“Is he eating well?”
Willendorf chuckled loudly. “I’ll say he is! Kechnie made up some synthetics based on that piece of fruit he brought with him, and he’s been stuffing himself wildly. He’s gained ten pounds since he came on ship. No, it’s not lack of food!”
“I guess not,” I said. “Keep an eye on him, will you? I feel responsible for his being here, and I want him to come through the voyage in good health.”
After that, I began to observe Alaree more closely myself, and I detected the change in his personality too. He was no longer the cheerful, childlike being who delighted in pouring out questions in endless profusion. Now he was moody, silent, always brooding, and hard to approach.
On the sixteenth day out—and by now I was worried seriously about him—a new manifestation appeared. I was in the hallway, heading from my cabin to the chartroom, when Alaree stepped out of an alcove. He reached up, grasped my uniform lapel, and, maintaining his silence, drew my head down and stared pleadingly into my eyes.
Too astonished to say anything, I returned his gaze for nearly thirty seconds. I peered into his transparent pupils, wondering what he was up to. After a good while had passed, he released me, and I saw something like a tear trickle down his cheek.
“What’s the trouble, Alaree?”
He shook his head mournfully and shuffled away.
I got reports from the crewmen that day and next that he had been doing this regularly for the past eighteen hours—waylaying crewman, staring long and deep at them as if trying to express some unspeakable sadness, and walking away. He had approached almost everyone on the ship.
I wondered now how wise it had been to allow an extraterrestrial, no matter how friendly, to enter the ship. There was no telling what this latest action meant.
I started to form a theory. I suspected what he was aiming at, and the realization chilled me. But once I reached my conclusion, there was nothing I could do but wait for confirmation.
On the nineteenth day, Alaree again met me in the corridor. This time our encounter was more brief. He plucked me by the sleeve, shook his head sadly and shrugged his shoulders, and walked away.
That night, he took to his cabin, and by morning he was dead. He had apparently died peacefully, in his sleep.
“I guess we’ll never understand him, poor fellow,” Willendorf said, after we had committed the body to space. “You think he had too much to eat, sir?”
“No,” I said. “It wasn’t that. He was lonely, that’s all. He didn’t belong here, among us.”
“But you said he had broken away from that group-mind,” Willendorf objected.
I shook my head. “Not really. That group-mind arose out of some deep psychological and physiological needs of those people. You can’t just declare your independence and be able to exist as an individual from then on if you’re part of that group-entity. Alaree had grasped the concept intellectually, to some extent, but he wasn’t suited for life away from the corporate mind, no matter how much he wanted to be.”
“He couldn’t stand alone?”
“Not after his people had evolved that gestalt-setup. He learned independence from us,” I said. “But he couldn’t live with us, really. He needed to be part of a whole. He found out his mistake after he came aboard and tried to remedy things.”
I saw Willendorf pale. “What do you mean, sir?”
“You know what I mean. When he came up to us and stared soulfully into our eyes. He was trying to form a new gestalt—out of us! Somehow he was trying to link us together, the way his people had been linked.”
“He couldn’t do it, though,” Willendorf said fervently.
“Of course not. Human beings don’t have whatever need it is that forced those people to merge. He found that out, after a while, when he failed to get anywhere with us.”
“He just couldn’t do it,” Willendorf repeated.
“No. And then he ran out of strength,” I said somberly, feeling the heavy weight of my guilt. “He was like an organ removed from a living body. It can exist for a little while by itself, but not indefinitely. He failed to find a new source of life—and he died.” I stared bitterly at my fingertips.
“What do we call it in my medical report?” asked Ship Surgeon Thomas, who had been silent up till then. “How can we explain what he died from?”
“Call it—malnutrition,” I said.