So I started across the slide and the walking was rougher than I’d expected it to be, but I was being careful so as not to fall and break my neck and I was getting along all right. I had to watch where I put my feet and was going slow and wasn’t paying too much attention to anything that might be happening.
A sudden grinding sound from somewhere above me jerked me around and a stone rolled underneath one foot and threw me to my knees. I saw the boulders coming down the slope straight at me. They came slow at first, slow and deliberate, seeming to topple rather than to roll. I yelled. I don’t remember what I yelled. I just yelled. I knew I didn’t have the time to get away, but I tried. I tried to get to my feet and had almost made it when another stone shifted underneath a foot and threw me down again. The boulders were much closer now, gathering speed, bounding high into the air when they struck other boulders in their paths, and the rest of the slide above me, jarred by the rolling boulders, was moving down on top of me, as if the rock and rubble had somehow come alive.
Before the first of the boulders reached me I seemed to see little shadowy figures running frantically along the base of the cliff and I thought, “Those God damned lobsters!”
Then the boulders reached me and I put out my hands to stop them, just as if there might have been a chance of stopping them; and I was still yelling.
The boulders hit and killed me. They smashed my flesh and bone. They busted in my rib cage and they cracked my skull. They smashed and rolled me flat. The blood went spraying out and stained the stones. The bladder broke, the intestines ruptured.
But there was, after a time, it seemed, a part of me that wasn’t killed. In the darkness of no-seeing I knew I had been killed. But there was this part of me that still hung onto knowing with bleeding fingernails.
I don’t believe I thought at first. I existed, that was all. In darkness, in emptiness, in nothingness; I was there, not dead. Or at least not entirely dead. I’d forgotten everything I had ever known. I began from scratch. No better than a worm. I tried to take it easy, but there was no such thing as easy. For no reason, I was frantic. Frantic without purpose. Just frantic to exist, to continue hanging on with bloody fingernails. A frantic worm, without knowing, with no reason.
After a time the tension eased a little and I thought. Not simple thoughts, but convoluted and intricate, going on and on, reaching for a simple answer, but going through a maze of mental contortions that were worse than hanging on to existence with no more than fingernails. The terrible thing about it was that I, or the existence that was I, for there was as yet no I, did not even know the problem to which it sought an answer.
Wonder came to replace the thinking, a quiet, hard, chilling wonder that stretched out flat and thin. And the wonder asked: Is this afterlife? Is there really afterlife? Is this what happens when one dies? Hoping it was not, frantic it was not, despairing at the prospect of an eternal, groping afterlife, so flat and thin and dark. Wonder went on forever and forever—not thinking, not reasoning, not speculating, just a wonder that filled the little being that existed, a hopeless, helpless wonder that grew no less or greater, but stretched, unmarked, toward eternity.
Then the wonder went and the darkness went. There was light again and knowing, not only the knowing of the present, but of the past as well. As if something had snapped a switch or pushed a button. As if I’d been turned on.
I had been human once (and I knew what human was), but I was no longer. I knew it from the instant that unseen operator snapped the switch. It wasn’t hard to know. I hadn’t any head and my eyes were floating way up in the air and they were funny eyes. They didn’t look just one way; they looked all the way around and saw everything. Somewhere between my eyes and me were hearing and taste and smell and a lot of other senses I’d never had before—a heat sense, a magnetic indicator, a sniffer-out of life.
I sniffed out a lot of life—big life—and it was moving fast and I saw it was the lobsters, moving very fast to dive down into their burrows. They must have dived down like scared rabbits, for in an instant I lost all sense of them, the sense of them shielded out by many feet of ground. But to replace them was a great deal of other life, a thousand different kinds of life, perhaps more than a thousand different kinds of life and I knew that deep inside my brain all these different life forms—all the plants and grasses, all the insects (or this planet’s equivalent of insects), all the viruses and bacteria—were being filed away most neatly, to be pulled out and identified if there ever should be need.
My brain, I knew, was somewhere in my guts. It had to be, I knew, for I hadn’t any head. It was no proper place for a brain to be, but I had no more than thought that than I knew that it was the right place, down where it was protected and not sticking up into the air where anything or anyone at all could take a swipe at it.
I hadn’t any head and my brain was somewhere in the middle of me and my body was an oval, sort of like an egg, and it was armor-plated. Legs—I had a hundred legs, tiny things like caterpillar legs. I figured out, as well, that my eyes weren’t floating in the air, but were at the ends of two flexible stalks, which I guess you’d call antennae. And those antennae were more than just stalks to hold up my eyes. They were ears as well, more sensitive than my human ears had been, and taste and smell, heat sense, life sense, magnetic sense and other things which had not come clear as yet.
Just knowing all I had parked away in those two antennae gave me a queasy feeling, but there seemed really nothing bad about it, nothing that I couldn’t handle. With all the extra senses, I thought, I’d sure be hard to catch. Even feeling a little proud, perhaps, at how well equipped I was.
I saw that I was on a hilltop, the very hilltop I’d sat upon with the lobsters lapping up the booze. How long ago I might have been there, there was no way of knowing. The ashes of the fire were still there, the fire that they had kindled, proudly, with a fire-drill, and I had let them kindle it, never letting on that I could have lit the fire with a thumb-stroke on my lighter. Even managing, if I remembered rightly, to look a little envious at the ease with which they handled fire. The campfire was old, however, with the prints of pattering raindrops imprinted on the ash.
The ship was just across the valley and in a little while I’d go over to it and take off. I’d file my claim and make arrangements to put the planet on a paying basis. Everything was all right, except that I wasn’t human, and there upon that hilltop I began to miss my humanness. It’s a funny thing; you don’t ever stop to think what human is until you haven’t got it.
I was slightly scared, I suppose, at not being human; perhaps more than a little scared at all the junk I had that made me not be human. With a little effort I still could make myself feel human in my mind, although I knew damn well I wasn’t. And I got lonesome, just like that, for the spaceship squatting over there across the valley. Once I got inside it, I told myself, I would finally be safe.
But safe from what, I wondered. I had been dead, but now I wasn’t dead. It seemed to me I should be happy, but I couldn’t seem to be.
One of the lobsters stuck his head out of a burrow. I saw him and I heard him and I sensed his lifeness and his temperature. I thought that he would know.
“What is going on?” I asked him. “What has happened to me?”
“There was nothing else to do,” he told me. “We feel so sorry for you. There was so much wrong with you. We did the best we could, but you were so badly made.”