Part 1

ARCTURUS TIMES THREE

By JACK SHARKEY

Illustrated by SCHELLING

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine October 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

A man who lived three lives? A piker! Jerry Norcriss lived hundreds--all over the Galaxy!

ZOOLOGY 2097

Trial-and-error familiarization with new life-forms is dangerously impractical on a far planet, where the representation of Earth men may be a solitary five-man crew. The loss of even a single man constitutes, in effect, obliteration of one-fifth of that planet's Earth-population. This is the "why" of the Space Zoologist.

The science of Contact came into being as a result of a government-subsidized "crash" program in the early seventies, following on the heels of the disastrous second Mars landing.

The first flight to Mars had been simple in intent. The job of the men on board had been merely to land in one piece and radio the joyous news back to Earth, to take some samplings of soil and air, some photographs and then return to Earth. All this was accomplished without incident.

It was the second Mars landing that occasioned the discovery of the quilties. These furry beasts, somewhere between marmosets and koalas in appearance save for overall bright orange and green tangles of fur, were found to be friendly, and unanimously adopted by the crew members as mascots and pets. The animals, disarmingly akin to ambulant rag-toys cut from patchwork counterpanes, did indeed deserve the nickname of "quilties". They were cuddly, friendly, with sad eyes and mournful squeaky voices that endeared them to all the men on that flight.

Fortunately, their discovery was radioed back to Earth along with the usual information in that first day's report. There were no subsequent messages.

Mars Flight Three found the remains of the crew where the quilties had left them.

On investigation by the ship's doctor, it was found that the biology of the quilty was similar to that of a hornet, and they considered man--as they would anything warm and fleshy--in the relative position of a caterpillar. During the cuddling with the small beasts, minute hairlike spines at the base of the quilties' tails had managed to prick the flesh of the crewmen. By the following morning, the men had been eaten to death from within by the grubs of gestating baby quilties.

All of this, of course, is common knowledge today. But it is mentioned here solely to demonstrate to you the monumental hazards which an astronaut had to encounter in the days before the discovery of Contact, and the development of the Space Zoologist, without whose training, courage and efforts extra-Terran colonization would be next to impossible.

"CONTACT--Its Application and Indigenous Hazards" by Lt. Commander Lloyd Rayburn, U. S. Naval Space Corps

* * * * *

Lieutenant Jerry Norcriss stood at the edge of the wide green clearing, sniffing contentedly of the not-unpleasant air of Arcturus Beta. Three hundred yards behind him, crewmen and officers alike labored to unload the equipment necessary for setting up camp for this, their first night on the planet.

No one had asked him to lend his strong back to the proceedings. Space Zoologists were never required to do anything which might sap, even slightly, any of their physical energies. Moreover, they were under oath _not_ to take any orders to the contrary.

Now and then, a hot-shot pilot would feel resentment at the zoologist's standoffish position, and take out his feelings with a remark like, "Would you pass the sugar, if you don't think it would sprain your wrist, sir?" Such incidents, if reported back to Earth, inevitably resulted in the breaking of the pilot, and his immediate removal from command. It was seldom the zoologist himself who made the report. Any crew member who overheard such statements would make the report as soon as possible, no matter what feelings of loyalty they might otherwise have for the pilot or person who had spoken.

From the moment of landing, the lives of every man aboard a ship were in the hands of the Space Zoologist.

From Captain Daniel Peters, the pilot, down to Ollie Gibbs, the mess boy, there was nothing but respect for Jerry Norcriss, and no envy whatsoever for the job he would soon be doing. That is not to say they were on friendly terms with him, either.

It was the next thing to impossible to call a Space Zoologist "friend." Even amongst themselves, the zoologists were distracted, bemused, withdrawn from their surroundings. After their first Contact, they never were able to join in amiable camaraderie with other men. Such social contact was not forbidden them. It was merely no longer a part of their inclination. In their eyes a cool, silvery light shimmered, an inner light that marked them for the ultimate adventurers they were. No person would ever suffice them. They lived only for the job they did. Without it, few lived longer than a terrestrial year. Even with it, there was often sudden death.

