Philip José Farmer
PART 3: THE EVOLUTION OF PAUL EYRE
1
AWARE that he was being watched, Paul Eyre rolled under the bed. Here, the TV camera could not see him. The watchers would be frantic, but they would not dare to enter his cell. They did not want to drop dead.
Nude, he lay flat on his back, staring at the bedsprings and the mattress. Above the mattress were the sheets and the blankets, then the roof, then the clouds. And above the clouds was the night sky. And in the sky was a star that held a planet which was his home. No, not really his home. It was the birthplace of the thing hiding in his brain, the thing causing him to change.
That thought was not quite correct. The thing was becoming him and he was becoming the thing. The tiny yellow-brick thing in him had grown and was taking over. And he was taking it over. He and it were melding.
He was scared but not as scared as he thought he should be. Anticipation was mixed with the fright. Besides, the change was inevitable. He had seen it in dreams twelve nights in a row. The thing was communicating with him in dreams, in images and in feelings. They had no common language, but they did not need it.
His body was contracting, rounding, flattening. The flesh and the bones were softening, just as his daughter’s bones had softened when he had seen her in the car in the high-school parking lot while fleeing from the police. But her skeleton had become semijelly so that she could assume, or be shaped into, human form. Not a human form, he thought, since she had been all-too-human. An acceptable human form with a straight spine and full breasts and full legs. But he was going to have a nonhuman form. One, in fact, which no human had ever had before.
Where would his bones and organs go?
He held up one hand under the springs. The fingernails were shimmering; the flesh was glowing. Would the watchers see the darkness under the sheets hanging over the sides dissolve before a bright light? Would they think that he had set himself on fire? And then, knowing that he had no matches or flammable fluid, would they know that he could not be on fire? They would want to send someone into his room, but they would not dare. They could only watch and wonder.
He had enough wonder for all of them. How could his one hundred and fifty pounds be altered and squeezed so without killing him? How could his brain be flattened and condensed without killing him?
His body sagged and spread out. He tried to lift his head but could not. His eyes were separating, one drifting to the left, one to the right. At the same time, his vision was becoming weaker. Only the bright light enabled him to see at all. They felt smaller, and they were starting to sink within his skull. But they could not go far because his skull was spread out and at the same time shrinking.
For a while, his eyes were at the bottoms of wells or seemed to be. He remembered reading that a man could stand at the bottom of a deep well in the daytime and see, faintly, the stars. And here came the stars. And comets. And novas. But they were within him; the nerves were flashing signals. And soon, the nerves would be gone. Or changed into a structure which the neurologists of Earth could not understand. And changed in function, too, a function beyond their understanding.
His body moved across the floor as if it were an amoeba. Though he could not see himself, he knew that he must look as if he were becoming an amoeba. His trunk was flattening and becoming circular. His legs, his arms, his head were changing into flat, circular forms and also shrinking. He was an amoeba withdrawing its pseudopods.
Where would his brain go? What would happen to his eyes? What about his veins and arteries and capillaries? What would his bones become? His fingers? His toes? His ears? His nose? His teeth? What would become of him, Paul Eyre?
He had always believed that he had a soul. When his body died, he would ascend to heaven. Unchangeable, incorruptible, eternal Paul Eyre.
But his soul would be squeezed and flattened along with his body. Souls follow the map of the body. What the body writes, the soul reads.
And he did not know the language in which the writing was set.
He could not scream when the terror of full realization struck. He had no throat, and his lips were melted into each other.
Something within did scream then. Its voice echoed back and forth as if it were a man lost and screaming in a labyrinth deep underground. Somewhere in the dimness a form rose up and moved toward him. It was blacker than the blackness and only half-human in shape. It was menacing, yet when it spoke its voice was soft and reassuring. Paul Eyre did not want to be reassured and he wanted to run.
He felt his body swelling. A feeling of triumph and of disappointment filled him, and suddenly, he had a throat and a mouth. Instead of screaming, he whimpered.
* * * *
At ten in the morning he awoke. He was in his pajamas and lying flat on his back on the bed. He felt tired and hungry and also ashamed. Why should he be ashamed? Was it because he was a coward?
He got out of bed and wobbled to the only door to his room. A third of the way down on this door was a smaller door. He swung this open, and a shelf holding a tray of food and milk swiveled inward. He took the tray off and shut the little door. He carried the tray to a small folding table, set it on the table and sat down in the chair before the table. While he ate ham and eggs, toast and butter, and a grapefruit, he wondered what he would have eaten if he had allowed his new form to take over. What could a being with no mouth and no digestive organs, as far as he knew, use for food? Or fuel?
