“We’ve siphoned up specimens of the soil,” Joan protested. “What’s to stop us from trying to catch up one of them in a suction cup?”
“You’re forgetting that suction cups have a diameter of scarcely nine inches,” I said. “These creatures may be as huge as the dragonflies of the Carboniferous Age.”
“Richard, we’ll project a traveling suction cup through one of the vacuum locks and try to—”
Her teeth came together with a little click. Startled, I turned and stared at her. Despite her elation she had been sitting in a relaxed attitude, with her back to the control panel and her latex taped legs extended out over the dais. Now she was sitting up straight, her face deathly pale in the cube-light.
The creatures were standing a little to the right of the rigidly staring crewmen, their swiftly vibrating wings enveloped in a pale bluish radiance which swirled upward toward the ribbed metal ceiling of the pilot chamber.
Enormous they were—and unutterably terrifying with their great, many-faceted eyes fastened in brooding malignance upon us.
Joan and I arose simultaneously, drawn to our feet by a horror such as we had never known. A sense of sickening unreality gripped me, so that I could neither move nor cry out.
Dawson alone remained articulate. He raised his arm and pointed, his voice a shrill bleat.
“Look out, sir! Look out! There’s another one coming through the wall directly behind you.”
The warning came too late. As I swung toward the quartz port I saw Joan’s arm go out, her body quiver. Towering above her was a third gigantic shape, the tip of its abdomen resting on her shoulders, its spindly legs spread out over the pilot dais.
As I stared at it aghast it shifted its bulk, and a darkly gleaming object that looked like a shrunken bean-pod emerged from between Joan’s shoulder blades.
Joan moaned and sagged on the dais, her hands going to her throat. Instantly the wasp swooped over me, its abdomen descending. For an awful instant I could see only a blurred shapelessness hovering over me.
Then a white-hot shaft of pain lanced through me and the blur receded. But I was unable to get up. I was unable to move or think clearly. My limbs seemed weighted. I couldn’t get up or help Joan or even roll over.
My head was bursting and my spine was a board. I must have tried to summon help, for I seem to remember Dawson sobbing: “I’m paralyzed too, sir,” just before my senses left me and I slumped unconscious on the dais.
How long I remained in blackness I had no way of knowing. But when I opened my eyes again I was no longer on the dais. I was up under the ceiling of the pilot chamber, staring down at the corrugated floor through what looked like a glimmering, whitish haze.
Something white and translucent wavered between my vision and the floor, obscuring the outlines of the great wasps standing there.
There were five wasps standing directly beneath me in the center of the pilot chamber, their wings a luminous blur in the cube-light.
My perceptions were surprisingly acute. I wasn’t confused mentally, although my mouth felt parched and there was a dull, throbbing ache in my temples.
The position in which I found myself and the whitish haze bewildered me for only an instant. I knew that the “haze” was a web the instant I studied its texture. And when I tried to move and couldn’t the truth dawned in all its horror.
I was suspended beneath the ceiling of the chamber in a translucent, hammock-like web. I was lying on my stomach, my limbs bound by fibrous strands as resistant as whipcords.
Minutes which seemed like eternities passed as I lay there with fear clutching at my heart. I could only gaze downward. The crewmen had vanished and the wasps were standing like grim sentinels in front of the control panel.
I was almost sure that Joan and the crewmen were suspended in similar webs close to me. I thought I knew what the wasps had done to us.
I had talked to Joan about life evolving along parallel lines throughout the Solar System, but I hadn’t expected to encounter life as strange and frightening as this—insectlike, and yet composed of some radiant substance that could penetrate solid metal and flow at will through the walls of a ship.
Some radiant substance that had weight and substance and could touch human flesh without searing it. Nothing so ghastly strange and yet—indisputably the creatures were wasplike. And being wasplike their habit patterns were similar to those of so-called social wasps on Earth.
Social wasps sting caterpillars into insensibility, and deposit eggs in their paralyzed flesh. When the wasp-grubs hatch they become ghoulish parasites, gruesomely feasting until the caterpillars dwindle to repulsive, desiccated husks.
IV
Eddington’s Oscillations
Horror and sick revulsion came into me as I stared down at the great wasps, with their many-faceted eyes seeming to probe the Jovian mists through a solid metal bulkhead!
They thought we were Jovian caterpillars! Evidently there were flabby, white larva-shapes out in the mist as large as men—with the habit perhaps of rearing upright on stumpy legs like terrestrial measuring worms. We looked enough like Jovian caterpillars to deceive those Jovian wasps.
They had apparently seen us through the walls of the ship, and their egg-laying instincts had gone awry. They had plunged ovipositors into our flesh, spun webs about us and hung us up to dry out while their loathsome progeny feasted on our flesh.
The whitish substance exuding from the mouthparts of one of the photographed wasps had evidently been mucilaginous web material.
There was no other possible explanation. And suddenly as I lay there with thudding temples something occurred which increased my horror tenfold.
Zigzagging, luminous lines appeared on the ribbed metal wall opposite the quartz port and a wasp materialized amidst spectral bands of radiance which wavered and shimmered like heat waves in bright sunlight.
A coldness itched across