Jerry was barely thirty, but his thick shock of hair was almost totally white and his mouth a firm line which never curled in a smile nor twisted in a frown. At the edge of the clearing, his bronzed flesh glowing ruddily in the failing sunset light of Arcturus, he stood and waited. Off in the distance behind him, Daniel Peters started across the clearing from the sunset-red gleaming of the sleek metal spaceship.

He drew abreast of the solitary figure, and said respectfully, "All in readiness, sir."

The words reached Jerry as from across a void. He turned slowly to face the other man, focusing his will with the effort it always took just to use his voice.

"Thank you, Captain," he said.

That was all he said, but as he followed Peters across the clearing toward the scorched circle where the great ship had descended on its column of fire, the pilot could not suppress a shudder. Jerry's voice was oddly disconcerting to the nervous system of the listener. It seemed like the "ghost-voice" of a medium at a seance. The mind that was Jerry Norcriss was only utilizing a body for the purpose of speaking. It did not actually belong there.

And that was true enough. Jerry and the others of his kind no longer lived in their bodies. They merely existed there, waiting painfully for the next occasion of Contact.

* * * * *

Beside the ship's ladder, hooked to an external power-outlet beneath a metal flap on one towering tailfin, was the couch and the helmet Jerry Norcriss would use.

Jerry lay back with the ease of long habit and adjusted the helmet-strap beneath his chin, as Peters read to him mechanically. The data came from the translated resumé of the roborocket that had gathered data on Arcturus Beta for the six months prior to the landing of the spaceship.

"... three uncatalogued species," his voice droned on. "An underground life-pulse in the swamp-lands near the equator; the creature could not be spotted from the air.... A basically feline creature, also near the equator, but in a desert region, metabolism unknown.... And pulses of intelligent life, and of some unfamiliar lower animal life, on the northern seas.... All other life-forms on the planet conform to previously discovered patterns, and can be dealt with in the prescribed manners."

A small section of Jerry Norcriss's mind found itself mildly amused, as always, by this bit of formality. The outlining of the planetary reconnaissance to a Space Zoologist was mere protocol, a holdover from the ancient custom of briefing a man who was about to undergo a mission of importance. Vainly did the zoologists try to convince authority that this briefing was futile. A man in Contact was no longer a man. He _was_ the creature whose mind he inhabited, save for a miniscule remnant of personal identity. His job was to Learn the creature from the inside out. As his mind, off in the alien body, Learned, the information was relayed via the Contact helmet to an electronic brain on the ship, to be later translated into code-cards for the roborockets.

Man's expansion throughout the universe was progressing faster than his mind could memorize or categorize.

The roborockets obviated his need to learn. For every known kind of alien-species problem, there was a solution. The scannerbeams of the rocket would sense each life-form over which they passed, in the rocket's six-month orbit about the planet. If all species conformed to already known types, then a signal would fly by ultrawave across the void to Earth, declaring the planet fit for immediate colonization. But if new species were encountered, the beam to Earth carried a hurried call to the Naval Space Corps, with a request for the next available zoologist.

Zoologists spent their Earthside time at Corps Headquarters, in the Comprehension Chamber. There, with the millions of index-cards at fingertip control, they lay back upon their couches and learned, through dream-like vicarious playbacks, about the species Contacted by their confreres. Any Space Zoologist with even five years' service had more accumulated knowledge in his brain than any dozen ordinary zoologists. And more intimate knowledge, too. A man who has _been_ an animal has infinitely more knowledge of that animal than a man who has merely dissected one.

* * * * *

So Jerry lay there, letting his ears record the voice of the pilot but closing his conscious mind to the import of the words. It never did any good to know that the creature you were about to be was unknown. And no comment on what sort of animal it _might_ be could be half so informative as actually _being_ what it was.