There was only one way to find out, a way he did not want to take. Or did he?
What he should be wondering about, he reminded himself, was why he accepted the change as reality. Once, he would have said that it was impossible. Anyone who actually thought he could change shape had to be crazy. Now, the universe seemed as flexible to him as his body.
He put the tray back on the swinging door and went into the bathroom. When he left it, he went to the doorless closet and changed from his pajamas into his clothes. At one time, he had gone into the bathroom to dress because there he would not be watched. At least, he had hoped he wasn’t. Now he did not care, even if women were watching him. And that meant that he was changing not only in body but in his attitudes. Before he had been brought here, he would not have undressed before any female. Even when going to bed with his wife, he had shed his clothes in the dark so she could not see him naked.
That reminded him of some of his dreams. Though fifty-four years old, no, fifty-five now, he had a strong sex drive. He had insisted that Mavice relieve him at least three times a week. It had not mattered to him whether or not she were sick or just disinclined. It was her duty to take care of him. Mavice had usually submitted but she had complained or else been silent and had let him know through her sullenness that she was angry.
If he were to be released, he would not go back to Mavice. She hated him, though he had to admit that she had cause. But he hated her, too. Perhaps part of his hate for her was hate reflected, hate for himself. Or contempt. But there was no use thinking about that. That was in a past that seemed even more bizarre than the present.
What a pair of wretches they had been!
“Falcons in a net,” Tincrowdor had once said of them. The writer was probably quoting some poem or book; his talk was half-quotation, as if he had no power to make up his own phrases. But that wasn’t true. Tincrowdor had then said, “No, not falcons. You and Mavice are more like vultures in a net. Or hyenas. Or rats in a hole plugged up with cyanide.”
He had hated Tincrowdor, too. No wonder that the man was afraid to meet him face to face now. Not that he blamed him. Why should Tincrowdor take a chance on dropping dead?
The sex drive had not been shut off when the door of his cell closed on him. He would have gone insane with desire if it had not been for those dreams. He would sleep, and he would see that glittering green city at the far end of many fields covered with red flowers. He would be walking across it on four feet, paws, rather. He was a creature half-human and half-feline. A leocentaur. And he was female. He had a beautiful human face, white shoulders and arms, and magnificent breasts. From the human torso down, his body was that of a lioness. A strange and powerful odor emanated from him, or, rather, her. His sexual organ twitched and stank with desire. He—she—was mad with desire, but, being sentient, could control somewhat his—her —lust.
And then a great male leocentaur would come leaping and bounding across the red fields, and he—she —and the male would couple.
What a difference eight hundred pounds of feline muscle, sweating, fur, a tail, and four paws with two hands and no inhibitions made!
Eyre quivered with memory of the ecstasy, far beyond anything he had experienced as a human. He also felt shame, but, as the day passed, the shame dwindled.
He could not understand why, if he was the female, he woke up with his pajamas sticky. But the orgasms of himself, the female, in the dream were paralleled by himself, the male, in his human body. Or form.
There were other dreams, dreams in which he was a small body with a hard shell, flying through the air, flying also through emptiness where stars were the only light. He saw the stars, or, rather, felt them in a way that he could not comprehend. This “seeing” was better than “seeing” with eyes.
Did the little yellow brick in his brain carry inside it ancestral memories? Memories that it could transmit to him via dreams?
He did not know. There were many things he could not explain. For instance, the thing in him could kill or cure human beings. If it saw a diseased or crippled human being, it cured that being. If it thought it was threatened, it killed. Paul Eyre was the agent through which the thing worked, but he had no control over it.
Yet, when he had been out hunting and had fired his shotgun at the saucerthing, why hadn’t it killed him? When he had searched for it afterward in those woods, why hadn’t it killed him then? It could not have been in doubt about his intentions.
He thought he had wounded it. How else explain the yellow haze that issued from some opening in its side? An opening his shotgun pellets must have made.
Or had it? Tincrowdor had said that perhaps it was spawning or sporing. The cloud had been composed of microscopic quicksilver-like objects, and these were the saucerthing’s young. Some had undoubtedly gone into Paul Eyre, through his nose and perhaps through his skin. They had become millions of yellow-brick-shaped things in his blood cells and in his skin tissues. He had excreted all but one, which had lodged in his brain. The others, sneezed out, digested out, sweated out, had not affected any other living being. They seemed to have died.
