Complete Short Fiction, page 42
He had not, up to this moment, really appreciated the magnitude of the task. He had not considered particularly the fact that the other might be as welt hidden as was he himself, that the planet represented an enormous search area however small it might be as planets went, and that even a very small population of possible hosts meant a most appalling amount of search work even if he could recognize the presence of the alien at sight—which he most certainly could not.
All these facts were brought to his attention with shocking suddenness as he took his first clear look around since meeting Robert Kinnaird. The picture that fell on their common retinas was that of the interior of a cylindrical object that vaguely suggested his own spaceship, filled with several rows of seats, most of them occupied by other human beings. Beside him was a window, through which Bob was looking at the moment; and the suspicion that had entered the Hunter’s mind at sight of the vehicle was instantly confirmed by the view through that window. They were on board an aircraft, traveling at a considerable altitude with a, speed and in a direction which the Hunter was in no position to guess. He had hoped at least to begin his search in a region of the crash of the two spaceships; now he realized he would be extremely fortunate even to find that region.
The flight lasted for several hours, and the Hunter quickly gave up the attempt to memorize landmarks-over which they passed. One or two of them did stick in his mind, and might give a rough clue to direction if he could ever identify them later; but he put little trust in this chance. He must keep track of time rather than position, and when he was more familiar with human ways, find out where his host had been at the time of his own intrusion.
The view was interesting, however. It was a beautiful planet, even from his alien viewpoint; mountains and plains, rivers and lakes, forests and prairies were all visible at various times, now clearly through a crystal atmosphere and now in glimpses between billowing clouds of water vapor. The machine he rode occupied some of his attention, as well; from Robert’s window he could see a portion of a metal wing, bearing at least one attachment which evidently contained an engine, as a rapidly rotating airfoil was visible ahead of it. By symmetry, there must be at least two and possibly four of these engines, the Hunter realized; and the machine, as a whole, suggested a very considerable degree of mechanical advancement on the part of this race. If this were the case, it might be worth while to attempt direct communication with the individual serving as his host. That, however, must await further developments.
Eventually the machine began to descend gradually. The Hunter could not see directly ahead, and it happened that they entered a solid cloud layer almost immediately, so he was unable to get any idea of their destination until just before the landing; but at that moment, as they broke out of the lower fringe ‘ of clouds, they made a broad turn over a large seaport city. The Hunter saw a great harbor, with decks and shipping galore, and buildings that reached as far as he could see; then the faint drone of the engines that penetrated the airplane’s cabin increased in pitch, a huge wheel appeared below the visible nacelle, and the big machine glided downwards to contact with a faint jar a broad, hard-surfaced runway located on a point of land across the harbor from the city’s largest buildings.
As Robert disembarked, he glanced back at the airplane; so the Hunter was able to form a better estimate of its size and construction details. He had no idea of the power developed by the four huge engines, and consequently could form no estimate of the machine’s speed; but he could see the quivering above the nacelles that told of hot metal within, and realized that at least they were not the phoenix converters most familiar to his own civilization. Whatever they were, it had already become evident that the craft could put a very respectable fraction of the planet’s circumference behind it without descending for fuel.
After alighting from the airplane, the boy entered a large building nearby, which was crowded with other human beings, and waited for a time. Presently he made his way through the throng to a broad counter, and received his baggage, which be bore off to the other end of the building where a number of ground vehicles were standing. He boarded one of these, which remained where it was until nearly full of passengers, and then moved off toward the denser portion of the city.
During the next several hours, the boy’s actions were largely meaningless to his hidden guest. He changed buses several times, wandered about the city on foot for a while with no apparent purpose, and attended a movie. Fortunately the Hunter’s vision persistence involved a time lapse of approximately the same duration as the human retina, so he also saw moving pictures rather than discrete projections. It was still daylight when they left the theater, and the Hunter decided that it must have been fairly early in the morning when he had first established visual connection with the outside world.
Now his host was walking with what seemed to be a purpose. They returned to a building where they had been earlier, where Robert once more collected his bags; then, after the ticket-window preliminaries which the Hunter was beginning to recognize as customary before a ride, they boarded still another bus. This was decidedly the longest single ride they had taken since leaving the airplane; they were well outside the city, having passed through several smaller collections of buildings, and the sun was almost down when the bus left them at the roadside.
A smaller road led off up a gentle slope; and at the top of this slope was a large, sprawling building—or group of buildings; the Hunter was not sure which. Robert Kinnaird picked up his bags and walked up the hill toward the structure, and the alien began to hope that the journey had ended for the time being at least. He was right, as it turned out.
To Robert, the return to school, assignment to a room, and meeting with old acquaintances was by now a familiar story; but to the Hunter every activity and everything seen and heard was of absorbing interest. He realized that most of it could have no direct application to his mission, but that was no reason to ignore possible sources of knowledge. He was a being of omnivorous interests, and was beginning to realize that direct communication with the human race was going to be necessary. That meant understanding them and their customs, preparatory to learning their spoken and written languages.
