began to talk.
“Kent,” he said, “I think finding that man’s body upset you more than you realize. You don’t want to let it get you down. A spaceman has to get used to things like that. That idea of yours about the pillows, for instance—that’s the kind of crazy thing only a green hand would think of. The pillows! Why, they’re just novelties, that’s all.”
Kent nodded and leaned back in his bunk, trying to appear relaxed. McTeague watched him. After a moment he looked relieved. “Well—that’s that. Want to play some bizareque?”
Kent nodded. While McTeague was shuffling and dealing the cards, he went on thinking. What was it about the pillows that bemused everyone, put a glamor on them? There was some excuse for scientists such as Dr. Roberts; they had to consider the whole range of the fascinating phenomena that the last twenty years had opened up for investigation. And besides, most of them suffered from a form of scientific snobbery, a human desire not to make fools of themselves by investigating something that was only a novelty, a child’s toy. But what about men like McTeague? Did no one besides himself, Kent, find anything odd in the continued heat of the pillows? Presumably Edward Clutts had. Edward Clutts was dead.
McTeague’s voice broke in on his thoughts. “Do you mean to lead a trump?” He pointed to the purple knight Kent had just laid down.
“Oh. No. Thanks.”
Before he went to bed that night, Kent put a thermometer by one of the pillows he had dug up. It registered forty-four Celsius, as he had known it would.
By morning it had dropped a degree or two, and it went on dropping slowly for the next few days until it reached room temperature, twenty Celsius, where it remained.
The holds were beginning to fill up. Toots had been dragged out on eight or ten pillow hunts, McTeague said there must be nearly a million and a half pillows on the ship and they’d be heading back to Terra pretty soon, and still Kent was baffled by the pillows. Every time he dug pillows he felt the blank euphoria which possessed the others, and it was only when he got back to the ship that he could even wonder about them. What had Edward Clutts been doing with his thermometers and his sackful of gadgets? Why had he died?
He might never have guessed if he had not happened to upset the glass.
He had been reaching into McTeague’s bunk for a magazine the big man had discarded, and his left elbow had struck against the long lap board on which McTeague laid out his solitaire when he was in his bunk. Kent hadn’t seen the glass of soma and ginger ale, which was sitting on the end of the board, until it started to fall over. He grabbed at it quickly—his reflexes were considerably faster than average—and set it upright again before more than a drop or two had spilled, feeling, as he moved, a sharp sensation of cold against his wrist.
He looked down, surprised. It was as if he had passed his arm above a large piece of dry ice. There was nothing in the bunk except the magazine, the glass of soma, the lap board, and, under its edge, one of the pillows.
Wondering, he picked it up. It was, as usual, agreeably warm to the touch. Where had the cold come from? The ice in the glass of soma had melted long ago.
He stood frowning at the edge of the bunk, feeling an impossible hypothesis beat at the threshold of consciousness. What could it be? Was it—what—To hell with it. But—He slipped between the sheets of his bunk at lights-out, expecting to turn and toss all night long, and was instantly asleep. He woke just at seven the next morning. He lit a smoke and lay on his back, one arm under his head, sorting out his ideas.
In the first place, the pillows were sentient and intelligent. He would deal with that later.
In the second place, they had some sort of mental reach. That was why everyone on the ship, except Toots (the psychology of darkside hexapods had not been much investigated, but it seemed that their mental abilities were parallel to those of dogs only up to a point, after which they went soaring off into some sort of high, supersensory cloudland), loved hunting them. That was why nobody had ever taken them seriously; the pillows didn’t want to be investigated. It was probable, too, that the pillows had some sort of control over events; else why the streak of luck that McTeague (and everyone else on board the Tryphe had similar experiences to relate) had enjoyed? The pillows wanted to be hunted and disseminated, and they had put a premium, in the form of pleasure and good fortune, on their dissemination.
In the third place— This was where Kent’s mind jibbed. Really, it was no more fantastic than the assumption he had already made, without much mental discomfort, that they could influence the flow of events. But this was something that every human being, that every sentient being, takes for granted every moment of his life. To endow the pillows with this ability was to fracture the supporting column of the Universe.
In the third place, the pillows could reverse entropy.
A pillow could extract heat, as a man sucks milk through a straw, from a substance colder than itself. They were intelligent; they took care never to display their faculty where it could be observed.
In the laboratory, they cooled gradually from forty-four degrees Celsius to room temperature. Otherwise, the difference between their fairly high temperature and the abnormal coolness of the objects around them might have been noticed even by the beglamored (it was the only word) wits of the indifferent scientists. But if a pillow were not on its guard (he had caught the one on McTeague’s bunk off guard last night when he had reached across it so suddenly), or if a pillow had nothing to fear, it would be possible to hold one of them in the hand, comfortably warm as usual, and feel the hand grow chill around it, feel the chill creep inward, have the hand freeze to the bone. That, on a larger scale, was what had happened to Edward Clutts.
Make a hypothesis. Clutts had been landed on Triton, at his own request, to investigate the pillows on their home terrain. There had been a rendezvous appointed at some specific time. They had looked for him, of course, but a man is a small object, even on a pebble like Triton. Clutts hadn’t gone to the rendezvous because he was dead. The pillows didn’t like to be investigated.
What did the pillows do with the heat? Kent rolled over on his side and lit another smoke. Presumably they needed it in their metabolism. Maybe they used it to make more pillows; no one had ever seen a pillow under the regulation sand-dollar size, and their reproduction and origin was a mystery in which no one had ever taken the slightest interest.
What did the pillows want? It seemed to him there was only one answer possible. Kent shuddered and rubbed his eyes. They were the inheritors, the successors to the human race. Maybe in the near future, maybe not for billions of yea rs, they were going to run the show. It was probably a near threat rather than a remote one; the bribes they were paying to be disseminated now would indicate that they did not intend to wait for any long time, not until the Universe began to run down. No wonder Toots hated them.
What was the Latin for pillow?
McTeague’s alarm clock went off. He yawned, stretched, and sat up in his bunk. “Time to get up,” he said to Kent. “Two days more, and we’ll be heading back for Terra. With all the holds full of pillows. Nice hot, tough, lucky pillows.”
“McTeague…” Kent said.
“Yes?”
It was hard to tell McTeague what he had discovered, even harder than he had thought it would be. McTeague listened to him without interrupting him, sitting on the edge of his bunk, rubbing his reddish eyebrows now and then with his hands.
“We mustn’t take them back,” Kent finished almost desperately. “We’ve got to tell the captain and the crew, have them dump the pillows out. No pillows must ever leave Triton again.”
It sounded horribly weak. McTeague looked at him for a moment and then got up. st ill massaging his eyebrows. “I’ll have to tell the old man about this,” he said.
They put him into the navigator’s cabin—the navigator had to move in with the old man—and stationed a guard in front of the door. Kent sat on the edge of the bed, his hands between his knees, and stared down at the design of the eutex on the deck. He could hear Toots howling somewhere; it sounded a couple of compartments off.
What was going to happen to him? When he got back to Terra, he supposed, there would be a commission in lunacy, and then a lot of little white buildings and occupational therapy. And meantime the pillows…
The cabin was getting cold. He went over to the toggle in the wall to turn on more heat and then paused, his hand on it, realizing what was happening.
