She was trying to say something, to interrupt him, but he rushed on. “Listen! The longevity serum-that was a lucky accident. But they played it for all it’s worth. Slick and smooth. They come and give us the stuff free-they don’t ask for a thing in return. Why not? Listen.
“They come here, and the shock of that first contact makes them sweat out that golden gook we need. Then, the last month or so, the pain always eases off. Why? Because the two minds, the human and alien, they stop fighting each other. Something gives way, it goes soft, and there’s a mixing together. And that’s where you get the human casualties of this operation-the bleary men that come out of here not even able to talk human language anymore. Oh, I suppose they’re happy-happier than I am!-because they’ve got something big and wonderful inside ‘em. Something that you and I can’t even understand. But if you took them and put them together again with the aliens who spent time here, they could all live together-they’re adapted.
“That’s what they’re aiming for!” He struck the console with his fist. “Not now-but a hundred, two hundred years from now! When we start expanding out to the stars-when we go a-conquering-we’ll have already been conquered! Not by weapons, Aunt Jane, not by hate-by love! Yes, love! Dirty, stinking, low-down, sneaking love!”
Aunt Jane said something, a long sentence, in a high, anxious voice.
“What?” said Wesson irritably. He couldn’t understand a word.
Aunt Jane was silent. “What, what?” Wesson demanded, pounding the console. “Have you got it through your tin head or not? What?”
Aunt Jane said something else, tonelessly. Once more, Wesson could not make out a single word.
He stood frozen. Warm tears started suddenly out of his eyes. “Aunt Jane-” he said. He remembered, You are already talking longer than any of them. Too late? Too late? He tensed, then whirled and sprang to the closet where the paper books were kept. He opened the first one his hand struck.
The black letters were alien squiggles on the page, little humped shapes, without meaning.
The tears were coming faster, he couldn’t stop them-tears of weariness, tears of frustration, tears of hate. “Aunt Jane!” he roared.
But it was no good. The curtain of silence had come down over his head. He was one of the vanguard-the conquered men, the ones who would get along with their strange brothers, out among the alien stars.
The console was not working anymore; nothing worked when he wanted it. Wesson squatted in the shower stall, naked, with a soup bowl in his hands. Water droplets glistened on his hands and forearms; the pale short hairs were just springing up, drying.
The silvery skin of reflection in the bowl gave him back nothing but a silhouette, a shadow man’s outline. He could not see his face.
He dropped the bowl and went across the living room, shuffling the pale drifts of paper underfoot. The black lines on the paper, when his eye happened to light on them, were worm shapes, crawling things, conveying nothing. He rolled slightly in his walk; his eyes were glazed. His head twitched, every now and then, sketching a useless motion to avoid pain.
Once the bureau chief, Gower, came to stand in his way. “You fool,” he said, his face contorted in anger, “you were supposed to go on to the end, like the rest. Now look what you’ve done!”
“I found out, didn’t I?” Wesson mumbled, and as he brushed the man aside like a cobweb, the pain suddenly grew more intense. Wesson clasped his head in his hands with a grunt, and rocked to and fro a moment, uselessly, before he straightened and went on. The pain was coming in waves now, so tall that at their peak his vision dimmed out, violet, then gray.
It couldn’t go on much longer. Something had to burst.
He paused at the bloody place and slapped the metal with his palm, making the sound ring dully up into the frame of the Station: rroom… rroom…
Faintly an echo came back: boo-oom…
Wesson kept going, smiling a faint and meaningless smile. He was only marking tune now, waiting. Something was about to happen.
The kitchen doorway sprouted a sudden sill and tripped him. He fell heavily, sliding on the floor, and lay without moving beneath the slick gleam of the autochef.
The pressure was too great-the autochef’s clucking was swallowed up in the ringing pressure, and the tall gray walls buckled slowly in…
The Station lurched.
Wesson felt it through his chest, palms, knees, and elbows: the floor was plucked away for an instant and then swung back.
The pain in his skull relaxed its grip a little. Wesson tried to get to his feet.
There was an electric silence in the Station. On the second try, he got up and leaned his back against a wall. Cluck, said the autochef suddenly, hysterically, and the vent popped open, but nothing came out.
He listened, straining to hear. What?
The Station bounced beneath him, making his feet jump like a puppet’s; the wall slapped his back hard, shuddered, and was still; but far off through the metal cage came a long angry groan of metal, echoing, diminishing, dying. Then silence again.
The Station held its breath. All the myriad clicking’s and pulses in the walls were suspended; in the empty rooms the lights burned with a yellow glare, and the air hung stagnant and still. The console lights in the living room glowed like witch fixes. Water in the dropped bowl, at the bottom of the shower stall, shone like quicksilver, waiting.
The third shock came. Wesson found himself on his hands and knees, the jolt still tingling in the bones of his body, staring at the floor. The sound that filled the room ebbed away slowly and ran down into the silences-a resonant metallic sound, shuddering away now along the girders and hull plates, rattling tinnily into bolts and fittings, diminishing, noiseless, gone. The silence pressed down again.
The floor leaped painfully under his body, one great resonant blow that shook him from head to foot.
A muted echo of that blow came a few seconds later, as if the shock had traveled across the Station and back.
The bed, Wesson thought, and scrambled on hands and knees through the doorway, along a floor curiously tilted, until he reached the rubbery block.
The room burst visibly upward around him, squeezing the block flat. It dropped back as violently, leaving Wesson bouncing helplessly on the mattress, his limbs flying. It came to rest, in a long reluctant groan of metal.
Wesson rolled up on one elbow, thinking incoherently, Air, the air lock. Another blow slammed him down into the mattress, pinched his lungs shut, while the room danced grotesquely over his head. Gasping for breath in the ringing silence, Wesson felt a slow icy chill rolling toward him across the room-and there was a pungent smell in the air. Ammonia! he thought, and the odorless, smothering methane with it.
His cell was breached. The burst membrane was fatal-the alien’s atmosphere would kill bun.
Wesson surged to his feet. The next shock caught him off balance, dashed him to the floor. He arose again, dazed and limping; he was still thinking confusedly, The air lock-get out.
When he was halfway to the door, all the ceiling lights went out at once. The darkness was like a blanket around his head. It was bitter cold now in the room, and the pungent smell was sharper. Coughing, Wesson hurried forward. The floor lurched under his feet.