George brushed, his hand shaking with excitement. This must be his lucky morning. It might even be a double selection; the package seemed unusually big. His lips began to lift at the corners. With a nod in place of thanks, he took the parcel from the postmistress, and went out, clutching it.
The woman looked after him disapprovingly. “I want you to stay away from that gesell, Fanny,” she said to her eleven-year-old daughter, who was reading a postcard in the back of the cubicle. “There’s something funny about him and his eggs.”
“Oksey-snoksey, mums, if you say so. But lots of people hatch eggs.”
The postmistress sniffed. “Not the way he hatches eggs,” she said prophetically.
On the way home George tore the wrapper from the box. He couldn’t wait any longer. He pulled back the flaps eagerly.
Inside the careful packing there was a large, an unusually large, pale blue -green egg. Its surface stood up in tiny bosses, instead of being smooth as eggs usually were, and the shell gave the impression of being more than ordinarily thick. According to the instructions with the parcel, it was a chu lizard egg from the planet Morx, a little -known satellite of Amorgos. It was to be incubated at a temperature of 76.3 C. with high humidity. It would hatch in about eight days.
George felt the surface of the egg lovingly. If only Mother were here to see it! She had always been interested in his egg hatching; it was the only thing he had ever wanted to do that she had really approved of. And this was an unusually interesting egg.
When he got home he went straight to the incubator. Tenderly he laid the soidisant chu lizard egg in one of the compartments; carefully he adjusted the temperature control. Then he sat down on the black and red afghan on his cot (his mother had crocheted the coverlet for him just before she passed away), and once more read the brochure that had come with the egg.
When he had finished it, he sighed. It was too bad there weren’t any eggs in the incubator now, eggs that were on the verge of hatching. Eight days was a long time to wait. But this egg looked wonderfully promising; he didn’t know when the club had sent out an egg that attracted him so. And from one point of view it was a good thing he hadn’t any hatchings on hand. Hatching, for all its excitement, was a sort of ordeal. It always left him feeling nervously exhausted and weak.
He had lunch, and after lunch, lying under the red and black afghan, he had a little nap. When he woke it was late afternoon. He went over to the incubator and looked in. The egg hadn’t changed. He hadn’t expected it would.
His nap hadn’t cheered or refreshed him. He was almost more tired than he had been when he lay down to sleep. Sighing, he went around to the other side of the incubator and stared at the cage where he kept the things he had hatched out. After a moment he took his eyes away. They weren’t interesting, really—lizards and birds and an attractive small snake or two. He wasn’t interested in the things that were in eggs after they had hatched out.
In the evening he read a couple of chapters in the Popular Guide to Egg Hatchery.
He woke early the next morning, his heart hammering. He’d had another of those nightmares. But—his mind wincingly explored the texture of the dream—but it hadn’t been all nigh tmare. There’d been a definitely pleasurable element in it, and the pleasure had been somehow connected with the egg that had come yesterday. Funny. (Jreel, who had molded the mnxx bird egg from its original cuboid into the present normal ovoid shape, wouldn’t have found it funny at all.) It was funny about dreams.
He got grapes from the cupboard and made café à la crème on the hotplate. He breakfasted. After breakfast he looked at his new egg.
The temperature and humidity were well up. It was about time for him to give the egg a quarter of a turn, as the hatching instruction booklet suggested. He reached in the compartment, and was surprised to find it full of a dry, brisk, agreeable warmth. It seemed to be coming from the egg.
How odd! He stood rubbing the sprouting whiskers on his upper lip. After a moment he tapped the two gauges. No, the needles weren’t stuck; they wobbled normally. He went around to the side of the incubator and checked the connections. Everything was sound and tight, nothing unusual. He must have imagined the dry warmth. Rather apprehensively, he put his hand back in the compartment—he still hadn’t turned the egg—and was relieved to find the air in it properly humid. Yes, he must have imagined it.
After lunch he cleaned the cabin and did little chores. Abruptly, when he was half through drying the lunch dishes, the black depression that had threatened him ever since Mother died swallowed him up. It was like a physical blackness; he put down the dish undried and groped his way over to a chair. For a while he sat almost unmoving, his hands laced over his little stomach, while he sank deeper and deeper into despair. Mother was gone; he was forty-six; he had nothing to live for, not a thing… He escaped from the depression at la st, with a final enormous guilty effort, into one of his more unpleasant fantasies. The imago within the molded mnxx bird egg, still plastic within its limey shell, felt the strain and responded to it with an inaudible grunt.
On the third day of the hatching, the egg began to enlarge. George hung over the incubator, fascinated. He had seen eggs change during incubation before, of course. Sometimes the shells got dry and chalky; sometimes they were hygroscopic and picked up moisture from the air. But he had never seen an egg act like this one. It seemed to be swelling up like an inflating balloon.
He reached in the compartment and touched the egg lightly. The shell, that had been solimey and thick when he first got it, was now warm and yielding and gelatinous. There was something uncanny about it. Involuntarily, George rubbed his fingers on his trouser leg.
He went back to the incubator at half-hour intervals. Even-time it seemed to him that the egg was a little bigger than it had been. It was wonderfully interesting; he had never seen such a fascinating egg.
He got out the hatching instructions booklet and studied it. No, there was nothing said about changes in shell surface during incubation, and nothing about the egg’s incredible increase in size. And the booklets were usually careful about mentioning such things. The directors of the Egg-of-the-Month Club didn’t want their subscribers to overlook anything interesting that would happen during the incubation days. They wanted you to get your money’s worth.
There must be some mistake. George, booklet in hand, stared at the incubator doubtfully. Perhaps the egg had been sent him by mistake; perhaps he hadn’t been meant to have it. (He was right in both these suppositions: Jreel had meant the egg for Krink, as a little gift.) Perhaps he ought to get rid of the egg. An unauthorized egg might be dangerous.
Hesitantly he raised the incubator lid. It would be a shame, but—yes, he’d throw the egg out. Anything, anything at all might be inside an egg. There was no sense in taking chances. He approached his hand. The imago, dimly aware that it was at a crucial point in its affairs, exerted itself.
George’s hand halted a few inches from the egg. He had broken into a copious sweat, and his forearm was one large cramp. Why, he must have been crazy. He didn’t want—he couldn’t possibly want to—get rid of the egg. What had been the matter with him? He perceived very clearly now what he thought he must have sensed dimly all along; that there was a wonderful promise in the egg.
A promise of what? Of—he couldn’t be sure—but of warmth, of sleep, of rest. A promise of something he’d been wanting all his life. He couldn’t be any more specific than that. But if what he thought might be in the egg was actually there, it wouldn’t matter any more that Mother was dead and that he was forty-six and lonely. He’d—he gulped and sighed deeply—he’d be happy. Satisfied.