Hal Clement - Needle.pdf - Hal Clement - margozap

Hal Clement - Needle

TOO MANY PEOPLE

Two alien races lived under a single sun, someplace across the galaxy, sharing

their world . . . sharing life itself. For they lived together in a

partnership more perfect than any other known to the intelligences of the

galaxy. Together, the two races became one, each deriving from the other that

which made him greater than his individual self. Host and symbiote, they lived

together, shared together . . . two bodies in one. For the one race was

symbiotic, amorphous, able to enter the body of the other.

Then one symbiote turned Criminal, and his race could not rest until he was

tracked down. But the Criminal could hide in any living thing . . . and on

Earth there were over two billion humans alone!

HAL CLEMENT blends a masterpiece of science fiction with a story of pure

detection to produce his best novel, and one of the most famous s-f novels of

the past quarter-century.

NEEDLE

Hal Clement

NEEDLE

Printed In the U.S.A.

Second printing, October, 1972

LANCER BOOKS, INC. " 1560 BROADWAY NEW YORK, N.Y. 10036

Chapter I. CASTAWAY

EVEN ON THE earth shadows are frequently good places to hide. They may show

up, of course, against lighted surroundings, but if there is not too much

light from the side, one can step into a shadow and become remarkably hard to

see.

Beyond the earth, where there is no air to scatter light, they should be even

better. The earth's own shadow, for example, is a million-mile-long cone of

darkness pointing away from the sun, invisible itself in the surrounding dark

and bearing the seeds of still more perfect invisibility -- for the only

illumination that enters that cone is starlight and the feeble rays bent into

its blackness by the earth's thin envelope of air.

The Hunter knew he was in a planet's shadow though he had never heard of the

earth; he had known it ever since he had dropped below the speed of light and

seen the scarlet-rimmed disk of black squarely ahead of him; and so he took it

for granted that the fugitive vessel would be detectable only by instruments.

When he suddenly realized that the other ship was visible to the naked eye,

the faint alarm that had been nibbling at the outskirts of his mind promptly

rocketed into the foreground.

He had been unable to understand why the fugitive should go below the speed of

light at all, unless in the vague hope that the pursuer would overrun him

sufficiently to be out of detection range; and when that failed, the Hunter

had expected a renewed burst of speed. Instead, the deceleration continued.

The fleeing ship had kept between his own and the looming world ahead, making

it dangerous to overhaul too rapidly; and the Hunter was coming to the

conclusion that a break back on the direction they had come was to be expected

when a spark of red light visible to the naked eye showed that the other had

actually entered an atmosphere. The planet was smaller and closer than the

Hunter had believed.

The sight of that spark was enough for the pursuer. He flung every erg his

generators could handle into a drive straight away from the planet, at the

same time pouring the rest of his body into the control room to serve as a

gelatinous cushion to protect the perit from the savage deceleration; and he

saw instantly that it would not be sufficient. He had just tune to wonder that

the creature ahead of him should be willing to risk ship and host in what

would certainly be a nasty crash before the outer fringes of the world's air

envelope added their resistance to his plunging flight and set the metal

plates of his hull glowing a brilliant orange from heat.

Since the ships had dived straight down the shadow cone, they were going to

strike on the night side, of course; and once the hulls cooled, the fugitive

would again be invisible. With an effort, therefore, the Hunter kept his eyes

glued to the instruments that would betray the other's whereabouts as long as

he was in range; and it was well that he did so, for the glowing cylinder

vanished abruptly from sight into a vast cloud of water vapor that veiled the

planet's dark surface. A split second later the Hunter's ship plunged into the

same mass, and as it did so there was a twisting lurch, and the right-line

deceleration changed to a sickening spinning motion. The pilot knew that one

of the drive plates had gone, probably cracked off by undistributed heat but

there was simply no time to do a thing about it. The other vessel, he noted,

had stopped as though it had run into a brick wall; now it was settling again,

but far more slowly, and he realized that he himself could only be split

seconds from the same obstacle, assuming it to be horizontal.

It was. The Hunter's ship, still spinning wildly although he had shut off the

remaining drive plates at the last moment, struck almost flat on water and at

the impact split open from end to end along both sides as though it had been

an eggshell stepped on by a giant. Almost all its kinetic energy was absorbed

by that blow, but it did not stop altogether. It continued to settle,

comparatively gently now, with a motion like a falling leaf, and the Hunter

felt its shattered hull come to a rest on what he realized must be the bottom

of a lake or sea a few seconds later.

At least, he told himself as his wits began slowly to clear, his quarry must

be in the same predicament. The abrupt stoppage and subsequent slow descent of

the other machine was now explained -- even if it had struck head-on instead

of horizontally, there would have been no perceptible difference in the result

of a collision with a water surface at their speed. It was almost certainly

unusable, though perhaps not quite so badly damaged as the hunter's ship.

