The Source n-3 Page 9

  So thought its keeper, Vasily Agursky, where he sat with his chin and drawn cheeks cupped in the palms of his too-large hands, gazing at Encounter Three through the thick glass wall of its tank. Agursky was a small man, no more than five-three in height, slender, slope-shouldered and with a large head whose dome came shiny and pointed through its uneven halo of dirty-grey down. Behind thick lenses his magnified eyes were light-brown in a pale face; they were red-rimmed, tiredly mobile under thin but expressive eyebrows. Thin-lipped and big-eared, he looked somehow gnomish in a paradoxically uncomical sort of way.

  The red lighting of the thing's room was turned low so as not to frighten it down out of sight beneath the sand of its tank; it 'knew' Agursky and rarely became excited in his presence; while he sat observing the thing, with his skinny legs astride a steel chair and his elbows on the backrest, so it sprawled on the floor of its tank watching him. At present it was a leech-thing with a rodent face. A pseudopod, sprouting from a spot on its rear left-hand side, moved slowly on starfish feet, independently examining pebbles and lumps of crusted sand, then laying them aside. The pseudopod's single rudimentary eye was alert and unblinking.

  The creature was hungry, and Agursky — unable to sleep despite the half-bottle of vodka he'd consumed — had decided to come down here and feed it. The queer thing (one of many queer things) was this: that lately he'd noticed how its moods seemed to affect him. When it was restless, so was he. Likewise when it was hungry. Tonight, despite the fact that he'd eaten fairly well during the day, he had felt hungry. And so he'd known that it must be hungry, too. It didn't really need to eat, not that he'd been able to discover, but it did like to. Offal from the cookhouse, blood of slaughtered beasts, the matted hides and hooves, eyes and brains and guts which men scorned — all of these things were grist for its mill. Ground up, they'd all go in through its feeder tube, and the thing in the tank would devour the lot.

  'What the hell are you?' Agursky asked the creature for what must have been the thousandth time since it came into his care. Frustrating to say the least, for if anyone should have known the answer to his question it was Agursky himself. Zoology and psychology were his 'A' subjects; he'd been brought in specifically to study the thing and find out what made it tick, but all he'd discovered so far was that it ticked. After he'd worked with it for only a month or so other scientists, supposedly better qualified, had come to see it. Agursky had been slacking, apparently. But they'd looked at it, studied his notes, shaken their heads and gone away baffled. And he'd been left to get on with it. But get on with what? He knew the creature as intimately as any man could possibly wish to know it, and still he didn't know it.

  Its blood was similar to the blood of all Earth's myriad animals, but sufficiently dissimilar to any of them as to make it alien. On the scales of intelligence it was not a higher species — not in comparison with Man, the dolphins, canines, apes — and yet it did have a certain sly intelligence. Its eyes, for example, were near-hypnotic. Every now and then Agursky had to stop staring it down and look away, or he was liable to go to sleep. The thing had put him to sleep on several occasions. And nightmares had invariably brought him gibbering awake.

  It could be taught but resisted learning: it knew, for instance, that when its keeper showed it a white card food was coming. Also that a black card meant it was in danger of receiving an electrical shock. It had learned, painfully, that white and black cards together meant: 'Don't touch the food until the black card is taken away'. But to show it those cards together would produce a great fury in it. When food was available it did not like being denied it, or threatened through it. These were a few of the things Agursky had learned about the creature, but he would get the uncomfortable feeling just looking at it that it had learned far more about him. Another thing he knew about it was this: that it had a capacity for hate. And he knew who it hated.

  'Feeding time,' he told it. 'I'm going to pump some vile, rancid, gone-off shit in there with you. And you're going to slurp it up like mother's milk and honey sweet from the comb — you bloody thing.' Doubtless it would prefer a live white rat or two, but the sight (even the thought) of that had already given Agursky too many bad dreams. For that was something else he'd learned about the thing in the tank: that while it would take dead, clotted blood readily enough, it in fact preferred it straight from a perforated, pulsing artery. Namely, that it was a vampire.

