I said, “I’d like to believe you. It would be very pleasant to believe you. But nothing you can say changes the fact that this thing, this gift of yours could be a weapon. To soften us up before you move in. If you were an advance agent for an invasion fleet, this is what you’d be doing.”
“You are thinking with habits,” he said. “Try to think with logic. Imagine that your race is very old, with much knowledge. You have ships that cross between the stars. Now you discover this young race, these Earthmen, who only begin to learn to leave their own planet. You decide to conquer them. Why? What is your reason?”
“How do I know? It could be anything. It might be something I couldn’t even imagine. For all I know you want to eat us.”
His throat-spines quivered. He said slowly, “You are partly serious. You really think... I am sorry that you did not read the studies of the physiologists. If you had, you would know. My digestion is only for vegetable food. You cannot understand, but—with us, to eat meat is like with you, to eat excretions.”
I said, “All right, maybe we have something else you want. Natural resources that you’ve used up. Some substance, maybe some rare element.”
“This is still habit thinking. Have you forgotten my air machine?”
“—Or maybe you just want the planet itself. With us cleared off it, to make room for you.”
“Have you never looked at the sky at night?”
I said, “All right. But this quiz was your idea, not mine. I admit that I don’t know enough even to make a sensible guess at your motives. And that’s the reason why I can’t trust you.”
He was silent a moment. Then: “Remember that the substance which makes the change is a catalyst. Also it is a very fine powder. The particles are of only a few molecules each. The winds carry it. It is swallowed and breathed in and absorbed by the skin. It is breathed out and excreted. The wind takes it again. Water carries it. It is carried by insects and by birds and animals, and by men, in their bodies and in their clothing.
“This you can understand and know that it is true. If I die another could come and finish what I have begun, but even this is not necessary. The amount of the catalyst I have already released is more than enough. It will travel slowly, but nothing can stop it. If I die now, this instant, still in a year the catalyst will reach every part of the planet.”
After a long time I said, “Then what did you mean by saying that a great harm would be done, if you stopped now?”
“I meant this. Until now, only your Western nations have the catalyst. In a few days their time of crisis will come, beginning with the United States. And the nations of the East will attack.”
4
I found that I could move, inchmeal, if I sweated hard enough at it. It took me what seemed like half an hour to get my hand into my pocket, paw all the stuff out onto the floor, and get the key-ring hooked over one finger. Then I had to crawl about ten feet to Aza-Kra, and when I got there my fingers simply wouldn’t hold the keys firmly enough.
I picked them up in my teeth and got two of the wristcuffs unlocked. That was the best I could do; the other one was behind him, inside the trunk, and neither of us had strength enough to pull him out where I could get at it.
It was comical. My muscles weren’t cramped, but my nervous system was getting messages that said they were—so, to all intents and purposes, it was true. I had no control over it; the human body is about as skeptical as a God-smitten man at a revival meeting. If mine had thought it was burning, I would have developed simon-pure blisters.
Then the pins-and-needles started, as Aza-Kra began to flex his arms and legs to get the stiffness out of them. Between us, after a while, we got him out of the trunk and unlocked the third cuff. In a few minutes I had enough freedom of movement to begin massaging his cramped muscles; but it was three-quarters of an hour before either of us could stand.
We caught the mid-afternoon plane to Paris, with Aza-Kra in the trunk again. I checked into a hotel, left him there, and went shopping: I bought a hideous black dress with imitation-onyx trimming, a black coat with a cape, a feather muff, a tall black hat and the heaviest mourning veil I could find. At a theatrical costumer’s near the Place de l’Opera I got a reasonably lifelike old-woman mask and a heavy wig.
When he was dressed up, the effect was startling. The tall hat covered the cone, the muff covered two of his hands. There was nothing to be done about the feet, but the skirt hung almost to the ground, and I thought he would pass with luck.
We got a cab and headed for the American consulate, but halfway there I remembered about the photographs. We stopped off at an amusement arcade and I got my picture taken in a coin-operated machine. Aza-Kra was another problem—that mask wouldn’t fool anybody without the veil—but I spotted a poorly-dressed old woman and with some difficulty managed to make her understand that I was a crazy American who would pay her five hundred francs to pose for her picture. We struck a bargain at a thousand.
As soon as we got into the consulate waiting-room, Aza-Kra gassed everybody in the building. I locked the street door and searched the offices until I found a man with a little pile of blank passport books on the desk in front of him. He had been filling one in on a machine like a typewriter except that it had a movable plane-surface platen instead of a cylinder.
I moved him out of the way and made out two passports; one for myself, as Arthur James LeRoux; one for Aza-Kra, as Mrs. Adrienne LeRoux. I pasted on the photographs and fed them into the machine that pressed the words "Photograph attached U. S. Consulate Paris, France” into the paper, and then into the one that impressed the consular seal.
I signed them, and filled in the blanks on the inside covers, in the taxi on the way to the Israeli consulate. The afternoon was running out, and we had a lot to do.
We went to six foreign consulates, gassed the occupants, and got a visa stamp in each one. I had the devil’s own time filling them out; I had to copy the scribbles I found in legitimate passports at each place and hope for the best. The Israeli one was surprisingly simple, but the Japanese was a horror.
We had dinner in our hotel room—steak for me, water and soy-bean paste, bought at a health-food store, for Aza-Kra. Just before we left for Le Bourget, I sent a cable to Eli Freeman:
Big story will have to wait spread this now all stock-yard so-called epidemic and similar phenomena due one cause step on somebody’s toe to see what I mean.
Shortly after seven o’clock we were aboard a flight bound for the Middle East.
And that was the fourth day, during which a number of things happened that I didn’t have time to add to my list until later.
Commercial and amateur fishermen along the Atlantic seaboard, from Delaware Bay as far north as Portland, suffered violent attacks whose symptoms resembled those of asthma. Some—who had been using rods or poles rather than nets—complained also of sharp pains in the jaws and hard palate. Three deaths were reported.
The “epidemic” now covered roughly half the continental United States. All livestock shipments from the West had been canceled, stockyards in the affected area were full to bursting. The President had declared a national emergency.
Lobster had disappeared completely from east-coast menus.