Stephen Marlowe

“ Moments later, Steve's buyer whisked him away in a smaller version of the bus that had taken the Frank Buck's crew to the bazaar. On the outskirts of the city, the car stopped. Steve climbed out, followed the stilt-figure up a flight of stairs as a round, fat, furry creature bounced up behind him with a weapon.
Inside, the place looked like a laboratory. And at the center of the room squatted a great round tank, large enough to hold a man. A green liquid boiled within it, but somehow Steve got the impression of boiling without much heat. ”

“ Steve's joy was an emotion the dead parasite would have loved to share when he saw Teejay among the sixty. Kevin was there too, and Steiner. Surprisingly, Schuyler Barling seemed more sprightly than the rest.
"LeClarc?" Steve demanded.
"He was the first," said Kevin. "Stronger control, perhaps. He's among those who could not make it."
"Maybe they're still alive."
"No," Teejay told him. "I saw three men die, horribly. Most of the others probably did, too."
"Don't you see, boy, we can't chance survival for all of us to seek out one or two who might still be alive! It wouldn't be fair." ”

“ Now that the creature had approached him, Steve wasn't sure. The voice continued, pulsing and throbbing in his ears like the Ganymede-fear itself—but in his ears. Not from the bleak terrain around him, and certainly not from the anthrovac.
"I'm going crazy," he said, aloud, driving the voice away temporarily. "No. No, I'm not, because I realize it too soon. A crazy man doesn't realize it and doesn't warn himself about it—certainly not at the outset." But did that mean the voice had any real existence? How could it?
I am Charlie Stedman.... ”

“ Schuyler Barling was laughing and screaming, froth flecking his chin. The delicate balance between parasite and host had been entangled, possibly beyond repair. Neither could dominate, and the result was a hopeless, gibbering hulk of a man.
"Poor devil," said Kevin. "He'll get psychiatric treatment on Earth, if that will help."
Steve crossed to the airlock, climbed into a spacesuit.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" Teejay wanted to know.
"You're forgetting about the other ship. We haven't got a blasting cannon on the Frank Buck, and there isn't one down on the Gordak, either. ”

“ It helped turn the tide of battle, and with Steve and Teejay, it was the last to enter the ship.
"Twenty-two of us," Kevin said grimly. "There are twenty-two who survived." They all sat about, nursing their wounds. The ship had flung itself through hyper-space, now hovered a million miles off Ganymede.
"You're wrong. There are twenty-three." It was Charlie Stedman. In the darkness and confusion, he'd managed to fight his way back with them. But why?
"Charlie!" Steve forgot the question. "You're free too."
Charlie lifted a neutron gun. "No. You're wrong. None of us is free. ”

“ It took a kind of free-for-all brawl to make me realize it, but a woman's still a woman, and that's one thing I had to learn. I fought your Captain Barling and I beat him. Probably, I could do it again. But I—well, I was fighting with Captain Barling and saying to myself all the time, 'This is stupid. What are you—a girl—doing this for? Don't you know you shouldn't go around fighting like a man?'" Steve noticed in the dim light that Teejay had begun to blush. ”

“ Kevin's laughter was sour.
"What we need is a good turncoat," Teejay assured him. "Someone who can go out among the animals and ask questions. I'm joking, of course, but if anyone could do it, it would be that rat, LeClarc."
Steve frowned. "That's not as funny as it sounds. Has anyone seen LeClarc since the fight?"
"No!" Kevin slammed fist against palm.
Steve was about to answer, but quite suddenly the lights blinked out. Somewhere outside, a dozen animals roared their fear. Within the lounge, Kevin commenced cursing lustily and an involuntary moan escaped Barling's lips. ”

“ He'd come to Ganymede after anthrovacs. But he'd left the satellite under an anthrovac guard! Fine thing. A mighty hunter was he! Clear across the universe to be bagged by his own game!
Obviously, Steve thought as they marched on, the blue day-star was not Earth's sun. Somehow, in a matter of moments, they'd left the Solar System entirely. He knew that theories had been advanced about traveling through something called sub-space, something which could make flight to the farthest stars almost instantaneous, since sub-space existed outside the space-time continuum. ”

“ He should have been prepared, for the anthrovacs are playful and can mime almost any human action.
He did not duck in time. He felt the stone thunk against his helmet, peered with horror at the glassite inches from his face until he saw that it hadn't cracked. Grinning now, he shook his fist at the creature, watched it duplicate the motion with its great hairy hand. It was a game, Steve told himself, a lot like the meaningless conversation Teejay and Kevin had had to dispell the Ganymede-fear. ”

“ Kevin demanded sarcastically.
And Steiner suggested: "Maybe you'd like to answer a few questions first."
"Sure." This was Teejay. "About a thousand questions."
It was as if the man hadn't heard them at all. "Outside a vehicle awaits you. There is room for all, provided each man occupies one of the squares you will find marked off on the floor. Let's go."
Angry, sullen, but still thoroughly bewildered, the men trooped outside.
The vehicle was a sort of bus, although the noise of a gasoline engine or the purring of a fission engine would have shocked Steve here on the world called Uashalume. ”

