Gordon Dickson - The Human Edge

“Help me!” he gritted, trying to sit up.

“You ought to lie still.”

“Help me up, I said!” The leg was a dead weight. Maury’s hands took hold and helped raise his body. He got the leg swung off the edge of the surface on which he had been lying, and got into sitting position. He looked around him.

The magnetic bubble had been set up to make a small, air-filled addition of breathable ship’s atmosphere around the airlock entrance of the Harrier. It enclosed about as much space as a good-sized living room. Its floor was the mountain hillside’s rock and gravel. A mattress from one of the ship’s bunks had been set up on equipment boxes to make him a bed. At the other end of the bubble-enclosed space something as big as a man was lying zippered up in a gray cargo freeze-sack.

“What’s that?” Joe demanded. “Where’s everybody?”

“They’re checking equipment in the damaged sections,” answered Maury. “We shot you full of medical juices. You’ve been out about twenty hours. That’s about three-quarters of a local day-and-night cycle locally, here.” He grabbed the wounded man’s shoulders suddenly with both hands. “Hold it! What’re you trying to do?”

“Have a look in that freeze-sack there,” grunted the Team Leader between his teeth. “Let go of me, Maury. I’m still in charge here!”

“Sit still,” said Maury. “I’ll bring it to you.”

He went over to the bag, taking hold of one of the carrying handles he dragged it back. It came easily in the lesser gravity, only a little more than eight-tenths of Earth’s. He hauled the thing to the bed and unzipped it.

Joe stared. What was inside was not what he had been expecting.

“Cute, isn’t it?” said Maury.

They looked down at the hard-frozen gray body of a biped, with the back of its skull shattered and burnt by the flare of a signal pistol. It lay on its back. The legs were somewhat short for the body and thick, as the arms were thick. But elbow and knee joints were where they should be, and the hands had four stubby gray fingers, each with an opposed thumb. Like the limbs, the body was thick—almost waistless. There were deep creases, as if tucks had been taken in the skin, around the body under the armpits, around the waist and around the legs and arms.

The head, though, was the startling feature. It was heavy and round as a ball, sunk into thick folds of neck and all but featureless. Two long slits ran down each side into the neck and shoulder area. The slits were tight closed. Like the rest of the body, the head had no hair. The eyes were little pock-marks, like raisins sunk into a doughball, and there were no visible brow ridges. The nose was a snout-end set almost flush with the facial surface. The mouth was lipless, a line of skin folded together, through which now glinted barely a glimpse of close-set, large, tridentated teeth.

“What’s this?” said Joe. “Where’s the thing that attacked us?”

“This is it,” said Maury. “One of the aliens from the other ship.”

Joe stared at him. In the brighter, harsher light from the star K94 overhead, he noticed for the first time a sprinkling of gray hairs in the black shock above Maury’s spade-shaped face. Maury was no older than Joe himself.

“What’re you talking about?” said Joe. “I saw that thing that attacked me. And this isn’t it!”

“Look,” said Maury and turned to the foot of the bed. From one of the equipment boxes he brought up eight by ten inch density photographs. “Here,” he said, handing them to the Survey Team Leader. “The first one is set for bone density.”

Joe took them. It showed the skeleton of the being at his feet… and it bore only a relative kinship to the shape of the being itself.

Under the flesh and skin that seemed so abnormally thick, the skull was high-forebrained and well developed. Heavy brown ridges showed over deep wells for the eyes. The jaw and teeth were the prognathous equipment of a carnivorous animal.

But that was only the beginning of the oddities. Bony ridges of gill structures were buried under a long fold on either side of the head, neck and shoulders. The rib cage was enormous and the pelvis tiny, buried under eight or nine inches of the gray flesh. The limbs were literally double-jointed. There was a fantastic double structure of ball and socket that seemed wholly unnecessary. Maury saw the Survey Leader staring at one hip joint and leaned over to tap it with the blunt nail of his forefinger.

“Swivel and lock,” said Maury. “If the joint’s pulled out, it can turn in any direction. Then, if the muscles surrounding it contract, the two ball joints interlace those bony spurs there and lock together so that they operate as a single joint in the direction chosen. That hip joint can act like the hip joint on the hind leg of a quadruped, or the leg of a biped. It can even adapt for jumping and running with maximum efficiency.—Look at the toes and the fingers.”

Joe looked. Hidden under flesh, the bones of feet and hands were not stubby and short, but long and powerful. And at the end of finger and toe bones were the curved, conical claws they had seen rip open Sam Cloate with one passing blow.

“Look at these other pictures now,” said Maury, taking the first one off the stack Joe held. “These have been set for densities of muscle—that’s this one here—and fat. Here. And this one is set for soft internal organs—here.” He was down to the last. “And this one was set for the density of the skin. Look at that. See how thick it is, and how great folds of it are literally tucked away underneath in those creases.

“Now,” said Maury, “look at this closeup of a muscle. See how it resembles an interlocking arrangement of innumerable tiny muscles? Those small muscles can literally shift to adapt to different skeletal positions. They can take away beef from one area and add it to an adjoining area. Each little muscle actually holds on to its neighbors, and they have little sphincter-sealed tube-systems to hook on to whatever blood-conduit is close. By increased hookup they can increase the blood supply to any particular muscle that’s being overworked. There’s parallel nerve connections.”

Maury stopped and looked at the other man.

“You see?” said Maury. “This alien can literally be four or five different kinds of animal. Even a fish! And no telling how many varieties of each kind. We wondered a little at first why he wasn’t wearing any kind of clothing, but we didn’t wonder after we got these pictures. Why would he need clothing when he can adapt to any situation—Joe!” said Maury. “You see it, don’t you? You see the natural advantage these things have over us all?”

Joe shook his head.

“There’s no body hair,” he said. “The creature that jumped me was striped like a tiger.”

“Pigmentation. In response to emotion, maybe,” said Maury. “For camouflage—or for terrifying the victims.”

Joe sat staring at the pictures in his hand.

“All right,” he said after a bit. “Then tell me how he happened to get here three or four minutes after we fell down here ourselves? And where did he come from? We rammed that other ship a good five miles up.”

“There’s only one way, the rest of us figured it out,” said Maury. “He was one of the ones who were spilled out when we hit them. He must have grabbed our hull and ridden us down.”

“That’s impossible!”

“Not if he could flatten himself out and develop suckers like a starfish,” said Maury. “The skin picture shows he could.”

“All right,” said Joe. “Then why did he try a suicidal trick like that attack—him alone against the eight of us?”

“Maybe it wasn’t so suicidal,” said Maury. “Maybe he didn’t see Cal’s pistol and thought he could take the unarmed eight of us.” Maury hesitated. “Maybe he could, too. Or maybe he was just doing his duty—to do as much damage to us as he could before we got him. There’s no cover around here that’d have given him a chance to escape from us. He knew that we’d see him the first time he moved.”