James White: Ambulance Ship

“There is a similar species, much smaller,” she went on, “which is native to Earth. We studied the more exotic types of Earth fauna in preparation for the e-t courses. It was called a bombardier beetle and it—”

“Doctor Conway!”

He swung away from the screen and ran into the main compartment. He did not need to be an empath to know that something was seriously wrong.

The team leader of the maintenancemen was waving frantically and Prilicla, encased in its protective globe and supported by gravity nullifiers, was drifting above the man’s head and trembling.

“Increasing awareness, friend Conway,” reported the empath. “Suggesting rapidly returning consciousness. Feelings of fear and confusion.”

Some of the confusion, thought Conway, belongs to me …

The maintenanceman simply pointed.

Instead of the hard coating he had expected to see there was a black, oily, semi-liquid which flowed and rippled and dripped slowly on to the floor plating. As he watched the area where the flame was being applied, the stuff rolled away from one of the barnacles, which twitched and unfolded its wings. The wings flapped, slowly at first, and it began pulling free of the patient, drawing its long tendrils out of the bird until it was completely detached and it went blundering into the air.

“Kill the torches,” said Conway urgently, “but cool it with the air hose. Try to harden that black stuff.”

But the thick, black liquid would not harden. Once initiated by the heat the softening process was self-sustaining. The patient’s neck, no longer supported by solid material, slumped heavily on to the deck followed a few seconds later by the massive wings. The black pool around the patient widened and more and more of the barnacles struggled free to blunder about the compartment on wide, membranous wings, trailing their tendrils behind them like long, fine plumes.

“Back everybody! Take cover, quickly!”

Their patient lay motionless and almost certainly dead, but there was nothing that Conway could do. Neither the maintenancemen nor the medical technicians were protected against those fine, harmless-looking tendrils of the barnacles-only Prilicla in its transparent globe was safe there, and now there seemed to be hundreds of the things filling the air. He knew that he should feel badly about the patient, but somehow he did not. Was it simply delayed reaction or was there another reason?

“Friend Conway,” said Prilicla, bumping him gently with its globe, “I suggest that you take your own advice.”

The thought of fine, barnacle tendrils probing through his clothing, skin and underlying tissues, paralyzing his muscles and scrambling his brain made him run for the side compartment, closely followed by Brenner and Prilicla. The Lieutenant closed the door as soon as the Cinrusskin was inside.

There was a barnacle already there.

For a split second Conway’s mind was like a camera, registering everything as it was in the small room: the face of O’Mara on the communicator screen, as expressionless as a slab of rock with only the eyes showing his concern; Prilicla trembling within its protective globe; the barnacle hovering near the ceiling, its tendrils blowing in a self-generated breeze, and Brenner with one eye closed in a diabolical wink as he pointed his gun-a type which threw explosive pellets-at the hovering barnacle.

There was something wrong.

“Don’t shoot,” said Conway, quietly but firmly, then asked, “Are you afraid, Lieutenant?”

“I don’t normally use this thing,” said Brenner, looking puzzled, “but I can. No, I’m not afraid.”

“And I’m not afraid because you have that gun,” said Conway. “Prilicla is protected and has nothing to fear. So who He indicated the empath’s trembling feelers. “… is afraid?”

“It is, friend Conway,” said Prilicla, indicating the barnacle. “It is afraid and confused and intensely curious.

Conway nodded. He could see Prilicla beginning to react to his intense relief. He said, “Nudge it outside, Prilicla, when the Lieutenant opens the door-just in case of accidents. But gently.”

As soon as it was outside, O’Mara’s voice roared from the communicator.

“What the blazes have you done?”

Conway tried to find a simple answer to an apparently simple question. He said, “I suppose you could say that I have prematurely initiated a planetary re-entry sequence.

The report from Torrance arrived just before Conway reached O’Mara’s office. It said that one of the two stars had a light-gravity planet which was inhabitable while showing no indications of advanced technology, and that the other possessed a large, fastspinning world which was so flattened at the poles that it resembled two soup bowls joined at the rims. On the latter world the atmosphere was dense and far-reaching, gravity varied between three Gs at the poles to one-quarter G at the equator, and surface metals were nonexistent. Very recently, in astronomical terms, the world had spiraled too close to its sun and planet-wide volcanic activity and steam had rendered the atmosphere opaque. Torrance doubted that it was still habitable.

“That supports my theory,” said Conway excitedly when O’Mara had relayed the report to him, “that the bird and the barnacles, and the other insect life-form, originate from the same planet. The barnacles are parasites, of course, with a small individual brain capacity, but intelligent when linked and operating as a gestalt. They must have known that their planet was heading for destruction for centuries, and decided to escape. But just think of what it must have taken to develop a space-travel capability completely without metal …

Somehow they had learned how to trap the giant birds from the heavy-gravity polar regions and to control them with their tendrils- the barnacles were a physically weak species and their ability to control non-intelligent hosts was the only strength they had. The birds, Conway now knew, were a non-intelligent species as were the tendril-less beetles. They had taken control of the birds and had flown them high above the equator, commanding maximum physical effort to achieve the required height and velocity for the linkup with the final propulsion stage-the beetles. They also had been controlled by the barnacles, perhaps fifty to each parasite, and they had attached themselves to the areas behind the wings in a gigantic, narrow cone.

Meanwhile the bird had been shaped and paralyzed into the configuration of a supersonic glider, its claws removed to render it aerodynamically clean, and injected with the secretions which would arrest the processes of decomposition. The crew had then sealed it and themselves in position and gone into hibernation for the duration of the voyage using the bird’s tissue for life-support.

Once in position the propulsion cone comprising millions of insects, hundreds of thousands of which were the intelligent controllers, had begun firing. They had done so very evenly and gently, so as not to shatter or crush the narrow apex of the cone where it was attached to the bird. The beetles could be made to deliver their tiny modicum of thrust whether they were alive or dead and, even with their ability to seal themselves inside a hard coating, the propulsion controllers had not lived for very long-they also were expendable. But in dying they had helped an organic starship carrying a few hundred of their fellows to achieve escape velocity from their doomed planet and its sun.

… I don’t know how they intended to position the bird for re-entry,” Conway went on admiringly, “but atmospheric heating was intended to trigger the organic melting process when they had braked sufficiently, allowing the barnacles to pull free of the bird and fly to the surface under their own wing-power. In my hurry to get rid of the coating I applied heat over a wide area of the forward section, which simulated re-entry conditions and—”