THE CATERPILLARS QUESTION

Suddenly, the scene seemed to be squeezed on both sides, making Tappy and the machines tall and thin. That state held for several seconds before abruptly becoming normal. He realized that, whoever or whatever the transmitter was, it was having trouble controlling the output.

He was in some kind of telepathic communication with Tappy.

No. Not communication. It was a one-way transmission. But definitely via a medluin he had not believed could exist. Telepathy.

Then he no longer saw her. He was looking at the Gaol cyborg, Garth, and he was hearing human voices and clicking sounds.

The hatchling! It was his transmitter. It had been on Garth, allowing a view of Tappy from Garth's vantage. Then the hatchling had leaped from it to somewhere. Ah! Now he knew. It was on her shoulder. Her hand and part of her arm had risen to block partially his view, then dropped.

By means Jack would never know, the hatchling was showing him what it saw and heard through its peculiar receptors and transmitter.

Or was the Imago doing this with the hatchling as its transmitter?

But how and who did not matter. Being and doing did.

He stood for a long time, almost as motionless as the androids near him, while he watched. Tappy had turned about one hundred degrees to the left. She and Garth were at one end of a large room. Men and women in loose green robes were seated at desks and consoles. Many of these bore three-foot-wide square crystals. Their faces bore strange symbols and images. Most of them seemed to be operated by verbal commands. Once, a crystal extruded part of its face in the shape of a human hand with one finger. The finger bent to point back to the screen. Its operator spoke, and the hand sank back and became one with the face of the block.

What kind of computer was that?

large green vines festooned with huge many-colored flowers and clusters of berries covered the ceiling and parts of the walls.

Since Jack could not smell them, he supposed that the hatchling's telepathic powers did not include odor. The vegetation was primarily to supply oxygen and secondarily to relieve the sterility and monotony of bare walls.

The room vanished. He swore. Was this to be the end of the transmission?

Several minutes passed during which he paced back and forth.

Had something bad happened to Tappy and the hatchling or did telepathy demand so much energy that the hatchling could no longer project the view? What? What?

As suddenly as it had gone, the scene was back. But the hatchling seemed to be on top of Tappy's head now. He saw that two of the berry stems on the wall just ahead of Tappy no longer bore a berry. Also, one berry was half-eaten. For several seconds, he did not realize the implication, then he struck his right palm with his left fist.

Of course! The hatchling, like all creatures, had to have food.

It had leaped to the cluster and eaten its fill.

Though Jack had seen no mouth on it, it had one or it ingested as an amoeba did.

He also knew now that the creature could not see or hear as Tappy and Garth did. It used their brains and eyes to transmit what they saw and heard. He was looking through Tappy's eyes, hearing through her ears. When the hatchling was on Garth, it functioned as it did on Tappy. He should have understood that before now. But he was somewhat numb from the shock of the unexpected transmission.

Tappy and Garth began to stroll across the room. Some operators glanced up at them. Nobody made a move toward or questioned them. The two intruders were regarded as part of the crew, though some may have wondered why the woman was not in uniform. However, the crew might know only what their duties were. They might not even know why the ship was located here or what its overall mission was.

Tappy and Garth went through a door (hatchway?) into another large room. This contained several vast transparent cases, at least sixty feet high, in each of which spun an upright cylinder. Jack had no idea what their function was, but they made a loud humming noise.

The two intruders approached a door at the opposite end of the room. Two guards, bipedal cyborg Gaol, stood on each side of it. They were eight feet high, four-armed, and plated like knights. Their helmets had half-open visors concealing the face but showing large glowing eyes. Two hands on their right sides gripped the barrel of a weapon with a disk at its end.

They did not move when Garth led Tappy past them and along the wall beyond them. Then he stopped, and his wheels turned to face the wall. A huge window was set in it, and Tappy could see into the next room. Jack realized at once that it was the control center (the bridge?) of the ship. It was not all the instruments and flashing varicolored lights and crystal display blocks and the intensity of the operators that made that certain. It was the creature in the center of the room.

He-she-it, whatever it was, was sitting, if its posture could be called sitting, on a slowly rotating wide disk on top of a narrow pillar six feet high. The edge of the disk almost touched the upper end of a long narrow ramp. A four-legged being would prefer a ramp to a staircase.

"My God!" Jack said.

The thing on the disk must be the true, the basic, the real Gaol, the being in its natural form. Garth and the other Gaol he had seen were cyborgs, their naturally endowed bodies reconstructed to be Gaol-machines. Some had bodies in which part of their skin was exposed. Others were entirely armor-plated. These would be lower-class Gaol. An oppressed class with no right to object to being made half machine. Or, perhaps, they had volunteered.

In any event, weird as it was, the captain's body was what evolution had iven it. It looked like a giant ratcage with a head, two arms, and four doglike legs. Its organs were suspended in a sac inside the cage. The sac filled three-fourths of the cage. Its two very long humanoid arms, anchored by a thick framework of bone on the front end of the sac, had copperish skin. The neck projecting from the sac was long and thick and mottlied purplish.

The head was a caricature of a human being's.

Start with the bottom of the Gaol. That was a turtle's lower plate, almost six feet long. From the sides rose long curving ribs that merged with a spine arcing from the rear of the plate to its front. The blimp-shaped sac was attached to the spine with muscles Jack could clearly see through the copperish skin enclosing them. When the Gaol was momentarily before a bright light on the wall, vague shapes were silhouetted in the sac. Its organs, no doubt.

The bottom of the sac rested on a thick fleshy pad attached to the plate.

The neck extended horizontally from the front of the sac through a wide opening in the front ribs.

The head! It had almost no forehead, and the cranium had no room for even a small brain. Jack guessed that the brain was in the sac.

Brutal and fierce described the face. The jaws projected to form a mouth like a shark's. Its open mouth revealed a multitude of tiny but very sharp triangular teeth set in three rows.

It had no tongue. There were three nostrils on the end of the beastish head, two below and one above. The top one was covered by a small flap of skin that blew in and out, though not smoothly and at regular intervals. Jack could not hear it but thought that it was communicating by whistling its Morse-codelike words through that nostril.

At right angles above the jaws was a broad plane of bone in which were set two large quite human-looking eyes. These were

blue. The ears resembled chrysanthemums.

What kind of a planet could have originated such a creature?

It could not be an Earth-like world.

After staring through the window at the ghastly being (ghastly to Jack), Garth rolled toward the two guards. Tappy followed it until Garth whistled at her and gestured at her to wait for him.