Jack Finney - Invasion of The Body Snatchers

"Miles, don't; don't ."

I looked up to see Becky quickly shaking her head, eyes averted, her face paling, but I didn't stop.

"Miles, please; I can't stand it; the way they look; please don't. No more!"

I stood, and turned toward her. "All right" – I nodded. "I don't know at all that it'd do any good, except that it's just that much more living matt – " I let it go and didn't finish. But I left the figures on the floor as they were. I didn't really know what I was doing, but – I left them as they were.

I did one more thing, and didn't ask Becky's permission. I took my desk scissors, snipped off a good chunk of her hair, then a handful of mine, and scattered them on the two figures on the floor. Now there was nothing to do but wait.

We sat, Becky in the leather chair, I at my desk; then Becky began speaking. Slowly, doubtfully, and pausing often to look at me questioningly, she described an idea that had occurred to her.

I listened, and when she stopped, waiting for an answer from me, I smiled and nodded a little, trying not to look immediately discouraging. "Becky, it might – it probably would – work as far as it goes. But I'd still end up, struggling on a floor, with two or three men on top of me."

She said, "Miles, I know there's no reason why anything we can think of has to work out at all. But now you're thinking like a movie. Most people do – sometimes, anyway. Miles, there are certain activities most people never actually encounter all of their lives, so they picture them in terms of movie-like scenes. It's the only source most people have for visualizing things they've had no actual experience of. And that's how you're thinking now: a scene in which you're struggling with two or three men, and – Miles, what am I doing in that scene in your mind? You're seeing me cowering against a wall, eyes wide and frightened, my hands raised to my face in horror, aren't you?"

I thought about it, and she was right, very accurate, in fact, and I nodded.

She nodded, too. "And that's how they'll think: the stereotype of a woman's role in that kind of situation. And it's exactly what I will do – until I know they've seen and noticed me. Then I can do exactly what you did; why not?"

I was considering what she'd said, and Becky persisted, unable to wait. "Why not, Miles; why can't I?" She paused for an instant, then said, "I can. You'll be beaten up, you'll have a bad minute or so, but then… Miles, why couldn't it work?"

I was afraid. I didn't like this at all; this was real, genuinely and simply a matter of life or death for us, and I saw that we were going at it in a spur-of-the-moment, improvising way. We had to think, be certain, and make sure of what we were doing – take the time to be right, and know we were right. Yet now, like soldiers suddenly caught in enemy fire, the most important thinking of our lives had to be improvised on the spot under terrible strain, with the penalty for anything less than perfection being death or worse. There was no time for more careful planning! We certainly couldn't sleep on it, I thought, and smiled with no amusement at the joke.

"Miles, come on !" Becky whispered. She was standing, reaching across the desk, yanking at my sleeve. "You don't know how much longer we have!"

There was a light tapping at the outer door of my office, and from the hallway outside I heard Mannie's voice, very soft and quiet. "Miles?" he whispered, then paused. "Miles…?"

"I'm sorry, Mannie," I called out, "but we're still awake. I can't help that; you know we'll stay awake as long as we can. But it won't be too long; it can't be."

He didn't answer, and now there was no guessing how much longer we'd be alone. I hated what we were going to do, hated pinning hope on this one flimsy notion of Becky's, but certainly I couldn't think of anything else at all. "All right." I stood up, then walked to the little wall cabinet and took out a wide roll of adhesive tape. At the instrument cabinet I gathered up everything else we needed; then, at my desk, I unbuttoned Becky's sleeves at her wrists, pushed back my coat sleeves, and went to work.

It didn't take long, four minutes, maybe, and while I was pulling down my sleeves, Becky buttoning the sleeves of her dress, she gestured with her head – "Miles, look."

I turned to look, narrowed my eyes to make sure I was seeing it, and then I knew I was. The yellow-white bones on the floor looked – different. I can't say how, but, looking at them now, there was simply no doubt that they'd changed.

It may have been the colour, though I couldn't be sure, but it was more than that, too. The sense of sight is more subtle than we're accustomed to think; it sees more than we credit it for. We say, "I could tell by looking," and though sometimes we can't explain how that could be, it is usually true. Those bones had lost hardness, although I don't even quite know what I mean by that, or how we could see it. Their form hadn't changed, but – they'd lost some degree of rigidity or firmness. Like an ancient wall of loosened bricks, its form still unchanged to the eye, but the mortar crumbling, some strength had left them. Whatever was holding each bone together, giving it its form and shape, was weakening. And the eye could tell it.

Trying not to hope too much, ready for disappointment, not yet able to trust what my eyes saw, I stared. Then suddenly, in the flick of an eye, on a little inch-long segment of the ulna, one of the two bones of the forearm, in the nearest figure on the floor, a patch of grey appeared. Nothing more happened for the beat of a heart; then the patch lengthened, and continued to lengthen, extending in both directions, shooting out along the yellow-white bone. And then – it was like an animated-cartoon sequence in which a picture is sketched impossibly fast, the lines flashing out in all directions faster than the eye can follow. On both figures on the floor under our eyes the grey shot out along the bones, following their lines with enormous speed – the entire rib cage of one in the flash of an eye. Then the bone-whiteness was gone, and for a suspended instant of time the two skeletons lay there composed – in perfect completeness – of a grey weightless fluff. The instant ended, and they collapsed – a puff of air would have done it – into a formless little heap of dust and nothingness on the floor.

For an instant longer I stood staring, wild with elation; then the breath sucked into my lungs, and I yelled out, "Mannie!"

The hallway door of my office opened instantly, and they came in – hurrying – their faces utterly calm and composed. I pointed with the toe of my shoe, and they stopped, stared for a moment, then Mannie pulled the key from his pocket and unlocked the door to my reception room. He opened it, and it bumped something, something hard that clicked on the wood of the door. Mannie pushed, the door opened a little more, then jammed. Then each of us, as fast as we could, moving one at a time, sidled around that partly blocked door.

There on the brown rug, yellow-white and reproduced down to the last useless detail, lay two skeletons, red-daubed on the shoulders, a handful of dark hair filtering through their bones. Face down on the floor, they grinned liplessly and unceasingly at the joke. Beside and under them, nearly unnoticeable on the rug, lay the brittle fragments of all that remained of the two great pods.

Mannie nodded slowly several times, lips folded in, thinking to himself, and Budlong said, "That's very interesting, really very interesting. Do you know" – he turned to me conversationally, eyes friendly as ever – "that had never occurred to me, and yet of course it's perfectly possible. Interesting." He turned to look down at the floor again.