  As Agursky stood up and began to prepare the feeding apparatus, he remembered the first time he'd tried the thing with a live rat. That had meant first drugging the creature in the tank and putting it well and truly to sleep. A small amount of blood containing a massive dose of tranquillizing agent had seen to that; after the thing had groggily retreated beneath the sand of its tank to sleep, then the heavy lid had been undamped and lifted, and the wriggling rat inserted. Three hours later (a remarkably short spell for the drug dosage) the thing had regained its senses and surfaced to see what was going on.

  The rat hadn't stood a chance. Oh, it had fought as only a cornered rat can fight, but to no avail. The vampire had held it down, bitten through its neck and siphoned off its living blood. And it had formed a pair of fleshy, needle-tipped tubes to do so, actual siphons which it had slid into the rat's severed vessels.

  The 'meal' had taken only a minute or two to complete, and Agursky had never seen the creature so avid for its food. After that… occasionally the thing would take on certain rodent characteristics, which its keeper assumed it had 'learned' from the creature it devoured. Nor was 'devoured' too strong a word for it; for after leeching the rat's blood, then the creature had consumed skin, bones, tail and all!

  From this and subsequent meals of living food, Agursky had drawn several conclusions, however unproven. Encounter One had been a vampire; or if not vampiric, certainly it had been a carnivore. It had been seen to devour men whole before it fled the complex. Encounter Two, the wolf, was also a predator, a flesh-eater. Four was a bat — but specifically a vampire bat. And five… he had declared himself to be Wamphyri. Was there anything at all in that world beyond the Gate which was not vampiric or savagely carnivorous? Agursky's conclusion: that world was not one he would care to visit to find out at first hand.

  Another speculation or line of thought which might lead to a number of unthinkable conclusions was this: that three of the five encounters — the five incursions from beyond — had been shape-changers, creatures which were not bound to one form. The thing in the tank, having examined and eaten a rat, could now assume an imperfect rodent identity. Would it also be able to emulate a man? Which in turn begged the question, was the Wamphyri warrior a man with the ability to change his shape, or had he been something else which now merely imitated a man?

  Morbid thoughts and questions such as these had driven Agursky to drink, and thinking them again now made him wish he had a bottle with him right here, right now. But he didn't. The sooner he could get done with this, the sooner he'd be able to get back to his quarters and drink himself to sleep.

  Just inside the door stood a trolley with the creature's food in a lidded container. The container was hooked up to an electric pump. Agursky wheeled the trolley closer to the tank and plugged in to the power supply. He coupled up the container's outlet to a feeder tube in the end wall of the tank, turned the valves on the container and tank to the open position and started the motor. The electric motor was quietly efficient; with a cough and a gurgle, glutinous liquids commenced to flow.

  As he worked, Agursky had been aware that the thing was watching him. Strangely, it had not turned toward the food supply but remained in the position in which he'd left it. Only its eyes had swivelled to follow his movements. Agursky was puzzled. Dark red lumps of minced meat in a stream of semi-clotted beast-blood were jetting in sporadic spurts into the tank, forming a foul heap of guts on the sand at that end of the thing's 'lair'. And still it hadn't moved.

  Agursky frowned. The creature could consume half its own weight at a time, and it hadn't been fed f
or four days. Could it be sick? Was its air supply OK? And now what the hell was it doing?

  He went back to his chair and seated himself as before, with his arms folded on the backrest and his chin resting on the back of his left hand. The creature stared back at him through eyes which now seemed very nearly human. Its face, too, had lost much of its rodent identity and had taken on more nearly human outlines. The leech-like body sac was elongating, losing its dark colour and corrugations. Legs were developing, and arms — and breasts?

  'What?' Agursky hissed the single word from between clenched teeth. 'What…?'

  The spurious pebble-examining member shrank, was withdrawn into the main mass of the body. That body was now very nearly human, in shape if nothing else. It was like a girl, even had a girl's flowing hair. But on the creature's head that mass of hair was coarse and lacklustre, like the false hair of a poorly made doll. The breasts were lumpy and without nipples, like pallid blobs of flesh stuck on a flat male chest. The size, too, was wrong, for the thing only had the mass of a large dog, which even remodelled made for a very small woman.