While in the woods, he had seen the saucer, and he had also seen the female leocentaur, a creature of unsurpassed beauty. Only now did he understand that she was the saucerthing in another shape.
He could accept that because he had to. But why hadn’t the thing killed him with its thoughts or whatever power it used to kill?
If he allowed himself to become a saucerthing, then he might understand.
Tincrowdor might have a theory. Tincrowdor was a writer whose field was mainly science fiction. When Eyre had related his experiences in the woods, Tincrowdor had given some fairly plausible theories to explain what had happened. Eyre felt that Tincrowdor had, somehow, hit close to the truth.
He would ask Tincrowdor.
Two days later, the closed-circuit TV screen lit up, and a broad red face appeared. For a minute, Eyre did not recognize him. Tincrowdor had a shaggy red and white beard, and his eyes were sunken in black. He looked as if he had grown a beard to disguise himself from Death.
“Hello, Paul,” he said. “They flew me in, but the cheapos made me go second-class. I had to buy my own champagne.”
“Listen,” Eyre said. “The others might think I’m crazy, but that doesn’t matter. My situation won’t be changed by their opinions.”
He paused and then said, “Last night I almost turned into a flying saucer.”
* * * *
Tincrowdor listened without interrupting. He said, “Some years ago, I would have thought you crazy, too. Now, I’m not so sure. What the hell, I know you’re not crazy! I’ll tell you why I believe what very few can believe. A few years ago an anthropological student named Carlos Castaneda wrote three books about his experiences with Yaqui Indian magic. Put quotes around the word magic, because that’s a word loaded with superstition and prejudice among Westerners. To the Yaqui brujos, sorcerers we’d call them, there are many worlds coexistent with ours. Parallel worlds, if you will, which intersect ours. By use of their quote magic unquote, the brujos can use entities, or forces, in these other worlds. Castaneda called these worlds nonordinary reality. That is, they are realities which we don’t usually encounter.
“I won’t go into how these brujos can perform their so-called magic. It’s not magic, but a rigid and always dangerous science. Or a discipline. Never mind the terms. The thing is that the brujos Castaneda knew, Don Juan and Don Genaro and some others, could perform incredible feats. They had powers we Westerners have always thought were mumbo-jumbo, fantasies, superstitions. Castaneda was convinced that the powers existed, have existed since the Old Stone Age. For instance, and I cite only one because it is relevant to your case, the brujos can change themselves into birds and fly. I became convinced after reading his books that they can do this. Castaneda is a level-headed scientist and no hoaxer.”
“You mean that I met a creature from this, this nonordinary reality, and that it has made these changes in me?” Eyre said.
Tincrowdor shook his head. “Not entirely. You have met a nonordinary creature and are undergoing some nonordinary changes. But these are not of the nature which Castaneda described. Your saucerthing and your sphinx come from this world, this hard universe. They are nonordinary only because they have just arrived. Probably, many things here are nonordinary to them, or it, I should say, since the forms seem to be metamorphous, not discrete.
“Apparently, the yellow-thing in you is capable of causing these changes in shape. It may not derive its power solely from itself. We human beings may have this power but have never realized it. Rather, only a few have ever realized it. The devices exist in our bodies, and the yellow-thing knows how to use them.
“Here’s what I think the situation could be. Postulate a species of sentient, or maybe nonsentient, beings which can live in space. They can also travel through space, perhaps using gravitons as a means of propulsion. Gravitons are wavicles. Wavicles are phenomena which act as if they’re both frequency waves and particles. Gravitons are wavicles responsible for gravity, just as photons are wavicles responsible for light. Well, that doesn’t matter. It’s not how they can propel themselves through space and atmosphere but their biological setup that is important.
“I can’t guess at how they have sexual intercourse and have children with genes from male and female. Maybe they have a sexual-reproductive process that isn’t remotely like what we know on Earth. Anyway, these ufos, let’s call them that and not flying saucers, these ufos, originated on some planet or maybe in space. Their planet was long ago crowded, or else they have a drive to seed other planets. In any event, many leave their native world. They go to other planets that are like Earth. These have sentients. Some are humanoids. Some centauroids. Some are only God knows what.
