'Why didn't you hypnotize me?' Hal said. 'You could have done it easily and a long time ago.'
'Because we doubted that you'd be privy to anything that had to do with our blood. Anyway, we needed someone who had necessary technical knowledge. However, we've been watching you, though not so successfully, since you managed to sneak in the lalitha past us.'
'How did you find out about Jeannette?' Hal said. 'And may I see her?'
'I am sorry; I must say no to your second question,' said Fobo. 'As for the first, it was not until two days ago that we managed to develop a listening device sensitive enough to justify installing it in your rooms. As you know, we are far behind you in some departments.'
'I searched the puka every day for a long time,' said Hal. 'Then, when I learned of the stage of development of your electronics, I quit.'
'Meanwhile, our scientists have been busy,' said Fobo. 'The visit of you Earthmen has stimulated us to research in several fields.'
A nurse entered and said, 'Phone, Doctor.'
Fobo left.
Yarrow paced back and forth and smoked another cigarette. Within a minute, Fobo returned.
He said, 'We're going to have company. One of my colleagues, who is watching the ship, tells me Macneff and two Uzzites left in a gig. They should be arriving at the hospital any second now.'
Yarrow stopped in midstride. His jaw dropped. 'Here? How'd they find out?'
'I imagine they have means about which they failed to inform you. Don't be afraid.'
Hal stood motionless. The cigarette, unnoticed, burned until it seared his fingers. He dropped it and crushed it beneath his sole.
Boot heels clicked in the corridor.
Three men entered. One was a tall and gaunt ghost – Macneff, the Archurielite. The others were short and broad-shouldered and clad in black. Their meaty hands, though empty, were hooked, ready to dart into their pockets. Their heavy-lidded eyes stabbed at Fobo and then at Hal.
Macneff strode up to the joat. His pale blue eyes glared; his lipless mouth was drawn back in a skull's smile.
'You unspeakable degenerate!' he shouted.
His arm flashed, and the whip, jerked out of his belt, cracked. Thin red marks appeared on Yarrow's white face and began oozing blood.
'You will be taken back to Earth in chains and there exhibited as an example of the worst pervert, traitor, and – and–!'
He drooled, unable to find words.
'You – who have passed the Elohimeter, who are supposed to be so pure – you have lusted after and lain with an insect!'
'What!'
'Yes. With a thing that is even lower than a beast of the field! What even Moses did not think of when he forbade union between man and beast, what even the Forerunner could not have guessed when he affirmed the law and set the utmost penalty for it – you have done! You, Hal Yarrow, the pure, the Lamedh-wearer!'
Fobo rose and said in a deep voice, 'Might I suggest and stress that you are not quite right in your zoological classification? It is not the class of Insecta but the class of the Chordata pseudarthropoda, or words to that effect.'
Hal said, 'What?' He could not think.
The wog growleld, 'Shut up. Let me talk.'
He swung to face Macneff. 'You know about her?'
'You are shib that I know her! Yarrow thought he was getting away with something. But, no matter how clever these unrealists are, they're always tripped up. In this case, it was his asking Turnboy about those Frenchmen that fled Earth. Turnboy, who is very zealous in his attitude toward the Sturch, reported the conversation. It lay among my papers for quite a while. When I came across it, I turned it over to the psychologists. They told me that the joat's question was a deviation from the pattern expected of him; a thing totally irrelevent unless it was connected to something we didn't know about him.
'Moreover, his refusal to grow a beard was enough to make us suspicious. A man was put on his trail. He saw Yarrow buying twice the groceries he should have. Also, when you wogs learned the tobacco habit from us and began making cigarettes too, he bought them from you. The conclusion was obvious. He had a female in his apartment.
'We didn't think it'd be a wog female, for she wouldn't have to stay hidden. Therefore, she must be human. But we couldn't imagine how she got here on Ozagen. It was impossible for him to have stowed her away on the Gabriel. She must either have come here in a different ship or be descended from people who had.
'It was Yarrow's talk with Turnboy that furnished the clue. Obviously, the French had landed here and she was a descendant. We didn't know how the joat had found her. It wasn't important. We'll find out, anyhow.'
'You're due to find out some other things, too,' Fobo said calmly. 'How did you discover she wasn't human?'
Yarrow muttered, 'I've got to sit down.'
