And himself? Jerry? Jerry shook his head woozily. It was hard to be self-analytical after ten days of three and four hours sleep per twenty. He had what his grandmother had once described as the curse of the Gael—black stubbornness and red rages.
All of these traits, in all four of them, had normally been buried safely below the surfaces of their personalities and had only colored them as individuals. But now, the last two weeks had worn those surfaces down to basic personality bedrock. Jerry shoved the thought out of his mind.
“Well,” he said, turning to Communicator, “we’re almost to your village now…. You can’t say someone didn’t come with you, this time.”
Communicator gabbled. The transceiver in Jerry’s hand translated.
“Alas,” the native said, “but you are not with me.”
“Cut it out!” said Jerry wearily. “I’m right here beside you.”
“No,” said Communicator. “You accompany me, but you are not here. You are back with your dead things.”
“You mean the ship, and the rest of it?” asked Jerry.
“There is no ship,” said Communicator. “A ship must have grown and been alive. Your thing has always been dead. But we will save you.”
III
They came out of the path at last into a clearing dotted with whitish, pumpkinlike shells some ten feet in height above the brown earth in which they were half-buried. Wide cracks in the out-curving sides gave view of tangled roots and plants inside, among which other natives could be seen moving about, scratching, tasting, and making holes in the vegetable surfaces.
“Well,” said Jerry, making an effort to speak cheerfully, “here I am.”
“You are not here.”
The berserk tigerishness in Jerry leaped up unawares and took him by the inner throat. For a long second he looked at Communicator through a red haze. Communicator gazed back patiently, evidently unaware how close he was to having his neck broken by a pair of human hands.
“Look—” said Jerry, slowly, between his teeth, getting himself under control, “if you will just tell me what to do to join you and your people, here, I will do it.”
“That is good!”
“Then,” said Jerry, still with both hands on the inner fury that fought to tear loose inside him, “what do I do?”
“But you know—” The enthusiasm that had come into Communicator a moment before wavered visibly. “You must get rid of the dead things, and set yourself free to grow, inside. Then, after you have grown, your unsick self will bring you here to join us!”
Jerry stared back. Patience, he said harshly to himself.
“Grow? How? In what way?”
“But you have a little bit of proper life in you,” explained Communicator. “Not much, of course… but if you will rid yourself of dead things and concentrate on what you call nightmares, it will grow and force out the poison of the dead life in you. The proper life and the nightmares are the hope for you.”
“Wait a minute!” Jerry’s exhaustion-fogged brain cleared suddenly and nearly miraculously at the sudden surge of excitement into his bloodstream. “This proper life you talk about—does it have something to do with the nightmares?”
“Of course. How could you have what you call nightmares without a little proper life in you to give them to you? As the proper life grows, you will cease to fight so against the ‘nightmares’…”
Communicator continued to talk earnestly. But Jerry’s spinning brain was flying off on a new tangent. What was it he had been thinking earlier about tranquilizers—that he had not taken any himself for some time? Then, what about the nightmares in his last four hours of sleep?
He must have had them—he remembered now that he had had them. But evidently they had not bothered him as much as before—at least, not enough to send him scrambling for tranquilizers to dull the dreams’ weird impact on him.
“Communicator!” Jerry grabbed at the thin, leathery-skinned arm of the native. “Have I been chang—growing?”
“I do not know, of course,” said the native, courteously. “I profoundly hope so. Have you?”
“Excuse me—” gulped Jerry. “I’ve got to get oot of here—back to th’ ship!”
He turned, and raced back up the trail. Some twenty minutes later, he burst into the clearing before the ship to find an ominous silence hanging over everything. Only the faint rustle and hissing from the ever-growing jungle swallowing up the ship sounded on his eardrums.
“Milt—Ben!” he shouted, plunging into the ship. “Art!”
A hail from farther down the main corridor reassured him, and he followed it up to find all three unrestrained members of the crew in the sick bay. But—Jerry brought himself up short, his throat closing on him—there was a figure on the table.
“Who…” began Jerry. Milt Johnson turned around to face him. The captain’s body mercifully hid most of the silent form on the table.
“Wally Blake,” said Milt emptily. “He managed to strangle himself after all. Got twisted up in his restraint jacket. Ben and I heard him thumping around in there, but by the time we got to him, it was too late. Art’s doing an autopsy.”
“Not exactly an autopsy,” came the soft, Virginia voice of the medician from beyond Milt. “Just looking for something I suspected… and here it is!”
Milt spun about and Jerry pushed between the big captain and Ben. He found himself looking at the back of a human head from which a portion of the skull had been removed. What he saw before him was a small expanse of whitish, soft inner tissue that was the brainstem; and fastened to it almost like a grape growing there, was a small, purplish mass.
Art indicated the purple shape with the tip of a sharp, surgical instrument.
“There,” he said. “And I bet we’ve each got one.”
“What is it?” asked Ben’s voice, hushed and a little nauseated.
“I don’t know,” said Art harshly. “How the devil would I be able to tell? But I found organisms in the bloodstreams of those of us I’ve taken blood samples from—organisms like spores, that look like this, only smaller, microscopic in size.”
“You didn’t tell me that!” said Milt, turning quickly to face him.
“What was the point?” Art turned toward the Team captain. Jerry saw that the medician’s long face was almost bloodless. “I didn’t know what they were. I thought if I kept looking, I might know more. Then I could have something positive to tell you, as well as the bad news. But—it’s no use now.”
“Why do you say that?” snapped Milt.
“Because it’s the truth.” Art’s face seemed to slide apart, go loose and waxy with defeat. “As long as it was something nonphysical we were fighting, there was some hope we could throw it off. But—you see what’s going on inside us. We’re being changed physically. That’s where the nightmares come from. You can’t overcome a physical change with an effort of will!”
“What about the Grotto at Lourdes?” asked Jerry. His head was whirling strangely with a mass of ideas. His own great-grandfather—the family story came back to mind—had been judged by his physician in 1896 to have advanced pulmonary tuberculosis. Going home from the doctor’s office, Simon Fraser McWhin had decided that he could not afford to have tuberculosis at this time. That he would not, therefore, have tuberculosis at all. And he had dismissed the matter fully from his mind.
One year later, examined by the same physician, he had no signs of tuberculosis whatsoever.
But in this present moment, Art, curling up in his chair at the end of the table, seemed not to have heard Jerry’s question. And Jerry was suddenly reminded of the question that had brought him pelting back from the native village.