  With every passing second the expression on Agursky's face grew that much more disgusted. The creature was attempting to resemble a woman, but it was making a nightmarishly horrific job of it. Its 'hands' had now shaped themselves into appendages very like human hands, but the nails on the too-slender fingers were bright scarlet and far too long. Worse, its 'feet' were also hands: the creature couldn't discriminate. Then… the thing's simpering, idiot face smiled at Agursky, and suddenly he knew where he'd seen that smile before.

  It was the face and smile, even the hair, of that sex-starved hag Klara Orlova, a spindly theoretical physicist who was fascinated by the creature and occasionally came in here to admire it! It had seen her face, her hands with their brightly painted nails, the upper roundness of her bosom where she wore that gown of hers unbuttoned to titillate the common soldiers — but it didn't know she had nipples, and it hadn't seen her feet at all. It had simply assumed that her feet were like her hands!

  Agursky checked himself: no, for that would be to grant the thing too high a level of intelligence, and he had already satisfied himself that it was not especially bright. This mimicking was like the mindless, human-seeming cry of a parrot, or the ape wearing spectacles to 'read' a book. Indeed it was less than the latter, for it was purely instinctive. Like the colour change of a chameleon, or better still the chameleon's colour control plus the elasticity of the octopus.

  Even while he was thinking these thoughts the thing had been ironing out certain imperfections. The skin tone was more nearly correct, as was the painted Cupid's bow of the mouth. The vampire's nose and dark nostrils, however, were still ugly and alien, ridged, convoluted and quivering. In its natural environment (wherever the hell that was) its sense of smell might well be its most important tool for survival; to change that organ's shape would be to drastically degrade its function. In any event, the final image which the thing presented — for all that it was still wrong, still grotesque — was at least something of… an attempt?

  But an attempt at what?

  Suddenly, unreasonably, Agursky felt fury surging in him. Was this… this damned, flesh-eating slime actually trying to seduce him?

  'Damn you — you thing! — that's it, isn't it?' he cried, jumping to his feet. 'You know the difference between us — or at least you sense it. And you'd like to use it! You think I'll be a little nicer to my plastic, blood-guzzling, alien little whore if 1 think I can maybe make love to it, eh? By God! — have you got the wrong man!'

  Like a playful cat the thing stretched, rolled on its back, thrust its pale, useless breasts at him. There was no navel in its belly, but a little below where a navel should be was a protuberant, pulsing tube of flesh that could only be the thing's conception of a human vulva. The sexual implications turned Agursky white with rage in a moment. The thing was trying to seduce him! He yanked a black card from the pocket of his smock, showed it to the half-smiling, half-grimacing thing.

  'You see this, you motherless monstrosity? How'd you like to dance for uncle, eh? You don't like that, do you?' But it was a bluff and the creature knew it. Its limpid eyes looked through the glass, this way and that all around the room, but Agursky hadn't brought the shock-box with him. He was impotent to carry out his threat.

  The gurgling, crimson mess from the feeder tube continued to pump into the tank. The container was almost empty, and still the thing hadn't been tempted to start feeding. But now, as Agursky tremblingly took his seat again, a stream of scarlet seepage from the pile of offal found a zigzag route to the creature and touched its side. The metamorphosis which took place in it then was rapid indeed.

  Its neck twisted round at an impossible angle to allow its quasi-human face to peer at the blood spreading round its flank. Then the face turned back and Agursky saw that the thing's eyes had taken on the hue of the blood it had observed. Hell glared out of those eyes at him. The grotesque, imitation face began to melt into another shape, another form. The mouth widened until it spanned almost the entire face, opened to display a cavernous gape where crooked, needle-sharp teeth lined a scarlet throat as far back as Agursky cared to look. And a forked snake's tongue vibrated in there, the tips of the fork flickering this way and that between the slime-dripping lips of the thing.

  'That's more like it!' Agursky cried, feeling that he'd achieved something of a victory. 'Your little plan didn't work, so now let's see you as you really are.'

