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So now, when he stepped outside, he retreated a pace or two and let the warm air from Polyphema flow like a cloak from his shoulders. Then he peered across the half-mile that separated him from his mother, but he could not see her. The
twilight state and the dark of the unlit interior of her captor hid her.
He tapped in Morse, “Switch to the talkie, same frequency.” Paula Fetts did so. She began asking him frantically if he were all right. He replied he was fine. “Have you missed me terribly, son?” “Oh, very much.” Even as he said this he wondered vaguely why his voice sounded so hollow. Despair at never again being
able to see her, probably.
“I’ve almost gone crazy, Eddie. When you were caught I ran away as fast as I could. I had no idea what horrible monster it was that was attacking us. And then, halfway down the hill, I fell and broke my leg…” “Oh, no, mother!” “Yes. But I managed to crawl back to the ship. And there, after I’d set it myself, I gave myself B.K.
shots. Only, my system didn’t react like it’s supposed to. There are people that way, you know, and the
healing took twice as long. “But when I was able to walk, I got a gun and a box of dynamite. I was going to blow up what I thought was a kind of rock-fortress, an outpost for some kind of extee. I’d no idea of the true nature of these beasts. First, though, I decided to reco
“Listen, son. Before I’m cut off, let me tell you not to give up hope. I’ll be out of here before long and over to rescue you.”
“How?” “If you remember, my lab kit holds a number of carcinogens for field work. Well, you know that sometimes a Mother’s conception-spot when it is torn up during mating, instead of begetting young, goes into cancer—the opposite of pregnancy. I’ve injected a carcinogen into the spot and a beautiful carcinoma has developed. She’ll be dead in a few days.”
“Mom! You’ll be buried in that rotting mass!”
“No. This creature has told me that when one of her species dies, a reflex opens the labia. That’s to permit their young—if any—to escape. Listen, I’ll—” A tentacle coiled about him and pulled him back through the iris, which shut. When he switched back to C.W., he heard, “Why didn’t you communicate? What were you doing? Tell
me! Tell me!” Eddie told her. There was a silence that could only be inter-preted as astonishment. After Mother had
recovered her wits, she said, “From now on, you will talk to the other male through me.”
“Please,” he persisted, not knowing how dangerous were the waters he was wading in, “please let me talk to my mother di—”
For the first time, he heard her stutter.
“Wha-wha-what? Your Mo-Mo-Mother?”
“Yes. Of course.”
The floor heaved violently beneath his feet. He cried out and braced himself to keep from falling and then flashed on the light. The walls were pulsating like shaken jelly, and the vascular columns had turned from red and blue to gray. The entrance-iris sagged open, like a lax mouth, and the air cooled. He could feel the drop in temperature in her flesh with the soles of his feet.
It was some time before he caught on.
Polyphema was in a state of shock.
What might have happened had she stayed in it, he never knew. She might have died and thus forced him out into the winter before his mother could escape. If so, and he couldn’t find the ship, he would die. Huddled in the warmest corner of the egg-shaped chamber, Eddie contemplated that idea and shivered to a degree for which the outside air couldn’t account.
However, Polyphema had her own method of recovery. It consisted of spewing out the contents of her stew-stomach, which had doubtless become filled with the poisons draining out of her system from the blow. Her ejection of the stuff was the physical manifestation of the psychical catharsis. So furious was the flood that her foster son was almost swept out in the hot tide, but she, reacting instinctively, had coiled tentacles about him and the Slug-gos. Then she followed the first upchucking by emptying her other three water-pouches, the second hot and the third lukewarm and the fourth, just filled, cold.
Eddie yelped as the icy water doused him.
Polyphema’s irises closed again. The floor and walls gradually quit quaking; the temperature rose; and her veins and arteries regained their red and blue. She was well again. Or so she seemed.
But when, after waiting twenty-four hours, he cautiously approached the subject, he found she not only would not talk about it, she refused to acknowledge the existence of the other mobile.
Eddie, giving up hope of conversation, thought for quite a while. The only conclusion he could come to, and he was sure he’d grasped enough of her psychology to make it valid, was that the concept of a mobile female was utterly unacceptable.
Her world was split into two: mobile and her kind, the immobile. Mobile meant food and mating. Mobile meant—male. The Mothers were—female.
How the mobiles reproduced had probably never entered the hillcrouchers’ minds. Their science and philosophy were on the instinctive body-level. Whether they had some notion of spontaneous generation
That was that. Any other idea was more than foul and obscene and blasphemous. It was—unthinkable. Polyphema had received a deep trauma from his words. And though she seemed to have recovered, somewhere in those tons of unimaginably complicated flesh a bruise was buried. Like a hidden flower, dark purple, it bloomed, and the shadow it cast was one that cut off a certain memory, a certain tract,
from the light of consciousness. That bruise-stained shadow covered that time and event which the Mothers, for reasons unfathomable to the human being, found necessary to mark KEEP OFF. Thus, though Eddie did not word it, he understood in the cells of his body, he felt and knew, as if his
bones were prophesying and his brain did not hear, what came to pass.
Sixty-six hours later by the panrad clock, Polyphemas entrance-lips opened. Her tentacles darted out. They came back in, carrying his helpelss and struggling mother. Eddie, roused out of a doze, horrified, paralyzed, saw her toss her lab kit at him and heard an inarticulate
cry from her. And saw her plunged, headforemost, into the stomach-iris. Polyphema had taken the one sure way of burying the evidence. Eddie lay face down, nose mashed against the warm and faintly throbbing flesh of the floor. Now and
then his hands clutched spasmodically as if he were reaching for something that soneone kept putting just within his reach and then moving away. How long he was there he didn’t know, for he never again looked at the clock.
Finally, in the darkness, he sat up and giggled inanely, “Mother always did make good stew.” That set him off. He leaned back on his hands and threw his head back and howled like a wolf under a full moon.
Polyphema, of course, was dead-deaf, but she could radar his posture, and her keen nostrils deduced from his body-scent that he was in terrible fear and anguish. A tentacle glided out and gently enfolded him. “What is the matter?” zzted the panrad. He stuck his finger in the keyhole. “I have lost my mother!” “?” “She’s gone away, and she’ll never come back.”