Seevers grinned mischievously. “Comes a planetary shake-up of the first magnitude. Such parasites would naturally pick the host species with the highest intelligence to begin with. With the extra boost, this brainy animal quickly beats down its own enemies, and consequently the enemies of its microbenefactor. It puts itself in much the same position that Man’s in on Earth—lord it over the beasts, divine right to run the place, and all that. Now understand—it’s the animal who’s become intelligent, not the parasites. The parasites are operating on complex instinct patterns, like a hive of bees. They’re wonderful neurological engineers—like bees are good structural engineers; blind instinct, accumulated through evolution.”
He paused to light a cigarette. “If you feel ill, young man, there’s drinking water in that bottle. You look ill.”
“I’m all right!”
“Well, to continue: The intelligent animal became master of his planet. Threats to his existence were overcome—unless he was a threat to himself, like we are. But now, the parasites had found a safe home. No new threats to force readaption. They sat back and sighed and became stagnant—as unchanging as horseshoe crabs or amoeba or other Earth ancients. They kept right on working in their neurological beehives, and now they became cultivated by the animal, who recognized their benefactors. They didn’t know it, but they were no longer the dominant species. They had insured their survival by leaning on their animal prop, who now took care of them with godlike charity—and selfishness. The parasites had achieved biological heaven. They kept on working, but they stopped fighting. The host was their welfare state, you might say. End of a sequence.”
He blew a long breath of smoke and leaned forward to watch Paul, with casual amusement. Paul suddenly realized that he was sitting on the edge of his chair and gaping. He forced a relaxation.
“Wild guesswork,” he breathed uncertainly.
“Some of it’s guesswork,” Seevers admitted. “But none of it’s wild. There is supporting evidence. It’s in the form of a message.”
“Message?”
“Sure. Come, I’ll show you.” Seevers arose and moved toward the wall. He stopped before the two hemispheres. “On second thought, you better show yourself. Take down that sliced meteorite, will you? It’s sterile.”
Paul crossed the room, climbed unsteadily upon a bench, and brought down the globular meteorite. It was the first time he had examined one of the things, and he inspected it curiously. It was a near-perfect sphere, about eight inches in diameter, with a four-inch hollow in the center. The globe was made up of several concentric shells, tightly fitted, each apparently of a different metal. It was not seemingly heavier than aluminum, although the outer shell was obviously of tough steel.
“Set it face down,” Seevers told him. “Both halves. Give it a quick little twist. The shells will come apart. Take out the center shell—the hard, thin one between the soft protecting shells.”
“How do you know their purposes?” Paul growled as he followed instructions. The shells came apart easily.
“Envelopes are to protect messages,” snorted Seevers.
Paul sorted out the hemispheres, and found two mirror-polished shells of paper-thin tough metal. They bore no inscription, either inside or out. He gave Seevers a puzzled frown.
“Handle them carefully while they’re out of the protectors. They’re already a little blurred…”
“I don’t see any message.”
“There’s a small bottle of iron filings in that drawer by your knee. Sift them carefully over the outside of the shells. That powder isn’t fine enough, really, but it’s the best I could do. Felger had some better stuff up at Princeton, before we all got out. This business wasn’t my discovery, incidentally.”
Baffled, Paul found the iron filings and dusted the mirror-shells with the powder. Delicate patterns appeared—latitudinal circles, etched in iron dust and laced here and there with diagonal lines. He gasped. It looked like the map of a planet.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Seevers said. “That’s what we thought too, at first. Then Felger came up with this very fine dust. Fine as they are, those lines are rows of pictograph symbols. You can make them out vaguely with a good reading glass, even with this coarse stuff. It’s magnetic printing—like two-dimensional wire-recording. Evidently, the animals that printed it had either very powerful eyes, or a magnetic sense.”
“Anyone understand it?”
“Princeton staff was working on it when the world went crazy. They figured out enough to guess at what I’ve just told you. They found five different shell-messages among a dozen or so spheres. One of them was a sort of a key. A symbol equated to a diagram of a carbon atom. Another symbol equated to a pi in binary numbers. Things like that—about five hundred symbols, in fact. Some we couldn’t figure. Then they defined other symbols by what amounted to blank-filling quizzes. Things like—‘A star is…’ and there would be the unknown symbol. We would try to decide whether it meant ‘hot,’ ‘white,’ ‘huge,’ and so forth.”
“And you managed it?”
“In part. The ruthless way in which the missiles were opened destroyed some of the clarity. The senders were guilty of their own brand of anthropomorphism. They projected their own psychology on us. They expected us to open the things shell by shell, cautiously, and figure out the text before we went further. Heh! What happens? Some machinist grabs one, shakes it, weighs it, sticks it on a lathe, and—brrrrrr! Our curiosity is still rather apelike. Stick our arm in a gopher hole to see if there’s a rattlesnake inside.”
There was a long silence while Paul stood peering over the patterns on the shell. “Why haven’t people heard about this?” he asked quietly.
“Heard about it!” Seevers roared. “And how do you propose to tell them about it?”
Paul shook his head. It was easy to forget that Man had scurried away from his presses and his broadcasting stations and his railroads, leaving his mechanical creatures to sleep in their own rust while he fled like a bee-stung bear before the strange terror.
“What, exactly, do the patterns say, Doctor?”
“I’ve told you some of it—the evolutionary origin of the neuroderm parasites. We also pieced together their reasons for launching the missiles across space—several thousand years ago. Their sun was about to flare into a supernova. They worked out a theoretical space-drive, but they couldn’t fuel it—needed some element that was scarce in their system. They could get to their outer planet, but that wouldn’t help much. So they just cultured up a batch of their parasite-benefactors, rolled them into these balls, and fired them like charges of buckshot at various stars. Interception-course, naturally. They meant to miss just a little, so that the projectiles would swing into lone elliptical orbits around the suns—close enough in to intersect the radiational ‘life-belt’ and eventually cross paths with planets whose orbits were near-circular. Looks like they hit us on the first pass.”
“You mean they weren’t aiming at Earth in particular?”
“Evidently not. They couldn’t know we were here. Not at a range like that. Hundreds of light-years. They just took a chance on several stars. Shipping off their pets was sort of a last ditch stand against extinction—symbolic, to be sure—but a noble gesture, as far as they were concerned. A giving away of part of their souls. Like a man writing his will and leaving his last worldly possession to some unknown species beyond the stars. Imagine them standing there—watching the projectiles being fired out toward deep space. There goes their inheritance, to an unknown heir, or perhaps to no one. The little creatures that brought them up from beasthood.”
Seevers paused, staring up at the sunlight beyond the high basement window. He was talking to himself again, quietly: “You can see them turn away and silently go back… to wait for their collapsing sun to reach the critical point, the detonating point. They’ve left their last mark—a dark and uncertain benediction to the cosmos.”