That idea brought the train of thought back to his own predicament. He felt

cautiously around him and found he was no longer entirely in the control room

-- in fact, there was no longer room for all of him inside it. What had been a

cylindrical chamber some twenty inches in diameter and two feet long was now

simply the space between two badly dented sheets of inch-thick metal which had

been the hull. The seams had parted on either side, or, rather, seams had been

created and forced apart, for the hull was originally a single piece of metal

drawn into tubular shape. The top and bottom sections thus separated had been

flattened out and were now only an inch or two apart on the average. The

bulkheads at either end of the room had crumpled and cracked -- even that

tough alloy had its limitations. The perit was very dead. Not only had it been

crushed by the collapsing wall, but the Hunter's semi-liquid body had

transmitted the shock of impact to its individual cells much as it is

transmitted to the sides of a water-filled tin can by the impact of a rifle

bullet, and most of its interior organs had ruptured. The Hunter, slowly

realizing this, withdrew from around and within the little creature. He did

not attempt to eject its mangled remains from the ship; it might be necessary

to use them as food later on, though the idea was unpleasant. The Hunter's

attitude toward the animal resembled that of a man toward a favorite dog,

though the perit, with its delicate hands which it had learned to use at his

direction much as an elephant uses its trunk at the behest of man, was more

useful than any dog.

He extended his exploration a little, reaching out with a slender pseudopod of

jellylike flesh through one of the rents in the hull. He already knew that the

wreck was lying in salt water, but he had no idea of the depth other than the

fact that it was not excessive. On his home world he could have judged it

quite accurately from the pressure; but pressure depends on the weight of a

given quantity of water as well as its depth, and he had not obtained a

reading of this planet's gravity before the crash.

It was dark outside the hull. When he molded an eye from his own tissue --

those of the pent had been ruptured -- it told him absolutely nothing of his

surroundings. Suddenly, however, he realized that the pressure around him was

not constant; it was increasing and decreasing by a rather noticeable amount

with something like regularity; and the water was transmitting to his

sensitive flesh the higher-frequency pressure waves which he interpreted as

sound. Listening intently, he finally decided that he must be fairly close to

the surface of a body of water large enough to develop waves a good many feet

in height, and that a storm of considerable violence was in progress. He had

not noticed any disturbance in the air during his catastrophic descent, but

that meant nothing -- he had spent too little time in the atmosphere to be

affected by any reasonable wind.

Poking into the mud around the wreck with other pseudopods, he found to his

relief that the planet was not lifeless -- he had already been pretty sure of

that fact. There was enough oxygen dissolved in the water to meet his needs,

provided he did not exert himself greatly, and there must, consequently, be

free oxygen in the atmosphere above. It was just as well, though, to have

actual proof that life was present rather than merely possible, and he was

well satisfied to locate in the mud a number of small bivalve mollusks which,

upon trial, proved quite edible. Realizing that it was night on this part of

the planet, he decided to postpone further outside investigation until there

was more light and turned his attention back to the remains of his ship. He

had not expected the examination to turn up anything encouraging, but he got a

certain glum feeling of accomplishment as he realized the completeness of the

destruction. Solid metal parts in the engine room had changed shape under the

stresses to which they had been subjected. The nearly solid conversion chamber

of the main drive unit was flattened and twisted. There was no trace whatever

of certain quartz-shelled gas tubes; they had evidently been pulverized by the

shock and washed away by the water. No living creature handicapped by a

definite shape and solid parts could have hoped to come through such a crash

alive, no matter how well protected. The thought was some comfort; he had done

his best for the petit even though that had not been sufficient.

Once satisfied that nothing usable remained in his ship, the Hunter decided no

more could be done at the moment. He could not undertake really active work

until he had a better supply of oxygen, which meant until he reached open air;

and the lack of light was also a severe handicap. He relaxed, therefore, in

the questionable shelter of the ruined hull and waited for the storm to end

and the day to come. With light and calm water he felt that he could reach

shore without assistance; the wave noise suggested breakers, which implied a

beach at no great distance.

He lay there for several hours, and it occurred to him once that he might be

on a planet which always kept the same hemisphere toward its sun; but he

realized that in such a case the dark side would almost certainly be too cold

for water to exist as a liquid. It seemed more probable that storm clouds were

shutting out the daylight.

Ever since the ship had finally settled into the mud it had remained

motionless. The disturbances overhead were reflected in currents and

backwashes along the bottom which the Hunter could feel but which were quite

unable to shift the half-buried mass of metal. Certain as he was that the hull

was now solidly fixed in place, the castaway was suddenly startled when his

shelter quivered as though to a heavy blow and changed position slightly.