He swayed to the wall and sank into a chair. One of the Uzzites started to move toward him. Macneff waved the man back and said, 'Turnboy got a wog to read to him a book on the history of man on Ozagen. He came across so many references to the lalitha that the suspicion was bound to rise that the girl might be the one.
'Last week one of the wog physicians, while talking to Turnboy, mentioned that he had once examined a lalitha. Later, he said, she had run away. It wasn't hard for us to guess where she was hiding!'
'My boy,' said Fobo, turning to Hal, 'didn't you read We'enai's book?'
Hal shook his head. 'We started it, but Jeannette mislaid it.'
'And doubtless saw to it that you had other things to think of... they are good at diverting a man's mind. Why not? That is their purpose in life.
'Hal, I'll explain. The lalitha are the highest example of mimetic parasitism known. Also, they are unique among sentient beings. Unique in that all are female.
'If you'd read on in We'enai, you'd have found that fossil evidence shows that about the time that Ozagenian man was still an insectivorous marmoset-like creature, he had in his family group not only his own females but the females of another phylum. These animals looked and probably stank enough like the females of prehomo marmoset to be able to live and mate with them. They seemed mammalian, but dissection would have indicated their pseudoarthropodal ancestry.
'It's reasonable to suppose that these precursors of the lalitha were man's parasites long before the marmosetoid stage. They may have met him when he first crawled out of the sea. Originally bisexual, they became female. And they adapted their shape, through an unknown evolutionary process, to that of the reptile's and primitive mammal's. And so on.
'What we do know is that the lalitha was Nature's most amazing experiment in parasitism and parallel evolution. As man metamorphosed into higher forms, so the lalitha kept pace with him. All female, mind you, depending upon the male of another phylum for the continuance of the species.
'It is astonishing the way they become integrated into the prehuman societies, the pithecanthropoid and neanderthaloid steps. Only when Homo sapiens developed did their troubles begin. Some families and tribes accepted them; others killed them. So they resorted to artifice and disguised themselves as human women. A thing not hard to do – unless they became pregnant.
'In which case, they died.'
Hal groaned and put his hands over his face.
'Painful but real, as our acquaintance Macneff would say,' said Fobo. 'Of course – such a condition required a secret sorority. In those societies where the lalitha was forced to camouflage, she would, once pregnant, have to leave. And perish in some hidden place among her kind, who would then take care of the nymphs' – here Hal shuddered – 'until they were able to go into human cultures. Or else be introduced as foundlings or changelings.
'You'll find quite a tribal lore about them – fables and myths make them central or peripheral characters quite frequently. They were regarded as witches, demons, or worse.
'With the introduction of alcohol in primitive times, a change for the better came to the lalitha. Alcohol made them sterile. At the same time, barring accident, disease, or murder, it made them immortal.'
Hal took his hands off his face. 'You – you mean Jeannette would have lived – forever? That I cost her – that?'
'She could have lived many thousands of years. We know that some did. What's more, they did not suffer physical deterioration but always remained at the physiological age of twenty-five. Let me explain all this. In due order. Some of what I'm going to tell you will distress you. But it must be said.
'The long lives of the lalitha resulted in their being worshipped as goddesses. Sometimes, they lived so long they survived the downfall of mighty nations that had been small tribes when the lalitha first joined their groups. The lalitha, of course, became the repositories of wisdom, wealth, and power. Beligions were established in which the lalitha was the immortal goddess, and the ephemeral kings and priests were her lovers.
'Some cultures outlawed the lalitha. But these either directed the nations they ruled into conquering the people that rejected them or else infiltrated and eventually ruled as powers behind the throne. Being always very beautiful, they became the wives and mistresses of the most influential men. They competed with the human female and beat them at their own game, hands down. In the lalitha, Nature wrought the complete female.
'And so they gained mastery over their lovers. But not over themselves. Though they belonged to a secret society in the beginning, they soon enough split up. They began to identify themselves with the nations they ruled and to use their countries against the others. Moreover, their long lives resulted in younger lalitha becoming impatient. Besult: assassinations, struggles for power, and so on.
'Also, their influence was technologically too stabilizing. They tried to keep the status quo in every aspect of culture, and as a result the human cultures had a tendency to eliminate all new and progressive ideas and the men that espoused them.'