Part 4

Jerry nodded. "It'll mean all miners will have to go armed for awhile. But that's better than getting eaten alive by one of these."

"You sure their presence won't trigger the thing's mimetic power?" asked Bob, uneasily.

"Not if you give full power to the scanner-beam," Jerry replied. "It'll muffle their life-pulse radiations under the brunt of the artificial one."

"Good enough, sir," said Bob. "I'll rig it right away."

Jerry shook his head. "No need. You could use some rest, I'm sure. The morning'll be soon enough. Meantime, you can see this young lady home. The rest of you," he said to the hovering crewmen, "are dismissed, too."

The men, eager to be away from the thing, saluted smartly and hurried out of the solarium, buzzing with wordy relief.

Jana paused a moment, staring at the creature whose strange powers had destroyed her father. Then she turned to Bob.

"I think I'll go to Jim's place," she said. "I want him to know." She moved her gaze to Jerry. "I owe you a lot," she said. "We all owe you a lot."

Embarrassed by the warmth of her praise, Jerry could only mumble something diffident and look the other way. He was taken quite by surprise by the pressure of cool moist lips against the side of his face.

When he looked back at the pair, Bob and Jana were on their way out the door.

Only when he heard the elevator doors at the end of the corridor close behind them did he move to the still-warm corpse of his onetime adversary, with a look of deepest compassion on his face.

"Well," he said gently, "you've lost. The planet goes back to the invaders. Once again, Earth has successfully obliterated the opposition."

He reached out a hand and touched the hulking thing on the floor. "Good-by," he said. "And I'm sorry."

Jerry Norcriss wasn't thinking about the deadliness of the thing, nor of the deaths of the hapless miners, nor of the billions of dollars he'd saved the investors holding Praesodynimium stock. He was thinking of a voice that--even unintelligently, even in the course of deception--had said, "Poor Jerry. Rest.... Relax. You're safe.... Secure...."

"You really had me going for a while, baby," he said, then blinked at the sudden sharp sting in his eyes, and hurried from the room.

* * * * *

Outside, the sun was glowing pink against the black eastern sky, and the air was cool and fresh in his nostrils. As he crossed the street from the hospital, heading toward the landing field and his shipboard bunk, a hurrying figure from the end of the block caught up with him and began to pace his stride, panting slightly.

"Talk about happy," said Bob, glumly. "When Jana told her boy friend the news, they went into such a clinch I didn't even stick around to be introduced. Seemed a nice enough guy, I guess. Hope she'll be happy with him."

Jerry recognized the gloominess of the tech's mood, and its cause, so didn't say anything. After a moment, Bob seemed to recover himself a little.

"Sir," he said, "there's one thing still bugs me about this alien."

"Oh?" said Jerry, halting. "What's that, Ensign?"

"How'd the initial roborocket miss the thing and its kind when it circled the planet before colonization began?"

"That's a moot question," said Jerry. "But my conjecture is that the scanner always caught it when it was assuming some other form. Since its victims were always indigenous to this planet, the things familiar to them were also of this planet, and the scanner-beam couldn't detect any life-pulses which were dissimilar to already-known species."

"I'll be damned," said Bob. "It's almost childishly simple when you explain it." Then, as Jerry went to start off again, Bob stopped him with an exclamation.

"What about that melting mine car I read about on the translation sheets? Was that for real, or wasn't it?"

Jerry shook his head. "Part of the general mimetic illusion, like the motionless clouds and unmoving trees. It let me see what I expected to see. In reality, I was just in the woods near the mine area, where you came upon the creature to destroy it." Jerry started slowly moving away once more.

A few steps further, and Bob halted again. "One final point, sir. That life-pulsing reading of point-nine-nine-nine. If the thing's pulsation was that powerful, I should think it would've been a lot harder to knock off than it was."

"You're right," said Jerry. "It would have been. But its life-pulse wasn't nearly that high."

"But the scanner-beam--" Bob protested. "When the colony sent up that roborocket, after those miners vanished, it reported an unknown life-pulse of point-nine-nine-nine. If that wasn't the alien's life-pulse, what the devil was it?"

Jerry patted Bob on the shoulder. "You're forgetting the mimicry. The roborocket they sent up caught the alien off-guard, in its own shape, not imitating some other life-form's pulsations. It detected the beam, since a scanner picks up mental pulses, and it instantly assumed the life-pulse of a creature it assumed no roborocket would worry about."

"What? What life-pulse, sir? What kind of life?"

"Atomic life, Ensign," said Jerry. "That bright green blip you and I studied so assiduously was the life-pulse of an atom-powered creature. It was another roborocket."

And as Bob stared after him, stupefied, Jerry Norcriss made his way across the landing field toward a well-earned bed--and oblivion.