as if it was alive, that squirmed feverishly, tried to get away from the heat-beam, flinched when the beam hit it, put out pseudopods in the opposite direction.

Hopping around to keep from touching the thing, turning under the glare of the floodlight, Colonel Penn kept boiling it away, and the crawling jelly turned black and gritty under the scorching beam of the pistol.

Part of the thing had split off, and was moving with frantic slowness toward the edge of the light. The beam followed it cruelly, caught up with it, stayed on it until it was completely burned. Before long, there was nothing left on the baked ground but a few scraps of charred material, and the Colonel kept on grimly spraying those until they boiled away into nothing.

Then they all stood there, not moving, struck dumb, looking at each other in the white glare of the floodlight.

“In the name of space, Colonel, what was that?” asked Sean Finney, white as a sheet.

The Colonel slowly put his pistol back in the holster.

“That wasn’t Hovcar, was it?”

“No, it wasn’t he. It wasn’t Helga, either.”

“Not Helga?” Mom exclaimed. She was still pale. “Then where is Helga?”

Colonel Penn shook his head. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have my suspicions. But I put them aside, almost unconsciously. In a sense, this is my fault. I’m to blame for what’s happened. But it was impossible to believe! I put it out of my mind, and I brought Hovcar back because . . . because it was just Hovcar, it couldn’t possibly not be.’”

“If you don’t tell us what this is all about, there isn’t a chance that we’ll understand a bit of it,” Sean Finney interrupted. “Would it do any actual harm if the colony knew a little more about this, do you think?”

“I intended to make a report, in one form or another, but it didn’t seem urgent. Not about Hovcar, you understand. It wasn’t until just now that I understood—that the truth seemed to leap to my eyes. Yes. It was when . . . when Hovcar pulled Helga against him that I saw what I’d been refusing to believe.”

The branch was trembling under me as if somebody was shaking the trunk of the mealie tree. But it wasn’t the tree that was trembling, it was me. Sweat was running down my sides, and I felt sick at my stomach. I’d been trembling like that since it started, ever since Colonel Penn drew his thermic pistol.

And I was trembling because I’d seen what the Colonel saw just before he fired: Piotr Hovcar had put his arm around Helga’s shoulder, and his arm had sunk into her shoulder. That was what I saw. Dad was stepping toward Hovcar, and Hovcar was smiling at him, and at the same time, without his seeming to notice it, his bare arm was embedding itself in Helga’s back. There was no blood, or anything. The two bodies just seemed to absorb each other, and Hovcar’s wrist was almost out of sight in Helga’s shoulder when Colonel Penn began to fire.

* * * *

Nobody was talking about anything else at recess. Everybody was talking about caviar. Yesterday nobody had ever heard of the word, and now it was the only thing.

“But what’s caviar anyway?” Tina asked in a complaining little voice.

“It’s something you eat,” Herbert told her, trying to sound important. “Something that grows up there, on Earth.”

“And was there some on Bis-bis, too?”

Herbert shrugged scornfully. “The Colonel said it looked like caviar. He didn’t say it was. My dad says the Colonel’s got some in a box with a double lid. It’s like a pile of little tiny black bubbles, all stuck together. And it moves!”

Herbert was not making it up. I’d heard Dad talking about it, too. The Colonel had made a report on it in the conference hall. Just about everybody was there. We wanted to hear too, Herbert and me; we walked around the building and tried to look in between the boards, but Lieutenant Le Garrec came out and told us to go play.

“Just like caviar,” Dad told Mom later. “When Penn talked about that . . . that thing, and especially what it could do, we could hardly believe him. Then he took out the box he’d brought back from up there—you know, one of those collecting boxes the zoologists use. We could see the stuff through the double glass, a pile of gummy pellets. You could really have mistaken it for caviar. There was nearly half a kilo of it.

“Perm explained that he really came across it by accident. He was watching a little animal from a distance—a sort of woods mouse—and he saw this lump of gelatin fall on it from a branch. It absorbed the mouse. Penn saw it liquefy and disappear. The thing had actually digested it. But that wasn’t all he saw. There was another mouse nearby. Well, the ‘caviar’ slowly transformed itself—listen to this—transformed itself into a mouse. It put out an ear, then two, then a tail, then two eyes. . . . You understand? Perfect mimicry. The phony mouse went up to the real one, and boom!”

