Without bothering to check on his surroundings by forming an eye, the Hunter began to soak his way into the hand and spread through his host's body in normal fashion. He had completed about a quarter of the job when he heard Arthur Kinnaird's voice.
"Ben, Look! The level is going down in the Hunter's dish, and he's higher around Bob's wrist than before! He must be awake!"
The alien extended a finger-sized pseudopod from the basin and waved it to let the speaker know he had been heard. The doctor's voice promptly responded.
"Hunter, get in there and get to work! Bob has picked up a very bad infection that my drugs don't seem to be touching, and he needs you. We'll ask you what happened later; first things first."
The Hunter waved again in acknowledgment. He was already aware of the trouble, and was working on it.
It was real work. Destroying the infecting organisms was a minor task, finished in minutes; but the toxins they had produced were far more difficult to neutral ize, and much of the tissue in the arm where they had entered was totally destroyed. The fracture had not been responsible; neither the Hunter nor Seever had made any professional errors there. A tiny wooden splinter had gotten into Bob's left hand just beyond the end of the cast. It had clearly entered after the Hunter's departure; Bob himself might not have noticed it, but the alien could not possibly have failed to. With his personal resistance to infection long since destroyed and his symbiont absent, Bob was a walking culture tube; a few hours had nearly destroyed his arm. The Hunter had not realized that his host's general self-reparability had become so poor, but the facts seemed beyond dispute. It was not the first time he wished he had studied biochemistry more thoroughly on his home world. He trusted contact with the check team could be made soon; they would certainly have specialists in tins field among their numbers.
But he had to get back to work. He could clean up the ruined arm and expect it to be replaced, however slowly, by normal healing. The real worry was Bob's brain. Some of the bacteria as well as their toxins must have been carried to that organ by his circulatory sys tem, and it could not be taken for granted that nothing had left the blood vessels to lodge in nerve tissue.
The Hunter had always been afraid to intrude into this material himself, though he had maintained a network of his own tissue in the capillaries. Brain cells were the objects where he was most afraid of making a mistake based on differences between human biochemistry and what he was more used to. Now it was necessary to take the chance, and he took it; but he worked very, veryslowly and very, very carefully.
The situation was one he had never been able to explain at all clearly either to his host or to Seever who had been curious about it. The Hunter did possess the ability to sense directly structures down to the large-molecule level. At the same time he could be aware simultaneously of the trillions of cells in a living organism, and work on them all at once with the same attention to each that a jeweler could give to a single watch. When he tried to describe this to a human being, however, it seemed to involve a contrast for his listener; the human seemed to think of him as a whole race of beings instead of an individual. This tended to bother the Hunter, because be could only think of himself as an individual.
Sometimes, facing problems which seemed beyond his ability, he wished there were more of him.
He did solve this one, for the time being. Relatively few bacteria had actually reached Bob's brain cells, and the alien managed to destroy these with comparatively little damage to nearby cells. He knew that these would not be repaired or replaced; it was the same with every humanoid species he knew, and was assumed by the scientists of his own kind to be an evolutionary byproduct of overspecialization of the brain cell. However, the brain itself was a highly redundant structure, and even though Bob was losing thousands of its cells every day, it would be many years before the cumulative effect became serious.
And at the moment, there was little point in worrying years ahead.
Bob was conscious and, except for the arm, normal by Monday night. He was still in the hospital section of the Seevers' home-Mrs. Seever remarked that with two patients, the, place was more like a hospital than it had been, for years-and after dinner the en-tire group assembled to bring everything up to date. Even Bob's parents were present; Daphne was spending the night with a friend.
The Hunter explained in detail what had happened to him, stressing the obvious fact that his people must be somewhere around, and mentioning as little as possible the lack of alertness which had led to such unfortunate results. The others told him of the message left at the ship, and its details, of which he approved. He agreed with the doctor that his entry into the ship had probably tripped a signal at the same time that it had released the paralyzing agent, so the check team was no doubt aware that the ship had been visited. What they would think when they found the small valve open but no prisoner on hand could only be guessed. Of course, if they found the message all would be well, but the Hunter agreed with Bob's pessimistic view that they had probably responded to the signal before the bottle had been placed. It would have been less surprising if they had arrived before the pipe containing his helpless form had been pulled up.
"They would beable to get to any place on Earth in an hour or so, and wouldn’t have to wait until night to check the ship," the Hunter assured in his human friends.
"Then we'd better get back to it as soon as we can," Maeta responded. "We'll try, or the Hunter will try, to tell whether the bottle message has been found and read; but more important, willleave a much more complete message in the Hunter's own language, with instructions on just where to meet him and how to recognize Bob. You didn't cover that in your note, did you, Bob?"
"No, I didn't think of it. I was more concerned with getting the history down. If they've read it, at least they'll know the other creature is dead, and, there's no more need for booby traps."
"They'll have heard, if they read it, that the other one is dead. Will they believe it?" asked Seever.
"That's why the Hunter will have to supplement that message," Maeta pointed out. "He should be able to identify himself clearly in some way-a serial num ber, or something like that."
"But I put my name on my note," Bob said. "They should be able to find me."
"Why?" asked the dark-haired girl. "We can't take for granted that they know all about Ell and its people."
"Why not? They must have investigated the island pretty well when they first came. They'd probably have found us then only I expect the Hunter and I weren't here."
"But why would theyhave known the people by name?" Maeta countered. "I suppose they'd have used human hosts the way the Hunter did, but they wouldn't have gotten in touch with them, would they? Talked to them, and used their help the way the Hunter used yours?"
"Definitely not," the detective said. "Unless some very special situation like minedemanded it, that would be extremely contrary to policy. I did it be-cause I didn't at the time think there was the slightest chance of help from home, and my quarry was a danger to your people."
"Right," Maeta nodded. "And whoever is here, they haven't been hanging around Ell all these years just getting to know these particular people. For one thing, if they had, wouldn't we have more people on the island in Bob's condition? Hunter addicts, if you don't mind?"
"Very unlikely," the alien replied. The group would have specialists able to forestall such events. That's why we're trying to get in touch with them, re member."