In Deep Read Online Free PDF Page B

you are. Now: is Meister to your right or left?”
    “Left. I know that, anyhow. Can see his eye stalks out of the corner of my eye.”
    “Very well.” McCarty’s arm rose, with a sharp-pointed fragment of rock clutched in the blobby fingers.
    Horrified, George watched it bend backward across the curve of the monster’s body. The long, knife-sharp point probed tentatively at the surface three centimeters short of the area over his brain. Then the fist made an abrupt up-and-down movement, and a fierce stab of pain shot through him.
    “Not quite long enough, I think,” McCarty said. She flexed the arm, then brought it back to almost the same spot and stabbed again.
    “No,” she said thoughtfully. “It will take a little longer,” then, “Major Gumbs, after my next attempt you will tell me if you notice any reaction in Meister’s eye stalks.”
    The pain was still throbbing along George’s nerves. With one half-blinded eye he watched the embryonic arm that was growing, too slowly, under the rim; with the other, fascinated, he watched McCarty’s arm lengthen slowly toward him.
    It was growing visibly, he suddenly realised—but it wasn’t getting any nearer. In fact, incredibly enough, it seemed to be losing ground.
    The monster’s flesh was flowing away under it, expanding in both directions.
    McCarty stabbed again, with vicious strength. This time the pain was less acute.
    “Major?” she said. “Any result?”
    “No,” said Gumbs, “no, I think not. We seem to be moving forward a bit, though, Miss McCarty.”
    “A ridiculous error,” she replied. “We are being forced back . Pay attention, Major.”
    “No, really,” he protested. “That is to say, we’re moving toward the thicket. Forward to me, backward to you.”
    “Major Gumbs, I am moving forward, you are moving back.”
    They were both right, George discovered: the monster’s body was no longer circular, it was extending itself along the Gumbs-McCarty axis. A suggestion of concavity was becoming visible in the center. Below the surface, too, there was motion.
    The four brains now formed an oblong, not a square.
    The positions of the spinal cords had shifted. His own and Vivian’s seemed to be about where they were, but Gumbs’s now passed under McCarty’s brain, and vice versa.
    Having increased its mass by some two hundred kilos, the something meisterii was fissioning into two individuals—and tidily separating its tenants, two to each. Gumbs and Meister in one, McCarty and Bellis in the other.
    The next time it happened, he realised, each product of the fission would be reduced to one brain—and the time after that, one of the new individuals out of each pair would be a monster in the primary or untenanted state, quiescent, camouflaged, waiting to be stumbled over.
    But that meant that, like the common amoeba, this fascinating organism was immortal. It never died, barring accidents; it simply grew and divided.
    Not the tenants, though, unfortunately—their tissues would wear out and die.
    Or would they? Human nervous tissue didn’t proliferate as George’s and Miss McCarty’s had done; neither did any human tissue build new cells fast enough to account for George’s eye stalks or Miss McCarty’s arm.
    There was no question about it: none of that new tissue could possibly be human; it was all counterfeit, produced by the monster from its own substance according to the structural blueprints in the nearest genuine cells. And it was a perfect counterfeit: the new tissues knit with the old, axones coupled with dendrites, muscles contracted or expanded on command. The imitation worked .
    And therefore, when nerve cells wore out, they could be replaced. Eventually the last human cell would go, the human tenant would have become totally monster—but “a difference that makes no difference is no difference.” Effectively, the tenant would still be human—and he would be immortal.
    Barring accidents.
    Or murder.
    Miss McCarty was