“What do you mean, boom?” Mom asked in a broken voice.

“The phony mouse snaffled up the real one. It jumped on its back and started to spread out like jelly. The real one had just time to squeak. When it was over, there was no mouse at all. Just a little more caviar. Penn scooped it up in his box and decided the Bis-bis expedition had lasted long enough.”

I didn’t want to show myself, because Dad would have stopped telling the story, but I wished I could see Mom’s face. Her voice was all changed. I think she was really scared.

“But then, Georges, do you think—”

She did not finish. Dad went on, “A story like that is hard to swallow. Even the biologists told Penn he hadn’t observed properly, that he must have made a mistake. Then Penn got mad. He said, ‘You want a demonstration? I’ll give you one.’ He looked all around him on the floor, then he reached down suddenly. He’s very quick, you know. He caught a beetle on the first try. Then he picked up the box, slid open the top lid and dropped the insect onto the lower one. Then he closed the lid. ‘I’m using these methods, gentlemen, because I don’t want to run any risk. I have no idea what this thing is capable of.’

“He pulled back the second lid. The beetle fell into the bottom of the box. Then we saw it, through the glass. Just exactly what Penn saw on Bis-bis: the lump of gelatin surrounded the beetle, covered it, and then there was no more beetle.”

“But, Georges, you didn’t see it transform itself—it didn’t turn into another beetle.”

“Ah, but it did. When Penn dropped a second beetle into the box, the ‘caviar’ . . . stopped being caviar. And this time it was an even better show than the mouse, because the stuff divided, and each lump turned into a little beetle. Needless to say, the real beetle didn’t last long. You understand, Minnie? That thing eats something, and it becomes that thing. It absorbs a mouse, and if another mouse comes along, it imitates the first one in order to trap the second. It helps itself to a beetle, and then splits into as many beetles as its mass allows.”

Mom’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Then, Piotr Hovcar ...”

“That’s what Penn couldn’t bring himself to believe, and how can you blame him? Even so, remember I told you, logically Hovcar shouldn’t have been able to survive alone on Bis-bis. And he didn’t.”

“But, Georges—”

“I know, I know, we saw him come out of the rocket, people talked to him, even threw their arms around him. . . . And he fooled Helga just as easily as he did us.”

“But my God, did they have to kill her too?”

“Don’t misunderstand. When Penn fired, there was already no more Helga. Why do you suppose she yelled like that, a few minutes earlier? That was the mouse’s squeak, the beetle’s last hop. At that moment, the fake Hovcar was beginning to absorb her—that’s the truth.”

“I think it’s true, I believe what you say, but I can’t imagine it. Even granting that this . . . this material can digest animals, insects, and then imitate them, how can I believe . . . After all, you saw Hovcar come out on his doorstep. You heard Helga—”

“That wasn’t them, Minnie, get it through your head. Penn thinks that stuff can identify itself absolutely with whatever it absorbs—and not just on the physiological level. When it digests a mouse, not only can it take on the appearance of a mouse, it actually becomes a mouse, it knows whatever the mouse knew. No more, but no less. And when it digested Hovcar—years ago, probably—it knew everything Hovcar knew. No more, but no less. So it knew there were other creatures like Hovcar on the neighboring planet, a whole tasty colony. It knew what it had to do to get Penn to take it on board the cargo rocket. It also knew that if it wanted to . . . absorb the whole colony, it would have to do it progressively, one person at a time, to avoid being discovered and destroyed.”

“That thing has to be destroyed,” Mom said in a hoarse voice. “They’ve got to burn it right away, exterminate it, and then never talk about it again.”

“That’s what they’re going to do. But the biologists have asked for a postponement to give them time to examine it. They’re wild with curiosity. Delia Rocca is working on it, at the moment. Tomorrow they’ll destroy it.”

“It’s a long time till tomorrow,” Mom said.

* * * *

Things are going badly. While I was running down the sloping street, I heard the hiss of a thermic pistol twice. It came from Carmelo Delia Rocca’s house, where I saw two men with blue armbands go in. I hope Tina wasn’t there.

Nobody had seen her at school that afternoon. But Mademoiselle Moreau didn’t have time to worry about it. The arithmetic lesson had hardly started when Captain Boulanger burst in, followed by Dr. Namara and two blue armbands.

