It’s hard to imagine anybody being taken in now, because Hennessy no longer looks even remotely human. He resembles a boil in the process of draining. Various nasty fluids leak from his cheeks, his mouth, his eyes. Even with his restraints on, his movements are twitchy, violent, and inhuman. But the thing occupying him manages a sneer as he confronts the Captain: “Come to negotiate? How cute.”
The Captain says, “What are you, and what do you want?”
The faux-Hennessy leers at him, and through bubbling lips, explains, “I think it’s fairly clear what I am. I’m an intelligent parasitic organism. Not evolved on that planet where you found me, but on another many light-years away, spreading from system to system the same way I’ve spread to you: via fools stumbling in where they don’t belong. If I told you how many sentient races I’ve infected down to the very last organism, all because of uncounted stupid space travelers like yourself giving me a ride from one world to another, you would quail in horror. I will infect your entire civilization, and you will do nothing to stop me.”
“Thank you,” says the Captain. He leaves the room via the same aperture he used to enter, tells his crew that Hennessy is a lost cause, and with a quick flip of a switch ejects the isolation chamber into a nearby sun, incinerating his old friend, the monster occupying him, and any chance of the foulness spreading to the rest of the human race. Such a course of action would be cold, and it would be cruel, and it would lead to some hard questions from a fleet board of enquiry, but it would also be completely sensible.
Except, of course, that he doesn’t do any of that. What he does is leave the room via the same aperture he used to enter, tell his crew that he’s lost all the crew members he’s going to, and that he wants options for curing Hennessy on his desk in one hour, damn it. Whereupon everybody disperses and lets the thing that used to be Hennessy continue to brew and mutate and become more dangerous, like a sausage plumping in its croissant dough.
How irresponsible! But this is not the worst part they miss.
Another thing needs to be established here. Hennessy, while he was Hennessy, was just a guy. Oh, he was a good companion for this routine journey between the stars, even if, as you impartial observers would have noted if your humble narrator had seen fit to subject you to the kabuki sameness of the first part of the story, a bit of a jackass, precisely the kind of putz who was just naturally the one person out of all the crew to get himself infected by some kind of Lovecraftian alien blood tick. Were this a thriller, you the audience would be sitting there on your fat asses clucking, well, of course, he was always the one I expected to go first. But he was, again, just a guy: not particularly bright, not possessed of prodigious reservoirs of strength, not naturally capable of shrugging off a blaster burst to the chest, the way this Hennessy was, before a jury-rigged weapon made out of spare parts brought him down just when all seemed lost. There have clearly been physical changes inside him, some improvements to his connective tissue, some replumbing of his circulatory system, some toughening of his actual flesh, that made him as tough and as hard to kill as he was.
You only have to look at his current complexion, a little like a microwavable pizza with pus topping, to know that he’s mutating in strange and terrifying ways, and that this process is accelerating.
It therefore follows—and absolutely should be obvious to the fellow crew members who are all in their respective departments working overtime to collate data for the meeting the Captain’s called in one hour, or having a stand-up quickie in a maintenance niche—that these mutations are likely to continue and that, if the Captain’s incomprehensible decision is to keep him on board, among the pressing tasks that need to be assigned to somebody is constant real-time monitoring. Somebody needs to be watching Hennessy every moment, measuring every infinitesimal change in his condition every moment, making a new threat assessment every moment. This is only common sense, and does it surprise you, at all, that nobody’s been put on this duty? Instead, he’s left in his chair, bubbling, cackling to himself, giving thanks to whatever alien deity he worships, and continuing his transformation from a Hennessy already beyond salvaging into a thing that even Hennessy’s gray-haired old mother back in Wichita, a woman so doting that she breast-fed him until he was seven, would order an exterminator on in two seconds flat.
Nobody’s there to say, “Uh, guys,” when the creature who used to be Hennessy develops extra musculature around its greenish and glistening forearms, and when those powerful limbs begin to struggle with the restraints holding its arms in place.
Incredibly irresponsible!
Too stupid to be borne!
Evidence of a species that deserves to be infected by this horror!
And yet even this is not the most astonishing element they miss; not even close.
You almost don’t need the next part of the story, either. You have internalized the ingredients from long and enthusiastic ingestion and know that what follows next is the last chance the members of this doomed crew have to do something remotely intelligent. Instead, you watch them have what amounts to a board meeting.
During this meeting the various surviving members of the crew all play the parts that reflect their dominant personality traits. There is a Professorial Type who drones on for a little bit about past legends of such a creature, archaeological evidence on various worlds of prior civilizations subsumed and destroyed by it, and an obscure research vessel that a few years back self-destructed after sending out an unnecessarily ambiguous and fragmentary warning, too garbled to be worth much, of what he suspects to be precisely this problem; and while this is all learned and intelligently presented, it is not helpful at all. There is a Panicky Male who imparts pretty much the same message in fewer words by informing everybody that this is all fucked up, man. There’s a Weepy Woman who merely sniffles. The Psychotic Type, fingering a combat knife with deep adoration, opines that the Captain should just let him into the isolation chamber with Hennessy, so he can take care of the problem in the way that none of you pussies could. There are a few angry rejoinders from the Hot Girl and Forgettable Guy who had their stand-up quickie less than an hour ago, and though they cleaned up well and are as close to professional as they ever are, there isn’t a person in the room who doesn’t know what they were just doing or that they unaccountably chose to do it now. The first intelligent comment comes from the Pragmatic Woman who says that Hennessy is already dead and that the thing pretending to be him should be spaced and the whole ship subjected to two days of internal, sterilizing radiation. The Cold Scientist says that it’s worse than that, actually, because they know nothing of the alien organism’s origins, least of all where it evolved and for that matter just what would have to be done to kill it, and that therefore, for the future of the human race, no chances should be taken; they really ought to head for the nearest sun and incinerate themselves in it. Everybody yells at the Cold Scientist for being so cold, and he says that he’s only suggesting the most logical and prudent course. The Guy With A Sweetheart Back Home, acting as if he’s the only person in the room with a reason to live, protests that Angie’s waiting for him.