“Any number of biological reasons,” Dmitri said happily “Carnivorous plants make themselves smell like rotten meat to attract flies. Moths generate pheromones to attract mates. Deer deposit scents to warn other deer of danger. Rabbits mark their territories with scent glands to keep other rabbits out. Skunks protect themselves with odors. All different ways of using scents to communicate or modify the behavior of other creatures.” He stopped. “I just had a thought.”
“What?”
“Why do we like them?”
“Because they’re cute!” Maggie called from above.
“What if that nice spicy smell you like so much isn’t their natural aroma? What if it’s tailor-made to influence our attitude toward them?”
Ruiz said, “How could they know what appeals to us? Different life form, different planet, entirely out of their biological spectrum.”
“Feedback,” Dmitri said. “They respond to all the billions of scent molecules we’re putting out from our skin, our mouths, our gonads, our intestinal tracts. Their olfactory organs analyze them as naturally as our own eyes put together a lot of data and give us the shape of the world around us. Then their scent glands mix up a brew that gets the response they want.”
Jameson grunted. “Scents couldn’t affect us that powerfully.”
“Couldn’t they? The smell of a baby can bring on a maternal response in a nonlactating female. The presence of menstruating females in a group living situation can bring on a woman’s period. A man can make you want to fight him by the smell of his fear, or back down by the smell of his rage. Do you know that a cat has a scent gland on its forehead that—”
“All right!” Jameson said. “I give up!”
“It doesn’t have to be sinister, you know,” Dmitri said, mollified. “They needed our help, and they instinctively tried to make themselves pleasing.”
Up above, the two pink forms were swinging themselves up the braided cables and optical fibers like a pair of cotton-candy monkeys. The vertical crevice twisted and widened into a dim grotto filled with the shrouded shapes of corroded machines that resembled rusty twelve-foot-high beehives. The dust, thick on the floor, showed the tracks of many humans. There was a litter of empty cans to show where they’d stopped to camp, and from somewhere behind the hives came the unmistakable smell of human waste.
“Watch it!” Ruiz cried as he pulled himself up into the chamber, and Jameson whirled to see one of Klein’s little glittering bugs scurry across the floor. He pounced and scooped it up, and with one smooth unbroken motion flung it back down the metal chasm they’d climbed from.
The two humanoids had disappeared. Jameson looked around, trying to locate them among the tall domelike shapes. He stepped round one of the hives and came face to three-eyed, long-snouted face with a Cygnan who seemed to be as startled as he was.
Jameson made a dive for it. At the back of his mind was the thought that if he could grab hold of a leg and manage to keep himself from getting drilled through by that rasping tongue until the others rushed up and helped him pin the alien down, he could tie it up with some of the rope he carried, just as he’d tied Augie.
“Kill it!” Maggie shouted behind him.
That gave him a jolt, but the advice was academic. The Cygnan reared up like an ocean wave and oozed backward along itself until it was running away, upside down on its queerly articulated legs. It was already a dozen feet away and rotating on its axis to put itself right-side up, without missing a beat, before Jameson could react. Ruiz threw his spear, which clattered harmlessly off one of the metal hives.
Jameson pounded after it futilely. He watched helplessly as it skidded around a dome and streaked for a crack in the grotto wall.
“Let’s get out of here!” Ruiz said, gasping.
The Cygnan rounded another dome, its flexible head raised like the trunk of a charging elephant. Jameson changed course, knowing he could never head it off.
He circled around, a mouse lost amid an acre of overturned bowls. He had lost track of the Cygnan. Ruiz, his spear retrieved, was circling in the opposite direction. Dmitri and Maggie were doing their best to flank him. But the Cygnan didn’t emerge anywhere.
“Here!” he heard Ruiz gasp.
He ran in fifteen-foot leaps toward Ruiz’s voice, Dmitri bringing up the rear. When he saw Ruiz, spear braced, fixed on something behind a dome, he approached from the opposite side. Maggie was coming up behind Ruiz, a kitchen knife in her hand.
“Look,” Ruiz said.
The Cygnan was stretched out on its back, writhing voluptuously like a puppy on a deliciously scratchy rug. The two humanoids squatted peaceably on their furry haunches beside it, looking like great big jolly pink nursery spiders.
There was an overpowering musty odor hanging like a miasma over the scene, too powerful to be coming from the one Cygnan. It was overlaid by a pungent, sour smell that tugged at Jameson’s memory until he realized that it reminded him of the scent in the zookeepers’ quarters the time Tetrachord had behaved so sluggishly.
“They’ve got the critter mesmerized,” Dmitri observed.
“Help me tie it up,” Jameson said.
He trussed the Cygnan’s legs together with the nylon line, in two groups of three limbs each. He’d found that one of the middle legs stretched naturally to join the front limbs, while the other middle leg wanted to fold rearward. The Cygnan offered no resistance. It was alive and moving, but uncoordinated. The fan-shaped irises of its eyes had contracted to slits, despite the dimness, and the three eyestalks were limp.
“Now we know why the pink beasties developed the ability to mimic odors,” Dmitri said. “Their ancestors used to hypnotize their prey.”
“What was their prey, Dmitri?” Ruiz said. “The ancestors of the Cygnans?”
“No, I don’t think they could have evolved on the same planet.”
“How … how could they do a thing like that with smells?” Maggie asked, motioning toward the hogtied Cygnan, whose whole body was pulsating, lengthening and contracting like an accordion.
Dmitri shrugged. “How does the Pesis wasp mesmerize a tarantula, get the tarantula to stand still while the wasp digs its grave, cooperate while the wasp walks under its fangs, paralyzes it, and lays an egg on its abdomen? I don’t know. Maybe these pink teddy bears release super-pheromones, thousands of times more powerful than the natural variety, the way synthetic analogs of morphine like etorphine are thousands of times more powerful than morphine itself. Maybe the synthetic pheromones initiate powerful endocrine reactions that cause exaggerated versions of normal Cygnan syndromes—pleasure, fear, torpor, docility, autointoxication, anything!”
“In a creature that evolved on a different planet?” Jameson said.
Dmitri shrugged again. “The humanoids seem to be virtuoso scent-producers. And they’ve been around Cygnans a long time. No wonder they were kept behind glass.”
Jameson wound nylon cord around the Cygnan’s snout to keep it from sawing away at its bonds when it recovered from its trance. The two humanoids watched him with huge intelligent eyes.
“They ought to find it in a day or two,” he said. “By that time we’ll have made it, or we’ll have been too late.”
“Do you really think leaving that individual alive is going to make a difference in what the Cygnans think about human beings?” Ruiz asked wearily.
“I don’t know,” Jameson said. “Probably not.”
He picked up his duffle and got to his feet. The humanoids seemed reluctant to follow suit. They kept trying to drift back to the helpless Cygnan.
“Tod,” Maggie said. “Do you think…?”