So he looked and listened almost feverishly, as Bob went to his room, unpacked, and then wandered about the school meeting friends from former terms. Most particularly he sought to connect spoken words with their meanings; and at first he had a good deal of trouble, for the conversations were mostly about events of the past two months vacation, so that the words usually lacked visible referents. He did learn a few personal names this first evening, among them that of his host, and decided that he could acquire an understanding of the spoken language with little loss of time.
He spent Robert’s sleeping hours in organizing the few words he had learned, and developing a definitely planned campaign for learning more as rapidly as possible. It may seem odd that one who was so completely unable to control his own goings and comings should dream of planning anything; but the extra effective width of his vision angle must be remembered. He was to some extent able to determine what he saw, and therefore felt that he should decide what to look for.
It would have been so much simpler if he could control his host’s movements in some way, or interpret or influence the multitudinous reactions that went on in his nervous system. He had controlled the perit, of course, but not directly; the little creature had been trained to respond to twinges given mechanically to the appropriate muscles, as a horse learns to respond to the reins. The Hunter’s kind used the perits to perform actions which their own semiliquid bodies lacked the physical strength to do; and which were too delicate for their intelligent hosts to perform—or which had to be performed in places which had brought the Hunter to earth; such as the interior of the tiny racer that had brought the Hunter to Earth.
But Robert Kinnaird was not a perit, and could not be treated as one. It was necessary to appeal to his mind, not his body. The Hunter had come to about the best possible place for that purpose, though he did not yet know it.
Classes began the next day. Their purpose was at once obvious to the unlisted pupil, though the subjects were frequently obscure. Kinnaird’s courses included, among other subjects, English, physics, Latin, and French; and of these four, physics proved most helpful to the Hunter in learning the English language. After witnessing a demonstrated experiment in elementary mechanics and comparing it with the explanatory diagrams—produced on the board by the instructor, he was able to interpret most of the diagrams in Bob’s textbook—he had learned the relatively few and simple drawing conventions. Slowly, helped by other experiments performed either by the instructor or Bob himself, many of the printed words became ‘intelligible. Unfortunately for the Hunter’s needs. Bob was a sufficiently advanced reader to have long outgrown subvocalization, so it was some time before the Hunter could determine the relationship between written and spoken words; but one day a heavily-lettered diagram was explained vocally by the teacher, and a few days the Hunter was able to picture the written form of any new word he heard—allowing, of course, for the spelling irregularities which are a curse of the English tongue.
By the beginning of November, two months after the opening of the school, the alien’s vocabulary had about the size though not the content of an intelligent ten-year-old’s. He had a rather excessive store of scientific terms, and many blanks where less specialized words should have been. Also, the meaning he attached to such words as “work” was the purely physical one—not the more inclusive meaning conveyed to the mind of the average layman. He thought it meant “force times distance” and only that.
By this time, however, he had reached a point where tenth-grade English had some meaning to him; and Robert’s literature assignments began to be of some help—new words were frequently intelligible from context, ignorant as the Hunter was of human customs.
About the beginning of December, a slight interruption occurred to the unregistered pupil’s education. Robert Kinnaird had been a member of the school’s football team during the fall. The Hunter, with his intense interest in the health of his host, somewhat disapproved of this, though he understood the need of any muscled animal for exercise. The final game of the school season was played on Thanksgiving Day, and when the Hunter realized it was the final game, no one gave more thanks than he.
But he rejoiced too soon. Bob, reconstructing one of the more exciting moments of the game to prove his point in an argument, slipped in some very greasy mud and twisted an ankle severely enough to put him in bed for several days. The Hunter was not annoyed so much at the enforced absence from classes, since the boy did a certain amount of reading even in the infirmary, but at his own failure to prevent the accident. Had he realized the danger even two or three seconds in advance, he could have supplied considerable reinforcement to the tendons throughout the body,; but once the sprain had occurred, he could do practically nothing to speed up its healing—the danger of infection was already nil without his help.
The incident at least recalled him to some of the duties of a symbiote. From then on, the web of alien cells surrounding Bob’s bones and muscle sheaths was ready at an instant’s notice to tighten to the limits of the Hunter’s physical power. This was not very great, but it helped salve the intruder’s conscience.
Back in class, host and symbiote both worked harder than usual to make up for lost time. By now, the Hunter felt quite at home in the English language, understanding both what he heard and read with very satisfactory proficiency.
Though vastly interested in this task for its own sake, he had never forgotten his primary mission. He had learned quite early that he was in a school, and deduced from this that his host was not an adult; he knew the names of the city, state, and even the country in which the school was located; and he had never ceased from striving to learn the name and location relative to his present position of the place where the boy had spent his last vacation. He wasted no time in vituperating the luck which had led him to select as host probably the only individual in a large group who was going to leave the neighborhood of the crash so soon and travel so far; it was a misfortune, he would readily have admitted, but there was no point in worrying about what was past.
