"Tell 'em! " I shouted into the monkeymouth, and Vladimir said, "All right," and the little people leaned back to listen.
"There are no Russians," Vladimir said.
The little people got ready to carve holes.
"No, wait, it's true! After we got your homing signal, before we landed, we made seven orbital passes over the entire planet. There is absolutely no human life anywhere but here!"
"Conimie lies," Richard Nixon Dixon said.
"God's own truth!" I shouted. "Don't touch him, man! He's telling the truth! The only thing out there over this whole damn planet is that pea soup! It covers every inch of land and every inch of water, except a few holes at the poles."
Dixon began to feel a little confused, and the little people murmured. I guess I sounded sincere.
"If there aren't any people," Dixon said, "where do the Russian attacks come from?"
Vladimir answered that one. For a bunny, he was quick on the uptake. "Spontaneous recombination! You and the Russians got new strains of every microbe developing like crazy. All the people, all the animals, all the plants were killed. And only the microbes lived. But you've been introducing new strains constantly, tough competitors for all those beasts out there. The ones that couldn't adapt died. And now that's all that's left-- the ones who adapt. Constantly."
Andrew Jackson Wallichinsky, the head researcher, nodded. "It sounds plausible."
"If there's anything we've learned about commies in the last thousand years," Richard Nixon Dixon said, "it's that you can't trust 'em any farther than you can spit." "Well," Andy lack said, "it's easy enough to test them."
Dixon nodded. "Go ahead."
So three of the little people went to the boxes and each came, back with an amoeba. In a minute it was clear that they planned to set them on us. Amauri screamed. Vladimir turned white. I would have screamed but I was busy trying to swallow my tongue.
"Relax," Andy Jack said. "They won't hurt you."
"Acredito!" I shouted. "Like it didn't hurt Harold!"
"Harold was killing people. These won't harm you. Unless you were lying."
Great, I thought. Like the ancient test for witches. Throw them in the water, if
they drown they're innocent, if they float they're guilty so kill 'em.
But maybe Andy Jack was telling the truth and they wouldn't hurt us. And if we refused to let them put those buggers on us they'd "know" we had been lying and
punch holes in our monkeysuits.
So I told the little people to put one on me only. They didn't need to test us all.
And then I put my tongue between my teeth, ready to bite down hard and inhale
the blood when the damn thing started eating me. Somehow I thought I'd feel better about going honeyduck if I helped myself along.
They set the thing on my shoulder. It didn't penetrate my monkeysuit. Instead it just oozed up toward my head.
It slid over my faceplate and the world went dark.
"Kane Kanea," said a faint vibration in the faceplate.
"Meu deus," I muttered.
The amoeba could, talk. But I didn't have to speak to answer it. A question would come through the vibration of the faceplate. And then I would lie there and
- it knew my answer. Easy as pie. I was so scared I urinated twice during the interview. But my imperturbable monkeysuit cleaned it all up and got it ready for breakfast, just like normal. And at last the interview was over. The amoeba slithered off my faceplate and returned to the waiting arms of one of the little people, who carried it back to Andy Jack and Ricky Nick. The two men put their hands on the thing and then looked at us in surprise.
"You're telling the truth. There are no Russians."
Vladimir shrugged. "Why would we lie?"
Andy Jack started toward me, carrying the writhing monster that had interviewed me.
"I'll kill myself before I let that thing touch me again."
Andy Jack stopped in surprise. "You're still afraid of that?"
"It's intelligent," I said. "It read my mind."
Vladimir looked startled, and Amauri muttered something. But Andy Jack only smiled. "Nothing mysterious about that. It can read and interpret the electromagnetic fields of your brain, coupled with the amitron flux in your thyroid gland."
"What is it?" Vladimir asked.
Andy Jack looked very proud. "This one is my son."
We waited for the punch line. It didn't come. And suddenly we realized that we had found what we had been looking for-- the result of the little people's research into recombinant human DNA.
"We've been working on these for years. Finally we got it right about four years ago," Andy Jack said. "They were our last line of defense. But now that we know the Russians are dead-- well, there's no reason for them to stay in their nests."
And the man reached down and laid the amoeba into the pea soup that was now about sixty centimeters deep on the floor. Immediately it flattened out on the surface until it was about a meter in diameter. I remembered the whispering voice through my faceplate.
"It's too flexible to have a brain," Vladimir said.
"It doesn't have one," Andy Jack answered. "The brain functions are distributed throughout the body. If it were cut in forty pieces, each piece would have enough memory and enough mindfunction to continue to live. It's indestructible. And when several of them get together, they set up a sympathetic field. They become very bright, then." "Head of the class and everything, I'm sure," Vladimir said. He couldn't hide the loathing in his voice. Me, I was trying not to be sick.
So this is the next stage of evolution, I thought. Man screws up the planet till it's fit for nothing but microbes-- and then changes himself so that he can live on a diet of bacteria and viruses.
"It's really the perfect step in evolution," Andy lack said. "This fellow can adapt to new species of parasitic bacteria and viruses almost by reflex. Control the makeup of his own DNA consciously. Manipulate the DNA of other organisms by absorbing them through the semipermeable membranes of specialized cells, altering them, and setting them free again."
"Somehow it doesn't make me want to feed it or change its diapers."
Andy lack laughed lightly. "Since they reproduce by fission, they're never infant. Oh, if the piece were too small, it would take a while to get back to adult competence again. But otherwise, in the normal run of things, it's always an adult."
Then Andy Jack reached down, let his son wrap itself around his arm, and then walked back to where Richard Nixon Dixon stood watching. Andy Jack put the arm that held the amoeba around Dixon's shoulder.
"By the way, sir," Andy Jack said. "With the Russians dead, the damned war is over, sir."
Dixon looked startled. "And?"
"We don't need a commander anymore."
Before Dixon could answer, the amoeba had eaten through his neck and he was quite dead. Rather an abrupt coup, I thought, and looked at the other little people for a reaction. No one seemed to mind. Apparently their superpatriotic militarism was only skin deep. I felt vaguely relieved. Maybe they had something in common with me after all.
They decided to let us go, and we were glad enough to take them up on the offer. On the way out, they showed us what had caused the explosion in the last "Russian" attack. The mold that protected the steel surface of the installation had mutated slightly in one place, allowing the steel-eating bacteria to enter into a symbiotic relationship. It just happened that the mutation occurred at the place where the hydrogen storage tanks rested against the wall. When a hole opened, one of the first amino-acid sets that came through with the pea soup was one that combines radically with raw hydrogen. The effect was a three-second population explosion. It knocked out a huge chunk of Post 004. We were glad, when we got back to our skipship, that we had left dear old Pollywog floating some forty meters off the ground. Even so, there had been some damage. One of the airborne microbes had a penchant for lodging in hairline cracks and reproducing rapidly, widening microscopic gaps in the structure of the ship. Nevertheless, Amauri judged us fit for takeoff.