Instantly he sent out an inquiring tentacle. He molded an eye at its tip, but

the darkness was still intense, and he returned to strictly tactile

exploration. Vibrations suggestive of a very rough skin scraping along the

metal were coming to him, and abruptly something living ran into the extended

limb. It demonstrated its sentient quality by promptly seizing the appendage

in a mouth that seemed amazingly well furnished with saw-edged teeth.

The Hunter reacted normally, for him -- that is, he allowed the portion of

himself in direct contact with those unpleasant edges to relax into a semi-

liquid condition, and at the same moment he sent more of his body flowing into

the arm toward the strange creature. He was a being of quick decisions, and

the evident size of the intruder had impelled him to a somewhat foolhardy act.

He left the wrecked space ship entirely and sent his whole four pounds of

jellylike flesh toward what he hoped would prove a more useful conveyance.

The shark -- it was an eight-foot hammerhead -- may have been surprised and

was probably irritated, but in common with all its land it lacked the brains

to be afraid. Its ugly jaws snapped hungrily at what at first seemed like

satisfying solid flesh, only to have it give way before them like so much

water. The Hunter made no attempt to avoid the teeth, since mechanical damage

of that nature held no terrors for him, but he strenuously resisted the

efforts of the fish to swallow that portion of his body already in its mouth.

He had no intention of exposing himself to gastric juices, since he had no

skin to resist their action even temporarily.

As the shark's activities grew more and more frantically vicious, he sent

exploring pseudopods over the ugly rough-skinned form, and within a few

moments discovered the five gill slits on each side of the creature's neck.

That was enough. He no longer investigated; he acted, with a skill and

precision born of long experience.

The Hunter was a metazoon -- a many-celled creature, like a bird or a man --

in spite of his apparent lack of structure. The individual cells of his body,

however, were far smaller than those of most earthly creatures, comparing in

size with the largest protein molecules. It was possible for him to construct

from his tissues a limb, complete with muscles and sensory nerves, the whole

structure fine enough to probe through the capillaries of a more orthodox

creature without interfering seriously with its blood circulation. He had,

therefore, no difficulty in insinuating himself into the shark's relatively

huge body.

He avoided nerves and blood vessels for the moment and poured himself into

such muscular and visceral interstices as he could locate. The shark calmed

down at once after the thing in its mouth and on its body ceased sending

tactile messages to its minute brain; its memory, to all intents and purposes,

was nonexistent. For the Hunter, however, successful insterstition was only

the beginning of a period of complicated activity.

First and most important, oxygen. There was enough of the precious element

absorbed on the surfaces of his body cells for a few minutes of life at the

most, but it could always be obtained in the body of a creature that also

consumed oxygen; and the Hunter rapidly sent sub-microscopic appendages

between the cells that formed the walls of blood vessels and began robbing the

blood cells of their precious load. He needed but little, and on his home

world he had lived in this manner for years within the body of an intelligent

oxygen-breather, with the other's full knowledge and consent. He had more than

paid for his keep.

The second need was vision. His host presumably possessed eyes, and with his

oxygen supply assured the Hunter began to search for them. He could, of

course, have sent enough of his own body out through the shark's skin to

construct an organ of vision, but he might not have been able to avoid

disturbing the creature by such an act. Besides, ready-made lenses were

usually better than those he could make himself.

His search was interrupted before it had gone very far. The crash had, as he

had deduced, occurred rather close to land; the encounter with the shark had

taken place in quite shallow water. Sharks are not particularly fond of

disturbance; it is hard to understand why this one had been so close to the

surf. During the monster's struggle with the Hunter it had partly drifted and

partly swum closer to the beach; and with its attention no longer taken up by

the intruder, it tried to get back into deep water. The shark's continued

frenzied activity, after the oxygen-theft system had been established, started

a chain of events which caught the alien's attention.

The breathing system of a fish operates under a considerable disadvantage. The

oxygen dissolved in water is never at a very high concentration, and a water-

breathing creature, though it may be powerful and active, never has a really

large reserve of the gas. The Hunter was not taking very much to keep alive,

but he was trying to build up a reserve of his own as well; and with the shark

working at its maximum energy output, the result was that its oxygen

consumption was exceeding its intake. That, of course, had two effects: the

monster's physical strength began to decline and the oxygen content of its

blood to decrease. With the latter occurrence the Hunter almost unconsciously

increased his drain on the system, thereby starting a vicious circle that

could have only one ending.

The Hunter realized what was happening long before the shark actually died but

did nothing about it, though he could have reduced his oxygen consumption

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