In Deep Read Free

its mouth.
    It had a great many teeth.
    George found himself crammed into some kind of crevice in a wall of rock, without any clear recollection of how he had got there. He remembered a flurry of branches as the creature sprang at him, and a moment’s furious pain, and then nothing but vague, starlit glimpses of leaves and earth.
    The thing was impossible. How had he got away?
    He puzzled over it until dawn came, and then, looking down at himself, he saw something that had not been there before. Under the smooth edge of gelatinous flesh three or four projections of some kind were visible. It struck George that his sensation of contact with the stone underneath him had changed, too: he seemed to be standing on a number of tiny points instead of lying flat.
    He flexed one of the projections experimentally, then thrust it out straight ahead of him. It was a lumpy, single-jointed caricature of a finger—or a leg.
    George lay still for a long time and thought about it with as much coherence as he could muster. Then he waggled the thing again. It was there, and so were all the others, as solid and real as the rest of him.
    He moved forward experimentally, sending the same messages down to his finger-and-toe nerve ends as before. His body lurched out of the cranny with a swiftness that very nearly tumbled him down over the edge of a minor precipice.
    Where he had crawled like a snail before, he now scuttled like an insect.
    But how… No doubt, in his terror when the thing with the teeth attacked, he had unconsciously tried to run as if he still had legs. Was that all there was to it?
    George thought of the carnivore again, and of the stalks supporting the organs which he had thought might be eyes. That would do as an experiment. He closed his own eyes and imagined them rising outward, imagined the mobile stalks growing, growing… He tried to convince himself that he had eyes like that, had always had them—that everyone who was anyone had eyes on stalks.
    Surely, something was happening?
    George opened his eyes again, and found himself looking straight down at the ground, getting a view so close up that it was blurred, out of focus. Impatiently he tried to look up. All that happened was that his field of vision moved forward a matter of ten or twelve centimeters.
    It was at this point that a voice shattered the stillness. It sounded like someone trying to shout through half a meter of lard. “Urghh! Lluhh! Eeraghh! ”
    George leaped convulsively, executed a neat turn and swept his eyes around a good two hundred and forty degrees of arc. He saw nothing but rocks and lichens. On a closer inspection, it appeared that a small green-and-orange larva or grub of some kind was moving past him. George regarded it with suspicion for a long moment, until the voice broke out again:
    “Ellfff! Ellffneee!”
    The voice, somewhat higher this time, came from behind.
    George whirled again, swept his mobile eyes around—
    Around an impossible wide circuit. His eyes were on stalks, and they were mobile—whereas a moment ago he had been staring at the ground, unable to look up. George’s brain clattered into high gear. He had grown stalks for his eyes, all right, but they’d been limp—just extensions of the jellylike mass of his body, without a stiffening cell structure of muscular tissue to move them. Then, when the voice had startled him, he’d got the stiffening and the muscles in a hurry.
    That must have been what had happened the previous night. Probably the process would have been completed, but much more slowly, if he hadn’t been frightened. A protective mechanism, obviously. As for the voice—
    George rotated once more, slowly, looking all around him. There was no question about it: he was alone. The voice, which had seemed to come from someone or something standing just behind him, must in fact have issued from his own body.
    The voice started again, at a less frantic volume. It burbled a few times, then said quite clearly in