THE CATERPILLARS QUESTION

An hour before dusk, they stopped. He made another fire and recooked the meat, which was too rare for him. Its blood and grease had coated the inside of his jacket pocket and drawn a bloom of pesky flying midges that he had to keep brushing off. These also bit savagely, making him even more angry.

After they had eaten, however-the pancake-sized vegetables were raw but delicious, tasting like a mixture of cheese and asparagus-he began reproaching himself. He should not have bad feelings toward her. He could have refused to go into that -gateway-boulder with her, and she must be under some kind of obsession or compulsion or both. Under a "spell," so to speak.

He continued on the same path of thought while climbing trees to search for a place to bed down. When he found one, he kept only half his mind on the task of finding dead branches on the ground and getting them up into the tree and placing them with THeir ends across two limbs. The auxiliary branches and the knobs -and sharp points were removed, smoothed off with his jackknife.

His knife was getting duller, he noted. The time would come when it would be useless, and the lighter would be empty. That thought made him feel panicky. However, perhaps he could trade more coins with a honker for a flint knife or an axe.

Shortly after the moon had risen, they were lying on their platform of hard branches. These were far from comfortable, and they could get warmth and softness only in each other and the little protection their clothes gave. Tappy was in his arms, his jacket spread over their upper parts. She hummed a tune he had never heard before, then fell asleep. The brace, which she had taken off. lay between her leps. Though he was very tired. he could not sink as swiftly as she into merciful unconsciousness.

He could not stop trying to make sense of what had happened, to find a pattern in the events that would give them an order and a goal.

Just how were Tappy's relatives-the two who had reluctantly given her a home-involved? Had they really been so eager to get rid of her? Was that eagerness an act'? could they have known somehow that Tappy was far more than she appeared to be?

Mr. Melvin E. Daw and his wife, Michaela, upper-middle-class people, affluent, had seemed pleasant enough, though they had not been able to hide their dislike of Tappy. Their instructions on how he was to take Tappy to the clinic had been specific. But they had CertaInly not volunteered any information to answer his unspoken questions. They had given him a map of the route he was to take to New Hampshire and had stressed that he should not deviate from it. Why? There were other roads he could have taken.

could they possibly have directed him to that road by which was the rural motel he and Tappy had stayed in? could they have estimated his traveling time so that he would take lodging there overnight? There were, as far as he knew, no other motels in that area.

How could the Daws have known that he and Tappy would go up that hill and find that boulder?

Reviewing the conversation with the Daws and their gestures and expressions, he thought that what had seemed i

And how could a blind thirteen-year-old know, consciously or unconsciously, that the gateway-boulder was there'? How could she even know about gates to other worlds?

Something-when and how he could not uess-had been implanted in her. It was driving her toward a oal that she could not explain or would not explain because something was keeping her from doing so.

He shivered. He had been conditioned by too many movies with horrible and evil monsters from outer space.

But that did not mean that such things did not exist.

He was in a situation which needed a superhero to deal with it, and he was far from being a Flash Gordon or Luke Skywalker.

He was not even a good imitation. He had never shot a gun and knew nothing of fencing or the martial arts beyond what he had seen in films.

He awoke from a nightmare. He had been in his studio, a studio that had never existed in reality but one he had imagined he would have some day. Bright sunlight fell through the enormous skylight like the shower of gold that had impregnated Dana, bathing a nude Tappy in the center of the room. Not the Tappy he knew, but an older and fully developed young woman. He was before his easel and had the portrait almost done. All he needed were a few more strokes of the brush to get her face just right, to give it a hint of the ethereal. No, of the unearthly.

The light darkened. Looking up, he saw that black clouds had slid under the sun, though the sky had been, a moment ago, without a trace of the nebulous. Then the clouds lowered een-gray tendrils-tentacles-and somehow they came through sky light glass and began misting the room. He could see Tappy only vaguely now.

The horror did not begin at once. It was hidden behind the swirling fingers of the cloud as they reached out for him. They touched him at the same time that he saw that Tappy's skin had become greasy. The glistening fatty exudation dripped from her as if she were a burning candle and pooled around her feet.

The shiny and greasy stuff began to rise before her. Very quickly, Tappy became gaunt, and then she was skin wrapped around bones. Now she was walking toward him, her arms held out. The figure forming from the grease had been left behind, but it was sliding along behind her on the trail. He could see through Tappy's skin and bones despite the weak light, and he could see that the figure was a rapidly swelling replica of her.

He wanted to scream but could not. His throat was plugged with semiliquid fat rising from deep within himself.

Tappy's hand almost touched him. The figure behind her reached around her, slid her arm along Tappy's outstretched arm. and shot her hand toward his mouth.

He came out of the nightmare to find himself groaning.

Though the moon did not relieve the darkness much, he could see Tappy's eyes staring at him. But she could not see him at all, of course. Or could she?

She muttered something. He said, "It's all right. Go back to sleep."

She closed her eyes and began snoring softly.

Larva ... Chrysalis ... Imago, he thought.

Was she going to change from what she was now into something as different as a larva was from an imago'? Or did those words apply to someone else?

Then one of those sudden and unexplainable sh fts of m nd happened, and he began worrying that he might have made her pregnant. After a while, he dismissed the worry with a rueful grin. They were in a situation so serious that the chance that she might have a baby was a slight problem. As of now, anyway.

Nine months from now. it might be very grave. If they lived that long.

He fell asleep again, and he was making love to Mullins Blanchflower, if what he was doing could be called making love. He awoke at the tail end of a wet dream, wondering why his unconscious would choose Mullins for his dream partner. She was a rather plain and chubby girl he had known in high school.

though not in the biblical sense. He had never consciously wished to make her. But copulation with undesirable girls had happened occasionally in his night fantasies. The unconscious was a tricky and unpredictable bastard.

He thought: Now I'll have to wash out my shorts. And I thought I was too tired, hungry, and miserable even to contemplate screwing. If I'd known how things were going to be, I"(I have tried it with Tappy. But then she'd have been too tired, hungry, and wretched or would have thought she was. Anyway, for God's sake, I was just worrying about her maybe being pregnant. Of course, there are other ways to get off. But she might not be ready for those.