“The pregnant female lands and releases the egg-bearing cloud. The microscopic eggs, or spores, or what have you, enter the tissues of sentients. Only one of the millions of eggs in a sentient’s body survives, just as only one sperm out of millions in an ejaculation survives to unite with an ovum in the womb. Whoever gets to the brain first is the winner.
“The egg and the sperm, that’s you, Paul, a bipedal thinking sperm, unite. The process is half-fusion, half-symbiosis. You think it’s parasitism because you’re an unwilling and very conscious host. A reluctant spermatozoan. Strange things happen. You have the power to cure or kill even when unconscious or sleeping. Only it’s not being done by you but by the ufo-egg, which goes all the way in its healing or its self-defense.
“Why does the symbiote kill those who threaten you? Obviously because it’s protecting itself and you, the host. Why does it heal nonthreatening humans? Obviously because it regards them as future hosts, or sperm.
“And so you’re shut up in a prison hospital for observation by scientists who can’t believe what they’re seeing but have to believe.
“Meanwhile, the zygote becomes embryo becomes an adult. The adult is, or will be, the ufo-egg plus the host. My analogies are, biologically speaking, mixed up. A symbiote, or parasite, and its host are not two gametes. But this doesn’t matter. You get the idea. You start to change shape. You resist, but you will eventually go all the way. You will become a saucerthing. What will happen to the brain in that saucer? I don’t know. I suspect you’ll become half-human, half-alien. You’ll grow to like your powers. After all, it’s only human to desire powers that other humans don’t have. Nor will you be bound to one shape. At times, maybe whenever you wish, you can change back to your original shape.
“That the saucer you saw changes into the shape of its original leocentaur form demonstrates that.
“Then, one day, you get out of this prison. You either stay on Earth to look for a male or go out into space for a male. You get fertilized, how, don’t ask me. You spread your seed. Other humans suffer the same strange space-change that you have suffered. And so on. Eventually, we have an Earth populated by ufo-humans. What happens then? I don’t know. I suspect that some will take off into space to seek virgin planets.”
Eyre said, “You don’t believe that.”
Tincrowdor said, “Do you believe it?”
“I don’t know,” Eyre said. “I do know that I don’t like it.”
* * * *
That was not the end of the conversation. What about the ufos? Why had so many been sighted and why, if there were so many, hadn’t any man been affected by them, as Eyre now was?
“I don’t know that any have actually been sighted here,” Tincrowdor said. “The Air Force investigation explained away all but about two percent as misinterpreted natural phenomena, delusions, hoaxes, or the result of mass hysteria. That an unexplainable two percent remains might be due to the investigators’ failure of rationalizing powers. Or perhaps the two percent were composed of actual ufos. These could have been males looking for females, which weren’t at that time on Earth.”
“But they weren’t all of the same type,” Eyre said.
“Some were balls that acted more like electrical phenomena than anything. Some were cigar-shaped. Some had blinking lights. Almost all were much larger than the saucer I saw.”
Tincrowdor shrugged and said, “If they existed in some place other than the observer’s mind, they may have belonged to different species or genera than your saucer. Or perhaps the males have different shapes. Maybe the differing types were hostile toward each other and expended their energies chasing each other. They may have exterminated each other in a secret unseen war or perhaps declared Earth a dangerous area and so avoid it from now on. Maybe they have a treaty that has declared Earth off-limits, and your saucer was here illegally. Or maybe she was sick or out of food and had to land here.
“You want me to explain all about them, and I can’t even tell you all about the how and why of human beings. Besides, everything I’ve said may be wrong.”
Tincrowdor seemed to find this amusing. Eyre did not.
When the dialogue was ended, Eyre paced back and forth—he could not sit still long unless he was reading or watching TV—and wondered what the effect of the conversation would be on the authorities. Would they assume he was crazy? If they did, then they would do nothing. Things would proceed as they had been. They might want to give him therapy, but they would be afraid to try it. If they believed his story, then they might become so alarmed that they would try to kill him. They would justify murder as in the best interest of the majority. The majority: all humanity with the exception of Paul Eyre. Logically, he had to agree with them.
* * * *
The following morning, Tincrowdor’s face appeared again on the screen. He looked pale and frightened.
“Paul,” he said, “you’ve been told that, if it looks as if you might escape, cyanide gas will be released in your room. It’s a terrible thing, but they can’t allow you even to get out into the hall. They’re afraid they couldn’t stop you, since you can kill with a glance. Well, last night. . . .”
