She brushed the leaves and bits of tree bark from her tunic and began to pull it over her head.
In the water, Corporal Hendricks waited patiently, continuing in his circle. Time passed. There was no sound. He opened his eyes. Gail was nowhere in sight.
“Gail?” he called.
It was very quiet.
“Gail!”
No answer.
Corporal Hendricks swam rapidly to the bank. He pulled himself out of the water. One leap carried him to his own uniform, neatly piled at the edge of the lake. He grabbed up his blaster.
“Gail!”
The woods were silent. There was no sound. He stood, looking around him, frowning. Gradually, a cold fear began to numb him, in spite of the warm sun.
“GAIL!”
And still there was only silence.
Commander Morrison was worried. “We’ve got to act,” she said. “We can’t wait. Ten lives lost already from thirty encounters. One-third is too high a percentage.”
Hall looked up from his work. “Anyhow, now we know what we’re up against. It’s a form of protoplasm, with infinite versatility.” He lifted the spray tank. “I think this will give us an idea of how many exist.”
“What’s that?”
“A compound of arsenic and hydrogen in gas form. Arsine.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
Hall locked his helmet into place. His voice came through the Commander’s earphones. “I’m going to release this throughout the lab. I think there are a lot of them in here, more than anywhere else.”
“Why here?”
“This is where all samples and specimens were originally brought, where the first one of them was encountered. I think they came in with the samples, or as the samples, and then infiltrated through the rest of the buildings.”
The Commander locked her own helmet into place. Her four guards did the same. “Arsine is fatal to human beings, isn’t it?”
Hall nodded. “We’ll have to be careful. We can use it in here for a limited test, but that’s about all.”
He adjusted the flow of his oxygen inside his helmet.
“What’s your test supposed to prove?” she wanted to know.
“If it shows anything at all, it should give us an idea of how extensively they’ve infiltrated. We’ll know better what we’re up against. This may be more serious than we realize.”
“How do you mean?” she asked, fixing her own oxygen flow.
“There are a hundred people in this unit on Planet Blue. As it stands now, the worst that can happen is that they’ll get all of us, one by one. But that’s nothing. Units of a hundred are lost every day of the week. It’s a risk whoever is first to land on a planet must take. In the final analysis, it’s relatively unimportant.”
“Compared to what?”
“If they are infinitely divisible, then we’re going to have to think twice about leaving here. It would be better to stay and get picked off one by one than to run the risk of carrying any of them back to the system.”
She looked at him. “Is that what you’re trying to find out—whether they’re infinitely divisible?”
“I’m trying to find out what we’re up against. Maybe there are only a few of them. Or maybe they’re everywhere.” He waved a hand around the laboratory. “Maybe half the things in this room are not what we think they are… It’s bad when they attack us. It would be worse if they didn’t.”
“Worse?” The Commander was puzzled.
“Their mimicry is perfect. Of inorganic objects, at least. I looked through one of them, Stella, when it was imitating my microscope. It enlarged, adjusted, reflected, just like a regular microscope. It’s a form of mimicry that surpasses anything we’ve ever imagined. It carries down below the surface, into the actual elements of the object imitated.”
“You mean one of them could slip back to Terra along with us? In the form of clothing or a piece of lab equipment?” She shuddered.
“We assume they’re some sort of protoplasm. Such malleability suggests a simple original form—and that suggests binary fission. If that’s so, then there may be no limits to their ability to reproduce. The dissolving properties make me think of the simple unicellular protozoa.”
“Do you think they’re intelligent?”
“I don’t know. I hope not.” Hall lifted the spray. “In any case, this should tell us their extent. And, to some degree, corroborate my notion that they’re basic enough to reproduce by simple division—the worse thing possible, from our standpoint.
“Here goes,” Hall said.
He held the spray tightly against him, depressed the trigger, aimed the nozzle slowly around the lab. The commander and the four guards stood silently behind him. Nothing moved. The sun shone in through the windows, reflecting from the culture dishes and equipment.
After a moment he let the trigger up again.
“I didn’t see anything,” Commander Morrison said. “Are you sure you did anything?”
“Arsine is colorless. But don’t loosen your helmet. It’s fatal. And don’t move.”
They stood waiting.
For a time nothing happened. Then—
“Good God!” Commander Morrison exclaimed.
At the far end of the lab a slide cabinet wavered suddenly. It oozed, buckling and pitching. It lost its shape completely—a homogeneous jellylike mass perched on top of the table. Abruptly, it flowed down the side of the table on to the floor, wobbling as it went.
“Over there!”
A bunsen burner melted and flowed along beside it. All around the room objects were in motion. A great glass retort folded up into itself and settled down into a blob. A rack of test tubes, a shelf of chemicals…
“Look out!” Hall cried, stepping back.
A huge bell jar dropped with a soggy splash in front of him. It was a single large cell, all right. He could dimly make out the nucleus, the cell wall, the hard vacuoles suspended in the cytoplasm.
Pipettes, tongs, a mortar, all were flowing now. Half the equipment in the room was in motion. They had imitated almost everything there was to imitate. For every microscope there was a mimic. For every tube and jar and bottle and flask…
One of the guards had his blaster out. Hall knocked it down. “Don’t fire! Arsine is inflammable. Let’s get out of here. We know what we wanted to know.”
They pushed the laboratory door open quickly and made their way out into the corridor. Hall slammed the door behind them, bolting it tightly.
“Is it bad, then?” Commander Morrison asked.
“We haven’t got a chance. The arsine disturbed them; enough of it might even kill them. But we haven’t got that much arsine. And, if we could flood the planet, we wouldn’t be able to use our blasters.”
“Suppose we left the planet.”
“We can’t take the chance of carrying them back to the system.”
“If we stay here we’ll be absorbed, dissolved, one by one,” the Commander protested.
“We could have arsine brought in. Or some other poison that might destroy them. But it would destroy most of the life on the planet along with them. There wouldn’t be much left.”
“Then we’ll have to destroy all life forms! If there’s no other way of doing it we’ve got to burn the planet clean. Even if there wouldn’t be a thing left but a dead world.”
They looked at each other.
“I’m going to call the System Monitor,” Commander Morrison said. “I’m going to get the unit off here, out of danger—all that are left, at least. That poor girl by the lake…” She shuddered. “After everyone’s out of here, we can work out the best way of cleaning up this planet.”
“You’ll run the risk of carrying one of them back to Terra?”
“Can they imitate us? Can they imitate living creatures? Higher life forms?”
Hall considered. “Apparently not. They seem to be limited to inorganic objects.”
The Commander smiled grimly. “Then we’ll go back without any inorganic material.”
“But our clothes! They can imitate belts, gloves, boots—”
“We’re not taking our clothes. We’re going back without anything. And I mean without anything at all.”