“Forget all that for awhile,” Sales said with a sudden change of expression. “I talked to the girl before she died. I’m taking cross-bearings on my conclusion, Chief. One line I’ve already indicated. The second is what the girl said. They check.” He looked at me thoughtfully.
“I had to blank her mind clear down to the lowest articulate levels,” he said, “before I could cut back under whatever compulsion it was that killed her. She didn’t know she was talking. I hadn’t much time—she was dying as she spoke. But from what she said I’ve pieced a theory together.” He paused. “Tell me, did you see anything at all during your experiences with the lake to make you suspect it might be—alive?”
IV
Voice of the Lake
With stunning suddenness, out of my memory came the vision of a great eye staring up at me through the pale fog as I maneuvered our copter above the Ring when Davidson and I first visited it.
The Eye was the lake, a vast translucent lens that had caught us like birds in a nest and drawn us down. The power of its compelling summons pouring from the lens into our brains, like sunshine into a darkened room.
“No,” I said thickly. “No, I saw nothing. Go on.”
“What its origin was I can’t even guess,” Sales said. “But originally some molecule like a gene, out of a million other molecules in that Ring area, suffered a liberation of energy when a secondary ionizing particle shot past and it changed from a gene to—something else. Something that grew and grew and grew.
“Most of the development must have taken place underground. I think the organism was complete when that cave-in occurred that exposed it to the light and to our attentions. It developed amazingly, into forms so complex we may never understand them exactly.” He smiled grimly.
“If we’re lucky we never will. I can tell you this much, though—it recognized its danger. Perhaps electric impulses from our own brains struck answering chords in the—the organism. And it knew it had to defend itself, fast.
“Now the lake has one fatal weakness. By that I think we can destroy it. I believe the organism is quite aware of this because of the way it chose to combat us.” He paused, looking at me so strangely that I almost acted, in that silent moment. But just as I was gathering my muscles to rise, he began again.
“The girl told me what happened when that airliner came down. It must have been sheer accident, its making a forced landing at the edge of the Ring. Radioactivity blanked out their communications and of course the air itself was close to deadly. There didn’t seem any hope at all for the people in the ship.
“The girl said many of them complained of feeling—well, call it attention—focused on them. I know now it was the lake itself, that gigantic organism, studying them, slowly working around to a decision about its next move. Then it came to a conclusion that may not yet have reached its final equation.
“The passengers saw a man stand up from behind a rock near them. The girl said he looked familiar. He shouted and waved them away. He warned them it would mean their death if they came closer. He vanished. But the passengers were still trying to get a message out and they stayed in the ship. The man appeared three times in all, each time warning them away in stronger and stronger terms.
“Finally he rose from behind a rock very near them and this time he invited them into the Ring. They were surprised to find that when seen this close he was a mirror image of one of their crew members. The image beckoned and ordered them in. They didn’t want to obey. But they went.
“That image, as you may have deduced, was a water-figure created by the lake itself, no one knows how completely. It may have been ninety percent illusion, shaped in the minds of the watchers. But you’ll notice the lake had to imitate one of the crew. It didn’t at that time know enough about human bodies to improvise.
“It did know a lot, though, about human minds. In fact, its power over them and its amazing selectivity make me suspect that the original gene from which the organism developed might once have been human or close to it.
“The water image was the lake’s first attempt to fight off mankind. The attempt failed. In other words an imitation wouldn’t do. But the real thing was close at hand for experimentation.
“What happened next no one will ever know. Logically the organism must have moved forward another step in its defense against invasion by mankind. In effect it created antibodies. It was inoculating itself with the virus of humanity in an effort to immunize itself against a later attack.
“But it had to effect a change in the humans before it could absorb them. Physically they must be changed to live under the lake and mentally they had to alter radically to stay there of their own will. It was their will the lake attacked. You saw that.
“I said before that something had apparently been washed from the mind of that girl we saw and some other basic drive substituted in her. I believe now I was nearer the truth than I guessed.” He looked at me keenly, almost speculatively.
“If I were in a spot like that,” he said, “with the problem of altering a human being’s whole emotional outlook, I think I’d strike straight at the root. It would be much simpler than trying to blanket his impulses with anything like hypnotism, for instance.
“I think that for the instinct of self-preservation those people now have another drive—instinct for the preservation of the Organism. It would be so simple, and it would work so well.”
There was a roaring in my ears. For a moment I heard nothing
