Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Life on other planets -- Fiction; Science fiction
"Something ... something here," she said, "in this leucocyte. It's
not normal structure, but it's familiar. I've seen something like it
before, but I just can't remember." She turned away from the
microscope and unthinkingly pressed her gory knuckles to her
forehead. "I know I've seen it before."
Brion squinted into the deserted microscope and made out a dim shape
in the center of the field. It stood out sharply when he
focused--the white, jellyfish shape of a single-celled leucocyte. To
his untrained eye there was nothing unusual about it. He couldn't
know what was strange, when he had no idea of what was normal.
"Do you see those spherical green shapes grouped together?" Lea
asked. Before Brion could answer she gasped, "I remember now!" Her
fatigue was forgotten in her excitement. "_Icerya purchasi_, that
was the name, something like that. It's a coccid, a little scale
insect. It had those same shapes collected together within its
individual cells."
"What do they mean? What is the connection with Dis?"
"I don't know," she said; "it's just that they look so similar. And
I never saw anything like this in a human cell before. In the
coccids, the green particles grow into a kind of yeast that lives
within the insect. Not a parasite, but a real symbiote...."
Her eyes opened wide as she caught the significance of her own
words. A symbiote--and Dis was the world where symbiosis and
parasitism had become more advanced and complex than on any other
planet. Lea's thoughts spun around this fact and chewed at the
fringes of the logic. Brion could sense her concentration and
absorption. He did nothing to break the mood. Her hands were
clenched, her eyes staring unseeingly at the wall as her mind raced.
Brion and Ulv were quiet, watching her, waiting for her conclusions.
The pieces were falling into shape at last.
Lea opened her clenched hands and smoothed them on her sodden skirt.
She blinked and turned to Brion. "Is there a tool box here?" she asked.
Her words were so unexpected that Brion could not answer for a
moment. Before he could say anything she spoke again.
"Not hand tools; that would take too long. Could you find anything
like a power saw? That would be ideal." She turned back to the
microscope, and he didn't try to question her. Ulv was still looking
at the body of the magter and had understood nothing of what they
had said.
Brion went out into the loading bay. There was nothing he could use
on the ground floor, so he took the stairs to the floor above. A
corridor here passed by a number of rooms. All of the doors were
locked, including one with the hopeful sign TOOL ROOM on it. He
battered at the metal door with his shoulder without budging it. As
he stepped back to look for another way in, he glanced at his watch.
Two o'clock! In ten hours the bombs would fall on Dis.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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