He paused and swallowed, then said, “Last night one of them made up his own mind to take action. Apparently, he believed what we said yesterday. He sneaked into the room in which the valves and the off-on button controlling the cyanide gas are located. This is guarded by one man, and an alarm is set off if any unauthorized person enters. He bludgeoned the guard and made a dash for the controls. He had to turn two valves before he could press the release button. He never got the first valve turned. As he touched it, he dropped dead. Now tell me. Did you somehow know all this was going on?”
Eyre was silent for a moment, then he said, “Not at all.”
Tincrowdor swallowed again and said, “Well, you see the implications, don’t you?”
Eyre could not keep the exultation out of his voice.
“Yes, I—this thing in me, rather—can kill even if I can’t see the one who’s threatening us.”
A few seconds later, the shock hit him. He sat down trembling. People were actually trying to kill him. Yet he had done nothing except to defend himself. No, he had not done even that. It was the creature inside him. But even as he thought that, he knew that that was not true. There was no longer any clearly defined Paul Eyre or ufo-child. Their borders were dissolving; their identities were merging.
He had to get out and away, but to do that he had to experience something the thought of which terrified him.
“They,” Tincrowdor said, “are divided. Half think you are telling the truth; half think you’re crazy. But the latter half isn’t certain. They saw the bright light emanating from under the bed, and they know that it wasn’t caused by fire. Your room is monitored for any change in temperature, and there was none then. That was a cold light.”
“Why aren’t Polar and Kowalski talking to me?” Eyre said. “Why have you suddenly become the spokesman?”
“I don’t have a degree in science, but I do have a free-wheeling imagination. This is a situation which requires a mind that is at ease with the fantastic. Set a thief to catch a thief. Put a science-fiction author in a science-fiction situation. Besides, I don’t think they trust me to keep my mouth shut. They can watch me while I’m working for them.”
“Are you actually going to help them to kill me?” Eyre said.
Tincrowdor looked distressed.
“I don’t think you can be killed.”
“But you’re willing to try,” Eyre said.
Tincrowdor was silent.
Eyre said, “And you’re the one who was always raising hell because the U.S. was needlessly killing so many in Vietnam. You’re the one who was too tender-hearted to shoot deer.”
Tincrowdor was obviously frightened. For all he knew, he might drop dead at this moment. Actually, Eyre thought, Tincrowdor wasn’t as cowardly and soft-hearted as he had supposed him to be. He must have courage to be able to tell him all this and to chance making him angry.
Or perhaps Tincrowdor wanted to be struck dead. He felt guilt because he had not made the public aware of what was being done to Eyre. This guilt was increased by his participation in the imprisonment of Eyre. Moreover, he could not keep from trying to figure out ways to kill the unkillable. It was a challenge to the intellect, which he had no doubt justified with all sorts of rationalization.
Suddenly Eyre realized that the face on the screen belonged to his most dangerous enemy.
That knowledge was followed by a slight shock. Why hadn’t Tincrowdor fallen dead?
Could it be because Tincrowdor was also secretly rooting for him? Tincrowdor had once said that it would be a good thing if something did wipe out all of mankind. Insanity, grief, sorrow, greed, murder, rape, brutality, hopelessness, despair, prejudice, hypocrisy, and persecution would vanish from Earth. Tincrowdor had admitted that poetry, art, and music would also disappear, but the price paid for a few worthwhile poems, dramas, paintings, sculptures, and symphonies wasn’t worth it. Besides, very few people appreciated art. According to him, money, power, and tearing other people apart, verbally and physically, were what most people cared about.
“On the other hand,” Tincrowdor had said, “if man goes, love and compassion also go. Perhaps we’re just a stage in evolution toward a species all of whose members will be filled with love and compassion. But I ask our Creator why, if this is true, we stages have to suffer so? Don’t we count for anything?”
Tincrowdor had once written a short story, What You See, in which visitors from the star Algol, as a parting gift, had spread an aerosol all over Earth. This covered all the mirrors in the world, and whenever anybody looked in one, he saw himself as he truly was. This did not have the desired effect of causing changes for the better in the viewers of self. Instead, all mirrors were smashed and a law passed making it a capital offense to manufacture mirrors. The law wasn’t necessary. Nobody except a few masochists wanted mirrors.
Eyre had asked Tincrowdor why, if he felt that way, he didn’t commit suicide.