Jerry repressed an urge to fidget. This was almost the worst part of Contact: The wait, while the senseless briefing took place. Soon enough he would know more of the species under observation than could be held on ten reams of briefing-sheets. Soon enough he would be sent, for an irreducible forty minutes, into the mind of each of the creatures to be learned.

The irreducible time-extent of Contact was its primary hazard. When the Contact helmet had been developed, it had been found that approximately forty minutes--forty-point-oh-three minutes, to be exact--had to be spent in the creature's mind. No amount of redesigning, fiddling or tinkering could change that time. The Zoologist could spend neither more nor less than that amount in a creature's mind.

Since all creatures have natural enemies, Contact called for more than simply curling up and relaxing inside the alien mind. The zoologist's host-alien might have a metabolism which called for it to drink a pint of water every fifteen minutes or shrivel. In which case the zoologist would shrivel with it, his punishment for not sufficiently Learning his host.

This, then, was the reason those irreducible forty minutes were a hazard. Should the creature being Contacted die, the zoologist died with it. There was no avoiding death if it came to the inhabited creature. A good zoologist Learned fast, or perished. Which is why there is no such thing as a bad Space Zoologist. You're either a good one or a dead one.

Peters' voice came to a halt and he closed the plastic folder over the briefing-sheet.

"That's about the size of it, sir," he said. "We've focused the Contact-beams toward the indicated areas and made a final check of all the wiring, tubes and power-sources."

Jerry sighed contentedly and shut his eyes.

"Whenever you're ready, then, Captain," he whispered, and relaxed his body in preparation for his first Contact. His mind and imagination toyed a moment with brief fancies about his forthcoming existences in swamp, desert and sea, then he pushed the thoughts away and let his mind go empty.

Faintly, he heard Peters calling an order to the technician within the spaceship--

Then silent lightning flashed across his consciousness.

II

He opened his eyes. Six eyes. In two rows of three eyes each.

He did not, however, see six images. The widespread belief in the multitudinous images seen by the faceted eyes of a housefly had been debunked the first time a helmeted biochemist had intruded upon that insect's puny brain. As with human eyes, the images were fused into a whole when they reached the mind. Save for the disconcerting sensation of possessing a horizontal and vertical peripheral vision of approximately three hundred degrees sight was comfortably normal.

Jerry looked over his surroundings and noted one slightly annoying side-effect of his hexafocal outlook. As a human will see--as when looking at the tip of a pencil pointed at the face--two images at the far end of any object looked upon, so Jerry, while able to zero in anywhere he chose, could see six ghost-images corresponding in their angle of perspective to the positions of his six eyes. Had he a pencil-tip to stare at, it would have appeared, beyond the tip, to be vaguely like a badminton bird seen head on, with images of the pencil-body comprising the "feathers."

A few moments of glancing about soon took care of the primary irritation of this unfamiliar sensation, and Jerry began to study his surroundings carefully.

He was inside a circular cavity of some sort, facing toward brightness at the opening ahead of him. The walls of the cavity were dark, sandy-smooth and slightly moist, so he reasoned he was in some sort of burrow in the soil. Beyond the opening, there was light and warmth and a hint of greenery which his host's eyes could not bring into sharp focus.

"I wish I knew my size," he thought. "Am I some small insect awaiting a victim, or a rabbit-souled mammal hiding from a predator, or a lion-sized carnivore sleeping off a heavy meal?"

Attempts to turn his head for a look at his host's body availed him nothing. Jerry relaxed for a moment, and tried to sense his body by _feel_. He had, he knew in a moment, no neck. Head and torso were a one-piece unit, or at least inflexibly joined.

Carefully, Jerry moved his right "hand" out before his face for a look. He saw a thin, flesh-covered bony limb, with a double "elbow," terminating in a semicircular pad which seemed suited for nothing but support. No claw, talon or digit on the pad; just a tesselated rubbery bottom, the tesselations apparently acting as treads do on a tire.