  Contact with the raw red pulp had triggered the thing's hunger, ripped away its mask. In the face of instinctive urges it was incapable of keeping up the deception. Except… for all the time he'd spent with the creature, Agursky had never seen anything quite like this before. Its food was there and the thing from beyond the Gate knew it, but more than just hunger and blood-lust had been triggered. And again the scientist wondered: is it ill? Is it suffering? And if so, from what?

  For as if the vibration of the tongue had been only the start of it, the catalyst, now the thing's entire body was beginning to tremble. The human paleness of its protoplasm (Agursky could scarcely bring himself to think of it simply as 'flesh') was turning a slaty, almost leprous colour and tufts of coarse hair were sprouting everywhere. Limbs retracted, withering back into the main mass, and the vibrations of the whole began to come in regular, almost seismic spasms.

  Watching it — fascinated despite himself, so that he was unable to take his eyes off it — Agursky's lips drew back from his yellow teeth in a silent snarl of loathing. God, the thing resembled nothing so much as a vast, diseased placenta — with a head!

  But its crimson eyes still glared at him, and even as he continued to observe it so the thing curled back its forked tongue to reach far back into its own throat. Its spasms became retching movements, until finally the creature coughed its tongue back into view. Balanced in the slightly upward curving fork was a quivering, misted-pearl sphere about as big as a small boy's marble.

  Agursky quickly stood up, went to the tank, crouched down and stared hard at the strange blob of matter in the creature's gaping mouth. Whatever it was, he could see that it was alive! Its surface was aswim with a pearly film, but Agursky believed he could see rows of flickering cilia around its circumference, causing the sphere to turn vertically on its own axis where it rested in the fork of the thing's tongue.

  'Now what — ?' he started to say — but at that precise moment the creature thrust its head forward and its tongue uncoiled, hurling the pearly sphere directly at the scientist's face!

  Agursky automatically jerked back, went sprawling on his backside. A ridiculous reaction, for of course the creature could do him no harm while the thick glass of the tank separated them. That was where the shimmering blob of matter had landed, flattening itself to the glass wall and clinging there. But even as Agursky stood up and shakily dusted himself down, so the sphere was on the move.

  It slipped down the inner wall of the tank, came to rest — however brie
fly — on the blood-slimed sand and pebbles. Then it resumed its spherical shape, floating like a pearly bubble on the film of blood. And with its myriad flickering cilia propelling it, it swiftly followed the stream back to its source beneath the feeder tube. Then, an astonishing thing:

  Like a ping-pong ball riding a jet of water, the spheroid climbed the last thick trickle of gore to the tube's inlet and disappeared inside. Frowning, jaw hanging slack, Agursky stepped to that side of the tank. The valves were still open, of course, and… it would be wonderful to isolate this thing, this — parasite? Is that what it was? Some parasitic creature inhabiting the alien's body? Perhaps, but -

  All sorts of ideas, words, were going through Agursky's mind. He had likened the creature itself to a placenta in the moment before it coughed this thing up. Maybe the connection he'd made there hadn't been too wild after all. The creature had seemed to undergo a sort of cataplasia, a reversion of its cells and tissues to a more primitive, almost embryonic form. Placenta, cataplasia, embryo — protoplast?

  Egg?

  Agursky turned off the valves and pump, pulled the trolley close and lifted the heavy lid of the food container. Inside, central on the bottom of the container, floating on a film of blood amidst a few lumps of red gristle and unidentifiable debris, the pearly sphere whirled in a blur of almost invisible cilia. Agursky stared at it and shook his head in bewilderment.

  In a moment of carelessness, fascinated and simply forgetting what he was dealing with here, he reached into the container and gently nudged the thing with the digit finger of his right hand. In the moment of contact he realized the folly of his action, but it was already too late.

  The spheroid turned blood red in a moment — and ran up his hand under the cuff of his white laboratory smock. Agursky gave a gurgling cry, rearing up and back, away from the trolley. He could feel the spheroid wetly mobile on his forearm, moving swiftly to his upper arm, his shoulder. In a moment it was on his neck, coming out from under his collar. Dancing like a maniac, he cursed and slapped at the thing, felt it damp against his palm and for a single instant of time believed he'd crushed it. But then it was on the back of his neck.