“I like to make myself and others miserable,” the writer had said.
And now Tincrowdor was torn in two. He wanted to survive and hence wanted Eyre to die. He also wanted Eyre to survive, because he might be the next stage in man’s evolution.
That Eyre could perceive this meant that he had evolved in one respect. There was a time when he would have been too dull to see what was troubling Tincrowdor. Eyre was, had been, an engineer who could analyze malfunctions in machines down to the last nut and bolt. But troubleshooting people had been beyond him. They were impenetrable and irrational.
* * * *
That night, Eyre awoke from a sleep untroubled by dreams. He rose, drank some water, and went to the single window to look at the night scene. The stars were out, the river beyond the walls and the city on both sides of the river were speckled and striped with lights. Like a zebra with the measles, he thought.
Between his building and the high stone walls was a paved area. This was bright with floodlights on the building and the wall. A tower at a corner of the walls to his left thrust up like the hand of a traffic cop signaling for a stop. It held two guards armed with rifles, and a machine gun.
He was surprised, though not shocked, to see the female leocentaur standing on the pavement below. The light gleamed whitely on her bare upper trunk, blackly on her long hair and tawnily on the leonine underbody. She was smiling up at him and waving with one hand.
The last time he had seen her, she had been a saucer-shaped thing hanging in the air outside his window. From her whirling body had come a sound that had seemed to him a farewell. But he had been mistaken. She was still around, still watching over him. Like a mother over her child.
Shouts came from the watchtower. She bounded to one side as rifle bullets struck the pavement and then she loped away out of Eyre’s sight to the right. A moment later, the machine gun opened up, but, after five bursts, it stopped. There were no more shots, but there was much excitement.
Three-quarters of an hour after the guards and the dogs had quit running around on the pavement, Tincrowdor’s face filled the TV.
“Up to now I’ve been a sort of John the Baptist for a weird messiah,” he said. “Faith was noticeable only by its absence. But they believe now! They’ve not only got two eye witnesses, but they’ve got photographs! The watch-tower was equipped with a motion picture camera, you know. No, you wouldn’t. Anyway here are some stills.”
The first was of the leocentauress running away. The third showed her leaping high into the air. At least fifteen feet, Eyre estimated. The fifth showed an elongated blur. The next one was of a blurred but undeniably saucer-shaped object. The last showed the saucer as it shot by a floodlight.
“Apparently, she didn’t think she was really in danger,” Tincrowdor said. “Otherwise, the guards would be dead. Of course, it may be that the adult isn’t capable of killing through ESP means or however it’s done. In which case, you, if you become an adult, may no longer be a danger. At least, not one kind of danger. You’ll always be a menace.
“One reason I think that the adult form may not be able to kill is that you didn’t kill the guards. You, that thing in you, anyway, must have wanted to protect its mother. So why didn’t it do it?
“Or is there something we don’t know?”
Eyre repressed any show of joy at the mother’s escape. He said, “So what happens now?”
“I don’t know. I think they’re going to let the White House in on what’s been going on. They’ve been very secretive so far. Very few officials know that a man is being held without any judicial processes at all and with no consideration of his civil rights. And fewer yet know the real reason why. But now that they have evidence that even the most unimaginative will have to accept, they will have to inform the highest authority. It may take some time to convince him, though.”
What you’re not saying, Eyre thought, is that everybody in the know is going to be scared to death. To my death.
And that morning, while it was still dark, he undressed and went under the bed. Sometime later he emerged, shaking, weak, and frightened. Halfway through, he had quit. For a long time, he lay in bed, tossing and turning, and cursing himself for a weakling. Yet he was glad that something in him, himself this time, had refused to become nonhuman. He finally fell asleep, waking at ten-thirty. He ate breakfast and read several pages of a book on a tribe in highland New Guinea. He had been reading much and widely of late, trying to make up for all the years when he had read only the daily local newspaper and sports magazines.
As he began pacing back and forth, the closed-circuit TV came on. Tincrowdor said, “This’ll be the last time I’ll be seeing you, Paul. Here, anyway. I’m quitting. I don’t want anything more to do with these people. Or with you. I can’t take it any longer. I’m being ripped apart between my conscience and what I believe, logically, should be done with you. And this last incident is too much for me. It was my idea, I’ll admit, but I didn’t like it when it was put in practice.”
“What last idea?” Paul said.