"Whatever I am," Jerry sighed, "I'm non-skid." He considered a moment, then added, "I can't be an insect, then. Insects can't rely on weight to keep them rightside up, and need gripping mechanisms. Okay, insect-size is out."

* * * * *

Jerry extended the pad before him and cautiously leaned his weight on it, then removed it back beneath his torso and studied the earth where it had rested. There was a concavity there, corresponding to the pad. It was not especially deep.

"Well, that lets out elephant-size," he reasoned, "and most oversize forms. I must be somewhere between a mouse and a middle-sized wolf. But _what_ am I?"

Jerry tried breathing. Nothing happened; there was no sense of dilation anywhere in his body. "Odd," he thought. "Unless I get oxygen--or whatever gases this creature breathes--through my food.... Or maybe I have air-tubes like an insect's.... No, I'd have to shift my body now and then for air circulation, and I feel no discomfort remaining still. Besides, I have flesh, and that tube arrangement only functions well in a body with an endoskeleton. Must be dependent on food intake, then. Stores its oxygen or whatever."

He extended the tesselated pad, and rubbed it cautiously against the soil. There was a dim sensation of touch in the pad. But it was subordinate to a soma-centric sense of location. His pad "knew" where it was in relation to his body, but had no great tactile capacity for his surroundings. "Well," Jerry thought, "that lets out _feeling_ my body to determine shape or function."

As it sometimes did when he was enhosted, his mind went back to old Peters, his instructor, who had taught "Project C" to the eager young zoologists. Project Contact had been mostly devoted to giving the student an open mind on metabolism and adaptability to environment. A Learner had to be able to reason out--and quickly--the metabolism of his host. It was little use knowing a Terran life-ecology; man lives on combustibles and oxygen, the oxygen combining with combustibles to provide heat, and plants live on carbon dioxide and water and sunlight, renewing the atmospheric oxygen. So old Peters had always stressed the student's learning their Basic Combinations.

Basic Combinations prepared the student--or so the school board hoped--for a wide variety of chemical relationships between a host and its environment. The students had to know what to do to survive should the host, for instance, live in a chlorine atmosphere, and need large amounts of antimony in its diet for proper combustion and survival. There were a good many chemical elements in the universe; the student had to know how to deal with any combination of them in a host's metabolism.

For the most part, the instincts of the host would carry a Learner through the Contact period. A species tended to keep its physical needs not only in its mind, but in its body as well. Mr. Peters had a saying he'd been fond of emphasizing to the students: "When in doubt, black out." The saying became a cliche to the student body, but they had the sense not to disregard it. A cliche is, after all, only a truth which has become trite because it is vitally necessary to use it often.

"When in doubt, black out," meant simply that if a situation arose which seemed impossible to handle rationally, the enhosted Learner's last resort was reliance upon the instinctive behavior of the host. The only thing to be done was to pull the mind into a tiny knot bobbing in the host's own brain, and let the host itself, once more in control, take the Learner instinctively to environmental victory. Or defeat.

* * * * *

There were dangers, of course. A Learner enhosted in a chicken, for instance, would be a fool to trust the chicken's instincts regarding, say, a snake. A chicken confronted by a snake tends to become hypnotized by its deadly adversary, and to stand stupidly in place until it is killed. In cases of that sort, the Learner would be safer taking control and going clucking off to the nearest high ground.

On the other hand, a Learner inhabiting something with the hairtrigger instincts of a bat would be much better off letting the animal's instincts take over in moments of grave risk, such as flying through the blades of a revolving fan. A bat could get through without a second thought about those whirling metal scythes, but a man's mind could not think fast enough to avoid a grim death by all-over amputation.

"Maybe," Jerry thought hopefully, "I've got an _easy_ one." It was possible, of course. His host might be in the midst of an afternoon siesta, and Jerry could relax and "sit out" his forty minutes of Contact. But such cases were few. At any moment a predator might come down into that orifice in the soil, and Jerry would have to fight for his host's life to preserve his own. Relaxed Learning was seldom feasible.

