I tried to review all that had happened on the planet and I got bogged down time after time as I tried to make the picture dovetail. The trail of thought I followed kept turning back to Kemper’s worry about the critters’ lack of a defense mechanism.
Maybe, I told myself, they had a defense mechanism, after all—the slickest, smoothest, trickiest one Man ever had encountered.
As soon as the camp awoke, I went to our tent to stretch out for a moment, perhaps to catch a catnap. Worn out, I slept for hours.
Kemper woke me.
“Get up, Bob!” he said. “For the love of God, get up!”
It was late afternoon and the last rays of the sun were streaming through the tent flap. Kemper’s face was haggard. It was as if he’d suddenly grown old since I’d seen him less than twelve hours before.
“They’re encysting,” he gasped. “They’re turning into cocoons or chrysalises or …”
I sat up quickly. “That one we found out there in the field!”
He nodded.
“Fullerton?” I asked.
“We’ll go out and see, all five of us, leaving the camp and animals alone.”
We had some trouble finding it because the land was so flat and featureless that there were no landmarks.
But finally we located it, just as dusk was setting in.
The ball had split in two—not in a clean break, in a jagged one. It looked like an egg after a chicken has been hatched.
And the halves lay there in the gathering darkness, in the silence underneath the sudden glitter of the stars—a last farewell and a new beginning and a terrible alien fact.
I tried to say something, but my brain was so numb that I was not entirely sure just what I should say. Anyhow, the words died in the dryness of my mouth and the thickness of my tongue before I could get them out.
For it was not only the two halves of the cocoon—It was the marks within that hollow, the impression of what had been there, blurred and distorted by the marks of what it had become.
We fled back to camp.
Someone, I think it was Oliver, got the lantern lighted. We stood uneasily, unable to look at one another, knowing that the time was past for all dissembling, that there was no use of glossing over or denying what we’d seen in the dim light in the gully.
“Bob is the only one who has a chance,” Kemper finally said, speaking more concisely than seemed possible. “I think he should leave right now. Someone must get back to Caph. Someone has to tell them.”
He looked across the circle of lantern light at me.
“Well,” he said sharply, “get going! What’s the matter with you?”
“You were right,” I said, not much more than whispering. “Remember how you wondered about a defense mechanism?”
“They have it,” Weber agreed. “The best you can find. There’s no beating them. They don’t fight you. They absorb you. They make you into them. No wonder there are just the critters here. No wonder the planet’s ecology is simple. They have you pegged and measured from the instant you set foot on the planet. Take one drink of water. Chew a single grass stem. Take one bite of critter. Do any one of these things and they have you cold.”
Oliver came out of the dark and walked across the lantern-lighted circle. He stopped in front of me.
“Here are your diet kit and notes,” he said.
“But I can’t run out on you!”
“Forget us!” Parsons barked at me. “We aren’t human any more. In a few more days …”
He grabbed the lantern and strode down the cages and held the lantern high, so that we could see.
“Look,” he said.
There were no animals. There were just the cocoons and the little critters and the cocoons that had split in half.
I saw Kemper looking at me and there was, of all things, compassion on his face.
“You don’t want to stay,” he told me. “If you do, in a day or two, a critter will come in and drop dead for you. And you’ll go crazy all the way back home—wondering which one of us it was.”
He turned away then. They all turned away from me and suddenly it seemed I was all alone.
Weber had found an axe somewhere and he started walking down the row of cages, knocking off the bars to let the little critters out.
I walked slowly over to the ship and stood at the foot of the ladder, holding the notes and the diet kit tight against my chest.
When I got there, I turned around and looked back at them and it seemed I couldn’t leave them.
I thought of all we’d been through together and when I tried to think of specific things, the only thing I could think about was how they always kidded me about the diet kit.
And I thought of the times I had to leave and go off somewhere and eat alone so that I couldn’t smell the food. I thought of almost ten years of eating that damn goo and that I could never eat like a normal human because of my ulcerated stomach.
Maybe they were the lucky ones, I told myself. If a man got turned into a critter, he’d probably come out with a whole stomach and never have to worry about how much or what he ate. The critters never ate anything except the grass, but maybe, I thought, that grass tasted just as good to them as a steak or a pumpkin pie would taste to me.
So I stood there for a while and I thought about it. Then I took the diet kit and flung it out into the darkness as far as I could throw it and I dropped the notes to the ground.
I walked back into the camp and the first man I saw was Parsons.
“What have you got for supper?” I asked him.
Worrywart
The title character in “Worrywart” is a copyreader for a big-city newspaper, which was Clifford Simak’s first job at the Minneapolis Star, and he tells us a great deal about that post in this story. And although Cliff quickly moved up to be chief of the copy desk—a position he held for years before being promoted to news editor—I think he really loved being a copyreader: It let him see all the news that came in.
Of course, the more you know, the more you find to worry about, if you are so inclined.
Charley Porter is a copyreader on the Daily Times and a copyreader is a funny kind of critter. He is a comma watcher and a word butcher and a mighty tide of judgment set against the news. He’s a sort of cross between a walking encyclopedia and an ambulatory index.
Occasionally you meet a reporter or an editor or you see their pictures or you hear them spoken of. But you never hear about a copyreader.
The copyreader sits with his fellow copyreaders at a horseshoe-shaped table. If he’s an old time copyreader, like Charley is, he wears a green eyeshade and rolls his shirtsleeves up above his elbows.
Inside the curve of the copydesk sits the man who directs the copyreaders. Since the inside of the desk is known as the slot, this man is called the slot man. To the slot man comes the daily flow of news; he passes the copy to the men around the desk and they edit it and write the headlines.
Because there is always copy enough to fill twenty times the allotted space, the copyreader must trim all the stories and see there is no excess wordage in them. This brings him into continuous collision with reporters, who see their ornately worded stories come out chopped and mangled, although definitely more readable.
When work slacks off in the afternoon, the copyreaders break their silence and talk among themselves. They talk about the news and debate what can be done about it. If you listened to them, not knowing who they were, you’d swear you were listening in on some world commission faced by weighty problems on which life or death depended.