Somebody out of sight said something to Tincrowdor. He snarled, “What the hell’s the difference?” and turned back to Eyre. “I suggested a device to turn on the cyanide by a remote control machine. And they installed one. Two, rather. The light-sensing monitor on you was to send a radio signal to a machine in Washington, D.C., when it detected that glow from under the bed. This in turn would signal back to the automatic controller of the cyanide-release machine. The setup was arranged so that there would be no human agency involved in the actual operation of gas release. That way, no one would die, they hoped.”
He swallowed, looked contrite, and said, “I did it, Paul, because I’m human! I want humanity to survive! As humans. Better the devil you know, I thought. And anyway, I didn’t believe that you could be killed, and I wanted to find out if I was wrong. I hoped I was at the same time I hoped I wasn’t. Can you understand?”
“I suppose that if I were in your shoes, I’d do the same,” Eyre said. “But you can’t expect me to be very friendly with a man who’s been trying to kill me.”
“Of course I don’t. I’m not very friendly to myself just now. But here’s what happened. As soon as the light glowed, a signal was sent to the machine in Washington. That machine never got to send a signal back. Both it and the control device here burned up! The circuits apparently became overloaded and burst into flames. They had fused but it made no difference. Up they went!”
“You can keep on trying, and you’ll never succeed,” Eyre said.
He was startled. He had had no intention of saying that. Was the thing in him talking? Or was the merger, the fusion as Tincrowdor called it, almost complete?
“Listen, Paul!” Tincrowdor shouted. “That window is shatterproof, but you can get through it! Their plan...”
A hand clamped down on Tincrowdor’s mouth. Polar and Kowalski appeared behind him and dragged him, struggling, out of sight.
Eyre wished Polar and Kowalski dead, but a moment later Polar appeared. Eyre was glad that he had not killed him. Perhaps it was better that he had no control over his powers. The responsibility and the guilt were not his.
“I assure you, Eyre, that we’re not planning anything more,” Polar said in a high-pitched voice. “Not against you, not in a positive manner, I mean. We know we can’t do anything to you. So we’re just going to keep you here until, by the grace of God, we can reach a satisfactory solution.”
Polar was lying, of course.
“Die! Die!” Eyre shouted, forgetting in another burst of anger his gladness of a moment ago.
Polar screamed and ran out of sight. A moment later, the screen went blank. Eyre quit laughing and stretched out on the floor. He closed his eyes but opened them almost at once. This time, the light was coming not from his skin but from deep within himself. And it was not steady but pulsing.
There was horror again, though it was as much less as the light was more. Or so it seemed to him. And the metamorphosis went so swiftly that his head would have swum—if he had had a head. Suddenly, he didn’t. It had collapsed and withdrawn and changed.
He rose from the floor humming. He was rotating or at least aware that he was, but he had at the same time no sense of dizziness or disorientation. Without eyes, he could see. The room around him was a black sphere, not a cube. The furniture was violet bowls. The electrical wiring within the walls was helixes of pulsing blue. The window was hexagonal, and the light from the flood lights was mauve, and the stars were of many colors and many shapes. One was a huge russet doughnut.
He had no hands to feel his shell, but he could feel with a sense strange to him. The shell was far more resistant than steel but as flexible as rubber.
He thought, Forward, and the shatterproof glass flew out from in front of him, the shards flaming and falling like comets with green tails. As they struck the yellow pavement below, they became brown.
If he had had a voice, he would have shouted with exultation. Instead, a tiny electric spark seemed to pass through him. It glowed as it traveled from one edge of his shell to the other, sputtered, and was gone.
Where were his eyes, his ears, his arms, his legs, his mouth, his genitals? Who cared? He certainly did not, as he swept out and up, curving almost vertically into the air. His change of angle brought visions of a lightning streak, colored scarlet. He was riding on it. Below, machine-gun bullets made orange pyramids that became increasingly brown as gravity carried them back to Earth. When they landed, they became flat hexagons.
Babies play, and Eyre played for a long time. Up and down, in and out, skimming the fields, climbing above the atmosphere where the sun blazed azure and space blazed greenly, down again, the air moving around him like snow on a TV screen, the snow melting as he slowed down, down into a river, moving through the blood-colored water, fishes pentagons of dark violet, the weeds upside-down beige towers of Babel. And up and out again, through clouds that looked like cerulean toadstools.