“ That's Teejay they're taking! Teejay!"
"And they'll take you too. But you're going alive, not dead. Stand still and let them get on with this."
"Don't you realize what they've been talking about?" Steve shouted his rage. "They'll wear us, like clothing. They'll get inside our brains and share our bodies with us, like they've done with all these other creatures. Did you think these monsters were all native to Uashalume? I wouldn't be surprised if none of them was. They've all been taken, as we have, from their own worlds. They all live here—as clothing. ”

“ Here on the third level were the cages which, in the months that followed, would hold the big game brought within the Gordak. But the word cage, Steve realized, can be misleading. A rectangular enclosure, its wall composed of evenly spaced bars—that's a cage. But the bubble-cages of the Gordak were something else again; precisely as the name implied, they were huge bubbles of plastic, complete with remote-controlled airlocks. You could pump in any kind of atmosphere, from Jupiter's lethal methane-ammonia mixture to the thin, oxygen-starved air of Mars, and under any desired pressure, too. ”

“ Kevin raised the neutron gun he had taken from LeClarc.
He never used it.
A fraction of a second later, the Frank Buck blasted off from the surface of Ganymede, and sudden acceleration threw them all to the floor. As Steve was to learn later, no hands were at the controls. No human hands.
"This, roughly, is the situation," began Barling, pacing back and forth, speaking out of swollen lips and averting the right side of his face with its puffy cheek and blackened eye. "We are all in this together, and—"
"You hypocrite!" cried Teejay. "Six hours ago, you wanted to kill us. ”

“ She wore what looked to Steve like a glossy black Martian sand-cape which she let fall straight down behind her so that it almost brushed the floor. Under it, she wore a brief pair of shorts, also black, and a halter. She was muscular in that lithe, feminine way which had grown so popular in the twenty-second century—the century which had finally seen women come abreast of men in all sporting activities and surpass them in some which required special grace and lithe-limbed skill. ”

“ The stone worms, Steve knew, were attracted by darkness—hence they generally dwelled in the deepest crevices, although a man's shadow might bring them to the surface. He'd never seen a stone worm, but he'd read about them and seen their pictures.
"You'll see something very unlovely," Teejay predicated. "The stone worm isn't a carbon-basic animal, but a silicate creature with a sodium-silicon-nitrogen economy. It's about four feet long and kind of like some ghastly white slug. It—hey, Stedman, get on your toes!" ”

“ As he spoke, Steve looked at his brother, standing right there in front of him, and wondered if anyone ever asked a more impossible question.
"Yes. He was dead. I don't know how he died, but I placed my ear against the chest of his vac-suit. The heart-beat is amplified through it, you know. But there wasn't any. After that, I ran back to the Gordak, and I had barely enough air to make it. I reported Charlie's death, of course."
Charlie's death. Well, she sounded sincere. But there was Charlie, standing two paces to her right and apparently listening to an account of his own demise. ”

“ Stedman. Either a man's got it or he hasn't. You haven't. Come back in ten years. Ship out around the Solar System the hard way, and maybe we can use you then—if you still remember what you learned about Extra-terrestrial zoology. What in space ever made you study extra-zoo, anyway?"
"I found it interesting," Steve said lamely.
"Interesting? As a hobby, it's interesting. But as business, it's hard work, a lot of sweat, a lot of danger, squirming around on your soft belly in the muck and mud of a dozen worlds, that's what it is. Just how do you think Carmical Enterprises got where they are? ”

“ They'd been ushered into the main lounge of the Frank Buck, a ship of about the Gordak's dimensions, but two or three years older. LeClarc stood there with his neutron gun, watching them carefully. In a few moments, Schuyler Barling joined them, a greasy salve covering the discoloration on his jaw. The jaw looked painfully swollen too, and Barling rubbed it speculatively. "I won't forget this," he growled briefly to Teejay, then turned to LeClarc. "Kevin McGann I know, but what about this man?"
"Stedman?" said LeClarc. "You'll want him, because he's the extra-zoo man on the Gordak. ”

“ Kevin stood near the viewport, spoke grimly. "He's not lying. There's a ship out there."
Schuyler Barling smiled coldly, took up his position near Charlie. "You all rejected my command once," he said. "You shouldn't have. I had no desire to come back to Earth like that. I've also learned that I can share my body on an equal basis with my master, something none of you would consider. Now we'll take you back."
Almost eighty men had died—for nothing. Steve held Teejay's hand briefly, released it. One life more wouldn't matter, and if there were a chance.... ”

“ By the time they start beating the anthrovacs in toward the Gordak you'll be feeling better—and raring to go to work with that oxygen-jag stunt of yours, too." And she added, "Say, have you been watching your stone worm?"
"He sure has," Kevin told her. "He took me down there yesterday and that worm's been growing fat on all the sand he's fed it. Sand—for food, that's what the worm eats. Imagine how that would settle the over-population problems on Earth if people, too, could eat sand."
"Yes, and then—" Teejay was speaking again—but words, just words, and Steve stopped listening. ”