02. The Shadow Dancers Read Online Free PDF

natural and normal. Your body defenses won't fight it. It survives by controlling that chemical balance, the blockers and the enzymes, in your brain. If it needs sugars and starches for some reason, it'll stimulate its host to eat particular things. Ditto for things rich in various minerals and whatever. It can suppress urges, emotions, desires, or heighten them to near compulsion."
    I got to admit I was gettin' a real sick feelin' inside. "You mean it takes over, makes the body a slave? It thinks?"
    "No. I doubt if anything like this ever could think as we understand thought. And it just manages the body and stays where it is and gets what it needs and it's happy, leaving the host to still be him or herself, subject to its requirements. There actually are some microscopic life forms like this here on Earth, but all in the lower animals and all known here so far in marine organisms. We think this is a natural organism. We think that on some world, somewhere, it was allowed to evolve so that it reached a very high state and operated on the highest life forms, and on land as well. You can't just catch it, like a disease. A specially organized cluster-still microscopic but definite-must invade the new host. Its remote cousins here reproduce by sex between two hosts-and it can compel its host to have sex, and does. The trouble is, from its point of view, it doesn't work that way in Type Zeros, so we think this is from a world quite different from ours."
    I didn't remember much from our lessons on the Company, but I remembered what he meant by Type Zero. That was the type that the home world was-which also happened to be the type we were, too. Just plain folks. The further away you got from us, though, on both sides, the more real strong differences came on. Humans developed in different places than here, or with maybe different ancestors. Some of 'em was ugly as sin and looked like folks from a bad horror movie, but they was still basically human anyway. They just went to show how different we could have turned out with just one little thing goin' another way. Those they called Type One, and no matter how weird they looked, they was all close enough to us that we could probably have sex and produce somethin' neither of us would really like to claim. Sorta like you can breed a lion and a tiger, or a cow and a buffalo; like that.
    Type Twos came from different ancestors and weren't close enough to breed with us. At best they'd produce sterile offspring-like mules-and mostly nothin' at all. Type Threes and beyond were so far off us that they might as wellbe from Jupiter or somewheres for all we had in common. We couldn't even catch their colds.
    Trouble was, there was millions of worlds side by side that was only different in smaller things, then millions of Type Ones on both sides of them, and so on. A lot more than the Company could count, let alone know everything about.
    "So we can catch it but we can't give it," I said. "That's somethin'."
    "Yeah. It means real addiction. We think it's a Type One organism, but we haven't been able to locate where it came from and considering the number and range it might take years, even decades, if all resources were put on doing just that. It's a needle-in-a-haystack proposition. On our own, we'll find this one only by the kind of luck you have hitting the lottery. Now it does a nice, neat job inside of us, but we're not what it evolved in and it runs into problems. Something in our air, or our body chemistry, or whatever gets to it after a while. It begins to slow down, then break down. The only thing that can restore it is a fresh module of itself. What it does inside the body is very complicated; suddenly it can't handle the task. It starts cutting back. It starts to die and it tells you about it by hitting the pain centers. It also becomes a massive infection in the brain, fighting off all comers and struggling to survive one more minute. The withdrawal becomes the ultimate agony-and the