In Deep Read Free Page A

a high tenor, “Whass happen’? Wheh am I?”
    George was floundering in a sea of bewilderment. He was in no condition to adapt quickly to more new circumstances, and when a large, desiccated lump fell from a nearby bush and bounced soundlessly to within a meter of him, he simply stared at it.
    He looked at the hard-shelled object, and then at the laden bush from which it had dropped. Slowly, painfully, he worked his way through to a logical conclusion. The dried fruit had fallen without a sound. That was natural, because he had been totally deaf ever since his metamorphosis. But—he had heard a voice!
    Ergo, hallucination, or telepathy.
    The voice began again. “He-elp. Oh, dear, I wish someone would answer!”
    Vivian Bellis. Gumbs, even if he affected that tenor voice, wouldn’t say, “Oh, dear.” Neither would McCarty.
    George’s shaken nerves were returning to normal. He thought intently, I get scared, grow legs. Bellis gets scared, grows a telepathic voice. That’s reasonable, I guess-her first and only instinct would be to yell .
    George tried to put himself into a yelling mood. He shut his eyes and imagined himself cooped up in a terrifyingly alien medium, without any control or knowledge of his predicament. He tried to shout: “Vivian!”
    He kept on trying, while the girl’s voice continued at intervals.
    Finally she stopped abruptly in the middle of a sentence. George said, “Can you hear me?”
    “Who’s that—what do you want?”
    “This is George Meister, Vivian. Can you understand what I’m saying?”
    “What—”
    George kept at it. His pseudo-voice, he judged, was a little garbled, just as Bellis’s had been at first. At least the girl said, “Oh, George—I mean Mr. Meister! Oh, I’ve been so frightened. Where are you?”
    George explained, apparently not very tactfully, because Bellis shrieked when he was through and then went back to burbling. George sighed, and said, “Is there anyone else on the premises? Major Gumbs? Miss McCarty?”
    A few minutes later two sets of weird sounds began almost simultaneously. When they became coherent, it was no trouble to identify the voices. Gumbs, the big, red-faced professional soldier, shouted, “Why the hell don’t you watch where you’re going, Meister? If you hadn’t started that rock slide we wouldn’t be in this mess!”
    Miss McCarty, who had had a seamed white face, a jutting jaw, and eyes the color of mud, said coldly, “Meister, all of this will be reported. All of it.”
    It appeared that only Meister and Gumbs had kept the use of their eyes. All four of them had some muscular control, though Gumbs was the only one who had made any serious attempt to interfere with George’s locomotion. Miss McCarty, not to George’s surprise, had managed to retain a pair of functioning ears.
    But Bellis had been blind, deaf and dumb all through the afternoon and night. The only terminal sense organs she had been able to use had been those of the skin—the perceptors of touch, heat and cold, and pain. She had heard nothing, seen nothing, but she had felt every leaf and stalk they had brushed against, the cold impact of every raindrop, and the pain of the toothy monster’s bite. George’s opinion of her went up several notches when he learned this. She had been terrified, but she hadn’t been driven into hysteria or insanity.
    It further appeared that nobody was doing any breathing, and nobody was aware of a heartbeat.
    George would have liked nothing better than to continue this discussion, but the other three were united in believing that what had happened to them after they got in was of less importance than how they were going to get out.
    “We can’t get out,” said George. “At least, I don’t see any possibility of it in the present state of our knowledge. If we—”
    “But we’ve got to get out!” said Vivian.
    “We’ll go back to camp,” said McCarty coldly. “Immediately. And you’ll explain to the Loyalty Committee