I had just thrown a spitball against the blackboard, so Mademoiselle Moreau had made me stand in the corner outside in the covered playground. That’s why they didn’t see me when they came in. The Captain was white, his nostrils pinched-looking.

“Where’s the little Delia Rocca girl?”

“I haven’t seen her yet,” Mademoiselle Moreau said. “I thought she was a little late.”

She turned pale suddenly. “Has anything happened to her?”

Without answering, the Captain turned to the two policemen. “Find her! And remember: above all, don’t touch her. Shoot on sight.”

Mademoiselle Moreau threw herself toward him. “What’s happening? You’re crazy!”

He aimed at her nervously with his thermic pistol. “Don’t come near me, Annie. Not till we’ve made the tests. Pardon me, but it’s necessary.”

I didn’t wait for them to notice me. I ran to the other side of the playground and squeezed through the hole in the fence. I have to find Tina and warn her. I don’t want her to get hurt.

Now that I’ve found her, everything is all right. They’re all afraid, but I’m not afraid any more. I have to be careful and then I won’t get burned. Tina told me that. She told me something else that was funny: “We’re free.”

I found her at the edge of the arroyo, near the sheep pens. That’s her favorite hiding place when she plays hooky. I told her Captain Boulanger was looking for her, and she smiled gently. “I know. That’s why I’m hiding here. But they’re not looking for you. You’ll be able to carry it on.”

“Carry what on?”

“The expansion.”

“Listen, Tina, you’re always saying crazy things, and the whole class laughs at you, but I like you. Tell me why they’re looking for you. Did you do something bad? What was it?”

“I didn’t do anything bad. I did what I had to do.”

“What? What did you do?”

There was a funny, lopsided smile on her face. “I ate some caviar.”

“See, you’re talking crazy again.”

“No, I’m not! Daddy took Colonel Penn’s box to make some experiments on the caviar. At recess, they said caviar is something to eat, didn’t they? So I wanted to taste it.”

“You ate that?”

“Sure!”

“But Tina, you’re crazy! I heard Dad and Mom talking about it. I didn’t understand everything they said, but I know it’s something very dangerous. You shouldn’t have done it.”

“Pooh! The caviar’s very good. As soon as I ate it, I knew.”

“You knew what?”

“Everything. I knew everything.”

“But they’re hunting for you, Tina. They want to hurt you.”

“That’s because they don’t know. You have to go tell them. You have to tell them we don’t want to do them any harm, and that the expansion has to go on.”

“Listen, Tina, you didn’t know what you did was bad. You come with me and we’ll explain it to them.”

“No. If they see me, they’ll burn me without listening to me. I know. But you go.”

“Okay, Tina, okay, I’ll tell them you didn’t know.”

She came up to me and stroked my cheek. “You’re nice, Hervé. You’re the nicest one of all. Should I kiss you?”

She put her arms around me and squeezed very hard. I was afraid, all of a sudden, because her mouth on my cheek was like a lot of little stinging insects. I yelled, because it seemed to me her face was melting into mine, that her arms were flowing into my neck and I was dying.

But it didn’t last. I wonder now why I yelled. Now I’m not afraid of anything. I know. We’re free and the expansion is going on. They have a spaceship in orbit around the planet. They haven’t managed to fix it because they’re twelve hundred separate intelligences. But when we’re all one, when we’ve melted all those individual minds into one intelligence, one single thought, then we can easily get the Ship into working order. I’ve often heard Dad say it was a pity we had no nexialist aboard, because that’s the science that integrates all the others. Well, this will be complete nexialism.

On Earth, there are millions and billions of entities. I know. Dad said so, and Tina’s Dad too. Millions and billions of intelligences. When we’ve absorbed them all, we’ll be One and we’ll be universal. The universe will belong to us. Why can’t they understand that? Why do they want to burn us when we’re bringing them freedom?

Here’s the house. Mom runs into the doorway, with Dad behind her. Their faces are drawn with anxiety.

“Hervé, where were you? We were so worried. Don’t stay outdoors, dear. Terrible things are happening. . . .”

Both of them open their arms wide, and I snuggle into them. Dad, Mom, how I love them. I love them more than before. I want to be more a part of them than I was before, much more, completely.

Dad and Mom yell when my arms begin to spread out over them, but they won’t last long. Don’t cry. Please don’t cry. Soon, you’ll know.