“You’re a fool, Seevers,” Paul grunted suddenly.
Seevers whirled, whitening. His hand darted out forgetfully toward the young man’s arm, but he drew it back as Paul sidestepped.
“You actually regard this thing as desirable, don’t you?” Paul asked. “You can’t see that you’re under its effect. Why does it affect people that way? And you say I can’t be objective.”
The professor smiled coldly. “I didn’t say it’s desirable. I was simply pointing out that the beings who sent it saw it as desirable. They were making some unwarranted assumptions.”
“Maybe they just didn’t care.”
“Of course they cared. Their fallacy was that we would open it as they would have done—cautiously. Perhaps they couldn’t see how a creature could be both brash and intelligent. They meant for us to read the warning on the shells before we went further.”
“Warning… ?”
Seevers smiled bitterly. “Yes, warning. There was one group of oversized symbols on all the spheres. See that pattern on the top ring? It says, in effect—‘Finder-creatures, you who destroy your own people—if you do this thing, then destroy this container without penetrating deeper. If you are self-destroyers, then the contents will only help to destroy you.’”
There was a frigid silence.
“But somebody would have opened one anyway,” Paul protested.
Seevers turned his bitter smile on the window. “You couldn’t be more right. The senders just didn’t foresee our monkey-minded species. If they saw Man digging out the nuggets, braying over them, chortling over them, cracking them like walnuts, then turning tail to run howling for the forests—well, they’d think twice before they fired another round of their celestial buckshot.”
“Doctor Seevers, what do you think will happen now? To the world, I mean?”
Seevers shrugged. “I saw a baby born yesterday—to a woman down the island. It was fully covered with neuroderm at birth. It has some new sensory equipment—small pores in the finger tips, with taste buds and olfactory cells in them. Also a nodule above each eye sensitive to infrared.”
Paul groaned.
“It’s not the first case. Those things are happening to adults, too, but you have to have the condition for quite a while. Brother Thomas has the finger pores already. Hasn’t learned to use them yet, of course. He gets sensations from them, but the receptors aren’t connected to olfactory and taste centers of the brain. They’re still linked with the somesthetic interpretive centers. He can touch various substances and get different perceptive combinations of heat, pain, cold, pressure, and so forth. He says vinegar feels ice-cold, quinine sharp-hot, cologne warm-velvet-prickly, and… he blushes when he touches a musky perfume.”
Paul laughed, and the hollow sound startled him.
“It may be several generations before we know all that will happen,” Seevers went on. “I’ve examined sections of rat brain and found the microorganisms. They may be working at rerouting these new receptors to proper brain areas. Our grandchildren—if Man’s still on Earth by then—can perhaps taste analyze substances by touch, qualitatively determine the contents of a test tube by sticking a finger in it. See a warm radiator in a dark room—by infrared. Perhaps there’ll be some ultraviolet sensitization. My rats are sensitive to it.”
Paul went to the rat cages and stared in at three gray-pelted animals that seemed larger than the others. They retreated against the back wall and watched him warily. They began squeaking and exchanging glances among themselves.
“Those are third-generation hypers,” Seevers told him. “They’ve developed a simple language. Not intelligent by human standards, but crafty. They’ve learned to use their sensory equipment. They know when I mean to feed them, and when I mean to take one out to kill and dissect. A slight change in my emotional odor, I imagine. Learning’s a big hurdle, youngster. A hyper with finger pores gets sensations from them, but it takes a long time to attach meaning to the various sensations—through learning. A baby gets visual sensations from his untrained eyes—but the sensation is utterly without significance until he associates milk with white, mother with a face shape, and so forth.”
“What will happen to the brain?” Paul breathed.
“Not too much, I imagine. I haven’t observed much happening. The rats show an increase in intelligence, but not in brain size. The intellectual boost apparently comes from an ability to perceive things in terms of more senses. Ideas, concepts, precepts—are made of memory collections of past sensory experiences. An apple is red, fruity-smelling, sweet-acid flavored—that’s your sensory idea of an apple. A blind man without a tongue couldn’t form such a complete idea. A hyper, on the other hand, could add some new adjectives that you couldn’t understand. The fully-developed hyper—I’m not one yet—has more sensory tools with which to grasp ideas. When he learns to use them, he’ll be mentally more efficient. But there’s apparently a hitch.
“The parasite’s instinctive goal is to insure the host’s survival. That’s the substance of the warning. If Man has the capacity to work together, then the parasites will help him shape his environment. If Man intends to keep fighting with his fellows, the parasite will help him do a better job of that, too. Help him destroy himself more efficiently.”
“Men have worked together—”
“In small tribes,” Seevers interrupted. “Yes, we have group spirit. Ape-tribe spirit, not race spirit.”
Paul moved restlessly toward the door. Seevers had turned to watch him with a cool smirk.
“Well, you’re illuminated, youngster. Now what do you intend to do?”
Paul shook his head to scatter the confusion of ideas. “What can anyone do? Except run. To an island, perhaps.”
Seevers hoisted a cynical eyebrow. “Intend taking the condition with you? Or will you try to stay nonhyper?”
“Take… are you crazy? I mean to stay healthy!”
“That’s what I thought. If you were objective about this, you’d give yourself the condition and get it over with. I did. You remind me of a monkey running away from a hypodermic needle. The hypo has serum health-insurance in it, but the needle looks sharp. The monkey chatters with fright.”
Paul stalked angrily to the door, then paused. “There’s a girl upstairs, a dermie. Would you—”
“Tell her all this? I always brief new hypers. It’s one of my duties around this ecclesiastical leper ranch. She’s on the verge of insanity, I suppose. They all are, before they get rid of the idea that they’re damned souls. What’s she to you?”
Paul strode out into the corridor without answering. He felt physically ill. He hated Seevers’ smug bulldog face with a violence that was unfamiliar to him. The man had given the plague to himself! So he said. But was it true? Was any of it true? To claim that the hallucinations were new sensory phenomena, to pose the plague as possibly desirable—Seevers had no patent on those ideas. Every dermie made such claims; it was a symptom. Seevers had simply invented clever rationalizations to support his delusions, and Paul had been nearly taken in. Seevers was clever. Do you mean to take the condition with you when you go? Wasn’t that just another way of suggesting, “Why don’t you allow me to touch you?” Paul was shivering as he returned to the third floor room to recoat himself with the pungent oil. Why not leave now? he thought.
But he spent the day wandering along the waterfront, stopping briefly at the docks to watch a crew of monks scrambling over the scaffolding that surrounded the hulls of two small sea-going vessels. The monks were caulking split seams and trotting along the platforms with buckets of tar and paint. Upon inquiry, Paul learned which of the vessels was intended for his own use. And he put aside all thoughts of immediate departure.