"I'd better see what sort of fighting equipment I have," he decided, wishing vainly that he could just turn his head and look his body over. This proceeding by _feel_ was a slow, tortuous, and sometimes deceptive process. Hollow fangs that seemed capable of injecting venom into an enemy might--as in the case of the Venusian Sea Vampires--turn out to be an organ for drinking water, the sacs above the fangs being for digesting liquids and not for storing poisons.

Jerry stimulated what should be his tongue into action, checking for the presence of fangs. Within the mouth of the creature, which felt large in relation to its head, he sensed a rasping movement, a kind of dull dry rustling, but could feel nothing with the tongue itself. "Best have a look at it," he decided suddenly, and, opening his jaws, extended the tongue.

* * * * *

Jerry was distinctly shocked by the thing that skewed and writhed forward from beneath his eyes. His sensation was not unlike that of a man who opens his mouth and finds a snake in it. And Jerry further realized that he was now seeing with another sextet of eyes, at the end of the tongue.

He was not one alien--he was two!

His primary six eyes took in the pink-and-gray horror extending ahead of him. The tongue was almost like another animal, serpentine in construction, and had two horny--what?--arms?--pincer-jaws?--at either side of the "head". They were tubular, like a cow's horns, and lay at either side of a wide slit-mouth in the tongue itself.

On impulse, Jerry swiveled the tip of the tongue back upon itself, and gazed through the six eyes around the tongue-slit-and-jaws/arms at the main body of his host. Then, suddenly feeling ill, he snapped the tongue back into his mouth and shut his jaws.

It had been a horrible sight. Where he'd expected to see the abdominal region of his host, just behind the thoracic section, there lay a wet, red concavity, in the midst of gaping jaws. Jerry himself was enhosted in a "tongue" of some still larger creature within that soft earthen burrow! And some remaining fragment of his host's awareness told him that the creature of whom he was the tongue was itself the tongue of yet another creature. He was a segment of some gigantic segmented worm-creature whose origin lay who-knows-how-far beneath the earth.

Carefully, stilling a mental feeling akin to _mal de mer_, he re-protruded his tongue and looked more carefully at it. Sure enough, just behind the "head" of the thing were two stubby growths, not yet mature. In time, Jerry realized, those growths would develop into a pair of double-elbowed front "arms" with semi-tactile tesselated pads at the base, and the curving jaws/arms would drop off or be resorbed, while that "tongue" extended a "tongue" of its own.

"And then what happens to _my_ segment?" he wondered. "Do I simply lie here forever with jaws agape?"

As he pondered this, there came a movement in the greenery just beyond the burrow orifice. A squiggly thing with an ill-assorted tangle of under-appendages came prancing with almost laughable ill-balance into view. Jerry, intent on observing this creature--very like a landbound jellyfish walking clumsily upon its dangling arms--relaxed his vigil as regards control of the host.

Before he realized it, his jaws were flung wide, and that self-determined tongue was leaping for its prey. The horny jaws/arms clamped into the viscous body of the passing creature, and the slit-mouth extended upper and lower lips like pseudopods to cover the writhing, squealing victim. Then a huge lump appeared in the tongue, just behind its "head." Jerry waited with a distinct lack of relish for the still squirming "meal" to make its alimentary way back into his own esophagous.

However, it did not. Just short of his lips, it halted. And after a few moments, it ceased to struggle.

Annoyed, but uncertain just why he was, Jerry attempted to re-mouth his tongue. It did not come back. His jaws lay open wide, and his tongue remained where it had shot forward to grasp the tentacled creature.

Something clicked in Jerry's mind, and he once more tried "seeing" out of the tongue's six eyes. He found that he still could, but dimly.

It took him about three seconds to figure out his peril.

* * * * *