He did learn, from a chance remark passed between Bob and one of his friends, that the place was an island. That would be some help, anyway; even though the fugitive was most probably no longer there, he or rather the being he took as host must have used a vehicle of some sort for his departure; the Hunter remembered his attempt to use the shark too vividly to suppose that the other could escape in a fish, and he had never heard of a warmblooded air breather that lived in the water. Seals and whales had never come up in Bob’s conversation, at least not since the Hunter had been able to understand it.
If a vehicle had been used, it could probably be traced—more easily than a free organism, at any rate. The Hunter was thankful for small blessings.
It remained to learn the location of the island. Bob received frequent letters from his parents; but for some time these did not strike the Hunter as clues, partly because he had a good deal of trouble reading script and partly because he did not know the relationship to the boy of the senders of the letters. He had no scruples about reading Bob’s mail, of course; he simply found it difficult. Robert did write to his parents, at somewhat irregular intervals; but he had other correspondents as well, and it was not until nearly the end of January that the Hunter found that by far the greater number of his letters were going to and coming from one particular address.
This discovery was eased by the boy’s receipt of a typewriter as a Christmas present; this greatly facilitated the Hunter’s reading of the outgoing mail, and he quickly learned that the letters went to Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Kinnaird. He knew from his reading of the custom of family names descending from father to son; and the deduction seemed defensible that the boy would spend his vacation with his parents. If this were true, he had the name of the island. It was now simply a question of locating it—and getting there as soon as possible. He realized that Robert would probably be going back for his next vacation, but that would give the fugitive five more months to cover his tracks; and he had had five already. To anyone but the Hunter, the search would already have seemed utterly hopeless.
There was a large globular map of the planet in the school library, and almost a plethora of fiat maps and charts on walls and in the various books in the school. Robert’s persistent failure to bestow more than a passing glance at any of them quickly grew maddening; and the Hunter began to be tempted to try forcing his eyes. It was a bad idea, and no one knew it better than he; but he possessed emotions as powerful as those of any human being, and experienced fully as much difficulty at times in keeping them in check.
He controlled himself, however—partially. He successfully resisted the temptation to tamper with Robert’s sclerotic muscles;-but gradually there welled up within his being, a growing conviction that direct communication with his host must be attempted if any further progress were to be made on his mission. The idea had, of course, been in the back of his mind from the time he had first entered the boy’s body. At that time he had hoped the necessity would not present itself, for a number of grave problems were involved; but now he felt convinced that there was no alternative. He might ride Robert Kinnaird’s body for the rest of the human being’s life—which, with the hidden visitor would probably be long—without ever approaching a place where clues to the whereabouts of his quarry could be obtained. With the active and intelligent assistance of the host, however; with his knowledge of Earth and its people combined with the Hunter’s familiarity with the ways of his own kind; with an able and healthy body willing to assist the alien instead of bearing him willy-nilly over the face of the globe—there could be no comparison of the relative chances. Communication was essential; and now, the means was at hand.
With the beings who normally served as hosts to the Hunter’s kind, conversation eventually reached a high level of speed and comprehensiveness. It must be remembered that the union took place with the host’s full knowledge and consent; and therefore almost anything the symbiote did to affect the former’s sense organs could be and was interpreted as a means of communication. It was immeasurably more complex than vocal speech; twinges at any and all muscles, shadow-images built directly, on the retina of an eye, motions of the fur with which the Allanese were thickly covered—for the most part, the meaning of any of the “signs” was self-evident; and after a few years’ companionship, conversation was almost telepathic in lucidity and speed between host and indweller.
Even with this background lacking for the second party, however, the Hunter felt that he could make himself known to and understood by his human host. Though the latter had no inkling of his existence, and would probably have suffered a severe emotional shock had the fact been proven to him, the Hunter suddenly realized the circumstance had played into his hands.
There was the protective net he had constructed over Bob’s muscles; and there was the typewriter. The net could be contracted, like the muscles it covered—though with far less power. If a time were chosen when Bob was sitting at the typewriter without particular plans of his own, it might be possible for the Hunter to strike a few keys in his own interest. The chances were really not too good; they depended upon Bob’s reaction when he found his fingers acting without orders.
Two nights after the Hunter had made his decision to act, the opportunity occurred. It was a Saturday evening, and the school had won a hockey game that afternoon. This proved a sufficient stimulus to cause Bob to write to his parents. He went to his room—the other occupant was not in at the time—got out the typewriter, and pounded off a description of the day’s events with very fair speed and accuracy. At no time did he relax sufficiently to make an opportunity for control, in the Hunter’s opinion; but with the letter finished and sealed, Robert suddenly remembered a composition which his English teacher had decreed should be turned in the following Monday. It was as foreign to his nature as to that of most other astounding science-fiction schoolboys to work so far in advance but the typewriter was out, and the hockey game offered itself as a subject which he could treat with some enthusiasm. He inserted a fresh piece of paper in the machine, rapidly typed the standard heading of title, pupil’s name, and date; then he paused to think. He had just written about this subject, but the readers of the first composition would be somewhat less critical of form, spelling and grammar than would his English teacher. A little care must be exercised.
