“Painfully?” asked the Dog.
“In certain aspects of it, I would imagine so.,,
“Then it is good,” the Dog decided.
“This biologist—it seems to me I’ve heard of other beings that had something similar.”
But, from the way he said it, I was fairly certain that he was thinking of something else entirely. There were, I told myself, a lot of ways in which one could study life.
We rode along for a while without saying anything. We were close to the city now and the traffic was beginning to get heavy. The Dog sat rigid in his seat and I could see that the long string of approaching lights had gotten him on edge. Trying to look at them as something I had never seen before, I could realize just how terrifying they might seem to the creature sitting there beside me.
“Let’s listen to the radio,” I said. I reached out and turned it on.
“Communicator?” asked the Dog.
I nodded. “Must be almost time for the evening news,” I said.
The news had just come on. A violently happy announcer was winding up a commercial about a wonderful detergent. Then the news reporter said: “A man believed to be Parker Graves, science writer for the Evening Herald, was killed just an hour ago by an explosion in the parking lot at the rear of the Wellington Arms. Police believe that a bomb had been placed in his car and exploded when Graves got into it and turned the ignition key. Police are now attempting to make a positive identification of the man, believed to have been Graves, killed in the blast.”
Then he went on to something else. I sat there, startled for a moment, then reached out and turned off the radio.
“What is wrong, my friend?”
“That man who was killed. That was me,” I told him.
“How peculiar,” said the Dog.
I saw the light in his third-floor laboratory and knew Stirling was at work. I pounded on the front door of the building until a wrathful janitor came stumping down the corridor. He motioned for me to leave, but I kept on pounding. Finally he opened the door and I told him who I was. Grudgingly, he let me in. The Dog slipped in beside me.
“Leave the dog outside,” ordered the wrathy janitor. “There ain’t no dogs allowed.”
“That isn’t any dog,” I said.
“What is it, then?”
“It’s a specimen,” I told him.
That one stopped him long enough so we could get past him and start up the stairs. Behind us, I could hear him grumbling as he went stumping back down the first-floor corridor.
Stirling was leaning on a lab table, writing in a notebook. He wore a white coat, incredibly dirty.
He looked around at us as we came in and was very casual. He didn’t know what time it was. You could see he didn’t. He wasn’t surprised at our showing up at this earthly hour.
“Come for the gun?” he asked. “Brought you something,” I said, holding out the sack.
“You have to get that dog out of here,” he said. “There are no dogs allowed.”
“That isn’t any dog,” I told him. “I don’t know what he calls himself, or where he may have come from, but he is an alien.”
Stirling turned all the way around, interested. He squinted at the Dog.
“An alien,” he said, not too surprised, “You mean someone from the stars?”
“That,” said the Dog, “is exactly what he means.”
Stirling crinkled up his brow. He didn’t say a word. You could almost hear him thinking.
“It had to happen sometime,” he finally said, as if he were delivering an opinion of Some weight. “No man could foresee, of Course, how it would come about.”
“So you’re not surprised,” I said. “Oh, of course, surprised. By the form of Our visitor’s appearance, however, rather than the fact.”
“Glad to meet you,” said the Dog. “I understand you are a biologist, and that is something I find most interesting.”
“But this sack,” I told Stirling, “is really why we came.”
“Sack? Oh yes, I thought you had a sack” I held it up so he could see it. “They are aliens, too,” I told him.
It was getting damn ridiculous.
He quirked an eyebrow at me.
Quickly, stumbling over my words, I told him what they were, or what I thought they were. I don’t know why I had that terrible sense of urgency to get it blurted out. It was almost as if I thought that we had little time and had to get it done. And maybe I was right.
Stirling’s face was flushed with excitement now and his eyes had taken on a glitter of dark intensity.
“The very thing,” he said, “I talked about this morning.”
I grunted questioningly, not remembering. “A nonenvironmental being,” he explained. “Something that can live anywhere, that can be anything. A lifeform that has a letter-perfect adaptability. Able to adjust to any condition—”
“But that’s not what you talked about,” I told him, for now I remembered what he’d said.
“Well, maybe not,” he admitted. “Maybe exactly what I had in mind. But the result would be the same.”
He turned back to the laboratory bench and pulled out a drawer and burrowed into t, thrusting stuff aside. Finally he came up with what he had been after, a transparent plastic bag.
“Here,” he said, “let’s dump them into this. Then we can have a look at them.”
He held the bag, stretching its mouth as wide as he could. With the help of the Dog, I upended the improvised sack and shook the bowling balls out of it into the. plastic sack. A few scraps and pieces fell out on the floor. Without bothering to shape themselves into balls, they snaked swiftly for the sink, swarmed up its iron legs, and tumbled down into the basin.
The Dog had started to give chase, but they were too fast for him. He came back crestfallen, his ears drooping and his tail at modified half-mast.
“They retreated down the drain,” he told us.
“Oh well,” said Stirling, happy and elated, “we have most of them right here.”
He tied a good stout knot in the top of the sack and hoisted it up. He passed a hook hanging from a standard above the bench through the knot and the sack hung there, suspended in midair. The plastic was so transparent that you could see the bowling balls without any trouble, every line and shade of them.
“You,” the Dog asked anxiously, “intend to take them apart?”
“In time,” said Stirling. “First I’ll watch them and study them and put them through their paces.”
“Tough paces?” the Dog asked anxiously.
“Say, what have we here?” asked Stirling.
“He doesn’t like our friends,” I said. “They’re cutting in on him. They’re lousing up his racket.”
Off to one side of the room, a telephone purred quietly.
We all stood silent, stricken.
The telephone rang again.
There was something horrifying in the tinkling of the bell. We had been standing there, all snug and all alone, and the bowling balls, for the moment, had been no more than academic objects of great curiosity. But the phone’s ring changed all that and the world came crashing in. There now was no aloneness and there was no snugness, for now we were not alone concerned, and the things hanging in the plastic bag were now far from academic: they were now a menace and a threat and something to be feared and hated.
Now I saw the great black of the night outside and could sense the coldness and the arrogance that held the world entrapped. The room contracted to a cold place of gleaming light shattering on the shine of the laboratory bench and the sink and glassware, and I was a feebleness that stood there, and the Dog and Stirling had no more strength than I.
“Hello,” said Stirling on the phone. And he said, “No, I hadn’t heard it. There be some mistake. He is here right here right now.”
He listened for a moment and then cut in. “But he’s right here with me. He and the talking dog.”
“No, he isn’t drunk. No, I tell you, he’s right—”
I strode forward. “Hey, give it to me!” I yelled.
He shoved the receiver at me and I could Joy’s voice: “You, Parker—what is going on? The radio—”