The day passed slowly, and nothing happened.
Nervously Pid watched the front of the plant. It shouldn’t be taking so long, if Ger were successful.
Late into the night he waited. Men walked in and out of the installation, and Dogs barked around the gates. But Ger did not appear.
Ger had failed. Ilg was gone. Only he was left.
And still he didn’t know what had happened.
By morning, Pid was in complete despair. He knew that the twenty-first Grom expedition to this planet was near the point of complete failure. Now it was all up to him.
He saw that workers were arriving in great number, rushing through the gates. He decided to take advantage of the apparent confusion, and started to shape himself into a Man.
A Dog walked past the woods where he was hiding.
“Hello,” the Dog said.
It was Ger!
“What happened?” Pid asked, with a sigh of relief. “Why were you so long? Couldn’t you get in?”
“I don’t know,” Ger said, wagging his tail. “I didn’t try.”
Pid was speechless.
“I went hunting,” Ger said complacently. “This form is ideal for Hunting, you know. I went out the rear gate with another Dog.”
“But the expedition—your duty—”
“I changed my mind,” Ger told him. “You know, Pilot, I never wanted to be a Detector.”
“But you were born a Detector!”
“That’s true,” Ger said. “But it doesn’t help. I always wanted to be a Hunter.”
Pid shook his entire body in annoyance. “You can’t,” he said, very slowly, as one would explain to a Gromling. “The Hunter shape is forbidden to you.”
“Not here it isn’t,” Ger said, still wagging his tail.
“Let’s have no more of this,” Pid said angrily. “Get into that installation and set up your Displacer. I’ll try to overlook this heresy.”
“No,” Ger said. “I don’t want the Grom here. They’d ruin it for the rest of us.”
“He’s right,” a nearby oak tree said.
“Ilg!” Pid gasped. “Where are you?”
Branches stirred. “I’m right here,” Ilg said. “I’ve been Thinking.”
“But—your caste—”
“Pilot,” Ger said sadly, “why don’t you wake up? Most of the people on Grom are miserable. Only custom makes us take the caste-shape of our ancestors.”
“Pilot,” Ilg said, “all Grom are born Shapeless!”
“And being born Shapeless, all Grom should have Freedom of Shape,” Ger said.
“Exactly,” Ilg said. “But he’ll never understand. Now excuse me. I want to Think.” And the oak tree was silent.
Pid laughed humorlessly. “The Men will kill you off,” he said. “Just as they killed off all the other expeditions.”
“No one from Grom has been killed,” Ger told him. “The other expeditions are right here.”
“Alive?”
“Certainly. The Men don’t even know we exist. That Dog I was Hunting with is a Grom from the twelfth expedition. There are hundreds of us here, Pilot. We like it.”
Pid tried to absorb it all. He had always known that the lower castes were lax in caste-consciousness. But this was preposterous!
This planet’s secret menace was—freedom!
“Join us, Pilot,” Ger said. “We’ve got a paradise here. Do you know how many species there are on this planet? An uncountable number! There’s a shape to suit every need!”
Pid ignored them. Traitors!
He’d do the job all by himself.
So Men were unaware of the presence of the Grom. Getting near the reactor might not be so difficult after all. The others had failed in their duty because they were of the lower castes, weak and irresponsible. Even the Pilots among them must have been secretly sympathetic to the Cult of Shapelessness the Chief had mentioned, or the alien planet could never have swayed them.
What shape to assume for his attempt?
Pid considered.
A Dog might be best. Evidently Dogs could wander pretty much where they wished. If something went wrong, Pid could change his shape to meet the occasion.
“The Supreme Council will take care of all of you,” he snarled, and shaped himself into a small brown Dog. “I’m going to set up the Displacer myself.”
He studied himself for a moment, bared his teeth at Ger, and loped toward the gate.
He loped for about ten feet and stopped in utter horror.
The smells rushed at him from all directions. Smells in a profusion and variety he had never dreamed existed. Smells that were harsh, sweet, sharp, heavy, mysterious, overpowering. Smells that terrified. Alien and repulsive and inescapable, the odors of Earth struck him like a blow.
He curled his lips and held his breath. He ran on for a few steps, and had to breathe again. He almost choked.
He tried to remold his Dog-nostrils to be less sensitive. It didn’t work. It wouldn’t, so long as he kept the Dog-shape. An attempt to modify his metabolism didn’t work either.
All this in the space of two or three seconds. He was rooted in his tracks, fighting the smells, wondering what to do.
Then the noises hit him.
They were a constant and staggering roar, through which every tiniest whisper of sound stood out clearly and distinct. Sounds upon sounds—more noise than he had ever heard before at one time in his life. The woods behind him had suddenly become a madhouse.
Utterly confused, he lost control and became Shapeless.
He half-ran, half-flowed into a nearby bush. There he re-Shaped, obliterating the offending Dog ears and nostrils with vicious strokes of his thoughts.
The Dog-shape was out. Absolutely. Such appalling sharpness of senses might be fine for a Hunter such as Ger—he probably gloried in them. But another moment of such impressions would have driven Pid the Pilot mad.
What now? He lay in the bush and thought about it, while gradually his mind threw off the last effects of the dizzying sensory assault.
He looked at the gate. The Men standing there evidently hadn’t noticed his fiasco. They were looking in another direction.
… a Man?
Well, it was worth a try.
Studying the Men at the gate, Pid carefully shaped himself into a facsimile—a synthesis, actually, embodying one characteristic of that, another of this.
He emerged from the side of the bush opposite the gate, on his hands and knees. He sniffed the air, noting that the smells the Man-nostrils picked up weren’t unpleasant at all. In fact, some
