Staples, at the end, lost courage and decided to fire from a sitting position in the trap door. Taking careful aim, he pulled the trigger. Then he looked carefully to see what damage had resulted. There was none. Either the bullet had gone into the eye and the opening had closed or else it had glanced off. He fired again and again.
Then the mouth opened—wide—wider—until there was nothing under Staples save a yawning void of darkness. The Worm belched a cloud of black, nauseating vapor.
The man, enveloped in the cloud, lost consciousness and fell. The Mouth closed on him.
On the roof the dog howled.
MIMIC
Donald A. Wollheim
Every day we pass people in the streets without looking at them or noticing them in any real way; they are just “people we don’t know.” But what if they’re more than that? What if some of them are actually creatures we don’t know?
Donald A. Wollheim is best known as an editor of science fiction, but he has written a number of remarkable stories in the field, and “Mimic” is one of his finest.
It is less than five hundred years since an entire half of the world was discovered. It is less than two hundred years since the discovery of the last continent. The sciences of chemistry and physics go back scarcely one century. The science of aviation goes back forty years. The science of atomics is being born.
And yet we think we know a lot.
We know little or nothing. Some of the most startling things are unknown to us. When they are discovered, they may shock us to the bone.
We search for secrets in the far islands of the Pacific and among the ice fields of the frozen North, while under our very noses, rubbing shoulders with us every day, there may walk the undiscovered. It is a curious fact of nature that that which is in plain view is oft best hidden.
I have always known of the man in the black cloak. Since I was a child he has always lived on my street, and his eccentricities are so familiar that they go unmentioned except among the casual visitor. Here, in the heart of the largest city in the world, in swarming New York, the eccentric and the odd may flourish unhindered.
As children we had hilarious fun jeering at the man in black when he displayed his fear of women. We watched, in our evil, childish way, for those moments, we tried to get him to show anger. But he ignored us completely and soon we paid him no further heed, even as our parents did.
We saw him only twice a day. Once in the early morning, when we would see his six-foot figure come out of the grimy dark hallway of the tenement at the end of the street and stride down toward the elevated to work—again when he came back at night. He was always dressed in a long, black cloak that came to his ankles, and he wore a wide-brimmed black hat down far over his face. He was a sight from some weird story out of the old lands. But he harmed nobody, and paid attention to nobody.
Nobody—except perhaps women.
When a woman crossed his path, he would stop in his stride and come to a dead halt. We could see that he closed his eyes until she had passed. Then he would snap those wide, watery blue eyes open and march on as if nothing had happened.
He was never known to speak to a woman. He would buy some groceries, maybe once a week, at Antonio’s—but only when there were no other patrons there. Antonio said once that he never talked, he just pointed at things he wanted and paid for them in bills that he pulled out of a pocket somewhere under his cloak. Antonio did not like him, but he never had any trouble from him either.
Now that I think of it, nobody ever did have any trouble with him.
We got used to him. We grew up on the street; we saw him occasionally when he came home and went back into the dark hallway of the house he lived in.
He never had visitors, he never spoke to anyone. And he had once built something in his room out of metal.
He had once, years ago, hauled up some long flat metal sheets, sheets of tin or iron, and they had heard a lot of hammering and banging in his room for several days. But that had stopped and that was all there was to that story.
Where he worked I don’t know and never found out. He had money, for he was reputed to pay his rent regularly when the janitor asked for it.
Well, people like that inhabit big cities and nobody knows the story of their lives until they’re all over. Or until something strange happens.
I grew up, I went to college, I studied.
Finally I got a job assisting a museum curator. I spent my days mounting beetles and classifying exhibits of stuffed animals and preserved plants, and hundreds and hundreds of insects from all over.
Nature is a strange thing, I learned. You learn that very clearly when you work in a museum. You realize how nature uses the art of camouflage. There are twig insects that look exactly like a leaf or a branch of a tree. Exactly.
Nature is strange and perfect that way. There is a moth in Central America that looks like a wasp. It even has a fake stinger made of hair, which it twists and curls just like a wasp’s stinger. It has the same colorings and, even though its body is soft and not armored like a wasp’s, it is colored to appear shiny and armored. It even flies in the daytime when wasps do, and not at night like all other moths. It moves like a wasp. It knows somehow that it is helpless and that it can survive only by pretending to be as deadly to other insects as wasps are.
I learned about army ants, and their strange imitators. Army ants travel in huge columns of thousands and hundreds of thousands. They move along in a flowing stream several yards across and they eat everything in their path. Everything in the jungle is afraid of them. Wasps, bees, snakes, other ants, birds, lizards, beetles—even men run away, or get eaten.
But in the midst of the army ants there also travel many other creatures—creatures that aren’t ants at all, and that the army ants would kill if they knew of them. But they don’t know of them because these other creatures are disguised. Some of them are beetles that look like ants. They have false markings like ant thoraxes and they run along in imitation of ant speed. There is even one that is so long it is marked like three ants in single file! It moves so fast that the real ants never give it a second glance.
There are weak caterpillars that look like big armored beetles. There are all sorts of things that look like dangerous animals. Animals that are the killers and superior fighters of their groups have no enemies. The army ants and the wasps, the sharks, the hawk, and the felines. So there are a host of weak things that try to hide among them—to mimic them.
And man is the greatest killer, the greatest hunter of them all. The whole world of nature knows man for the irresistible master. The roar of his gun, the cunning of his trap, the strength and agility of his arm place all else beneath him.
Should man then be treated by nature differently from the other dominants, the army ants and the wasps?