He did not get tired or hungry. Exerting or resting, he was “feeding.” He did not understand how he did it, any more than a savage would understand the processes by which food entering his mouth became energy and flesh. All he knew was that, munching mouthlessly, he devoured photons and gravitons and chronotrons and radio waves and magnetic lines of force. When in space, he would be eating all these and x-ray energy. His mouth was his shell.
As an engineer, he would have supposed that the surface area of his shell was too small to absorb enough energy to keep him alive. As what he now was, he knew that he could take in more than enough energy.
And then, as he soared up in a catenary curve that left behind a mile-long line of glimmering sapphire porcupine quills, quickly fading, he saw his mother. Going three times as fast, she was an ankh-shaped thing, striped with scarlet and blue and trailing yellow energy particles shaped like stars of David. She did not slow down, she went on up, out into space, headed toward some star. But as she passed, she whispered—or so it seemed to him—that he should follow her. She would love to have him accompany her. If he did not wish to, however, she bade him a fond farewell and hello.
“And what shall we do, brother?” he said in his non-voice.
His brother did not answer. The little yellow thing in him was he; his brother was he, and he was his brother.
He turned and raced around the planet, which was a shifting pattern of triangles and cubes below him. He sped in his orbit as if circularity was a means for arriving at a decision.
And it was.
* * * *
The doorbell rang.
Mavice Eyre got up from her chair before the TV set and walked through babble and smoke to the front door. She opened it onto the night and Paul Eyre. Two seconds passed, during which he could have covered fifty miles while out of the atmosphere and in the other form. Then Mavice fainted.
There was confusion and consternation. Paul Eyre acted calmly and did what had to be done. With order restored, the TV set off, and Mavice and his children, Roger and Glenda, in their chairs, he began to tell them a little of what had happened. Of his metamorphosis, he said nothing.
When he had finished, Mavice said, “Why didn’t they tell us that they were letting you go? Why didn’t you phone us? I almost died when I saw you!”
“They would like to keep this a secret,” he said. “Your oaths of silence still hold. I’m well now, though I’m not what I was. Not by a long shot. And I didn’t notify you I was coming because they asked me not to. Why, I don’t know. Security reasons, I suppose.”
He could not tell them the truth, of course.
There was a silence. His wife and his son were still afraid of him. Glenda did not fear him, but she did not trust him all the way. Of the three, she suspected that he was far more changed than he had admitted.
“Dad, where’d you get those clothes?” Roger said. “They look as if they came off a skid-row bum. And they sure smell like it!”
“I’ll get rid of them,” he said. And he thought, they did come from a wino. I took his clothes and in return I cured his diseased liver and his incipient tuberculosis and I may have altered the chemical imbalance that has made him an alcoholic. Maybe. I don’t know what was sick about him. But if he had a cirrhosed liver and that cough was from TB and his lust for drink comes from chemistry and not from the pysche, then he’s healed.
“Are you going back to work at Trackless Diesel, Dad?” Glenda said.
“Never. The idea makes me sick.”
“But what will you do!” Mavice said shrilly. “You’re fifty-five, and in only ten years you’ll be able to retire! If you quit, you’ll lose your retirement pension and the group medical insurance and. . . .”
“I have better things to do,” he said.
“Such as what?” Mavice said.
“Such as finding out what a human being is and why he is,” Eyre said. “Before I go on.”
“Go on where?” Glenda said.
“Wherever my destiny takes me.”
“And what is that?”
“Whatever seems to be best. Or whatever is good.”
“Look, Dad,” Glenda said. She stood up. “Look at me. I was a cripple and a hunchback, and you healed me just by looking at me! Think of what you can do for others!”
Glenda was radiant with joy, but Roger and Mavice had a better foundation for their emotion than Glenda did for hers. Not that they should be so afraid of him. They should dread what others would try to do to him and to them. Perhaps he should not have come back here. He had put them in jeopardy, whereas, if he had gone to some distant place, they would be safe.
But that wasn’t true either. As long as he stayed on Earth, no human was safe. Change was dangerous, and he was here to see that all were changed. It didn’t matter if he went to Timbuktu (and he might), change would spread out from him in an all-engulfing wave. It would lap over the Earth.
He stood up. “Let’s go to bed. Tomorrow. . . .”
Mavice said, “Yes. . . ?”
“I begin looking.”
Mavice assumed that he meant he would search for another job. It was his duty to support his family.
And so it was. But a far stronger duty was to find a mate. And then the seeding would begin.