I had never seen anything quite so horrible. Embedded in Darnel’s flesh was a huge, faintly luminous grub, its rudimentary mouthparts obscurely visible beneath the drum-tight skin over his breastbone.
His hands closed and unclosed as I stared down at him. His forehead was drenched with sweat and he writhed as though in unbearable anguish, a hectic flush suffusing his cheeks.
My throat felt hot and swollen but I managed to whisper: “Darnel. Darnel, my lad.”
Slowly his eyelids flickered open and he stared up at me, a grimace of agony convulsing his haggard features.
“Nothing seems quite real, sir,” he groaned. “Except—the pain.”
“Is it very bad?”
“I’m in agony, sir. I can’t stand it much longer. It’s as though a heated iron were resting on my chest.”
“Where did that wasp take you?”
“Into the chart room, sir. When I struggled in the web it carried me into the chart room and stung me again.”
I swallowed hard. “Did you experience any pain before that, lad?”
“I felt a stab the first time it plunged its stinger into me, but when I came to in the web there was no pain. The pain started in the chart room.”
I was thinking furiously. Stinger—ovipositor. A few species of stinging terrestrial insects possessed organs which combined the functions of both. Evidently the wasps had simply stung us at first—to paralyze us. Now they were completing the gruesome process of providing a feast for their avaricious progeny. One of the wasps had taken Darnel from the web, and deposited a fertile, luminous egg in his flesh.
It was becoming hideously clear now. The wasp’s retreat into the chart room had been motivated by a desire to complete its loathsome task in grim seclusion. It had withdrawn a short distance for the sake of privacy, passing completely through the wall out of sight.
My stomach felt tight and hollow when I contemplated the grub, which had apparently hatched out almost instantly. It seemed probable that Darnel’s anguish was caused by the grub’s luminosity searing his flesh, as its mouthparts were still immobile.
“Darnel,” I whispered. “The paralysis wore off. They couldn’t sting us into permanent insensibility. The pain may go too.”
He looked at me, his eyes filming. “I don’t understand, sir. Paralysis?”
I had forgotten that Darnel wasn’t even aware of what we were up against. He couldn’t see the grub. He didn’t know that we were—caterpillars.
He was in torment, and I was powerless to help him. I was glad he didn’t know, despite my certain knowledge that I was about to share his fate. I whispered hoarsely: “Can you see Joan, lad. Is she—”
“She’s lying in the web next to you, sir. Dawson and Stillmen have been out.”
“Taken out.”
“There are two empty webs, sir. Oh, God, the pain—I can’t stand it.”
The great wasp was moving now. It was moving slowly across the chamber toward the quartz port, between its motionless companions. Its wings were vibrating and it was raising Darnel up as though it were about to hurl him out through the inches-thick quartz into the mist.
Suddenly as I stared the utter strangeness of something that had already occurred smote me with the force of a physical blow. The wasp had carried Darnel right through the wall—from the pilot chamber to the chart room, and back again.
Apparently the great wasps could make us tenuous too! Close and prolonged contact with the energies pouring from them had made Darnel’s body as permeable as gamma light. Horribly it was borne in on me that Darnel’s anguish was caused by a pervasive glow which enveloped him from head to foot. It was fainter than the radiance which poured from the wasps and was almost invisible in the fluorescent cube-light, but I could see it now.
The wasp didn’t hurl Darnel out. It simply vanished with him through the quartz port, its wings dwindling to a luminous blur which hovered for an instant before the inches-thick crystal before it dwindled into nothingness.
The same instant a voice beside me moaned. “Richard, I can’t move.”
“Joan,” I gasped. “Oh, my dearest—”
“Richard, I can’t move. I’m in a sort of web, Richard. It’s—it’s like a mist before my eyes.”
I knew then that Joan was trussed up on her side, gazing through her web directly at me. I was glad that she couldn’t see the wasps.
“Joan.”
“Yes, Richard.”
“Did you just wake up?”
“Wake up? You mean I’ve been dreaming, Richard. Those wasps—”
“Darling, do you want it straight?”
“You don’t need to ask that, Richard.”
I told her then—everything I suspected, everything I knew. When I stopped speaking, she was silent for ten full seconds. Then her voice came to me vibrant with courage.
“We can’t live forever, Richard.”
“That’s what I’ve been thinking, darling. And you’ve got to admit we’ve had the best of everything.”
“Some people I know would call it living,” she said.
“Darling?”
“Yes, Richard.”
“I’ve a confession to make. I’ve liked being out in space with you. I’ve liked the uncertainty, the danger—the desperate chances we both took with our lives.”
“I’m glad, Richard.”
“I don’t glow outwardly—you know that. You’ve had a lot to contend with. I’ve reproached you, and tried to put a damper on your enthusiasm, and—”
“You’ve been a wonderful husband, Richard.”
“But as a lover—”
“Richard, do you remember what you said to me when we were roaring through the red skies above Io? You held my fingers so tightly I was afraid you’d break them, and your kisses were as fiery as a girl could ask for. And you said I reminded you of someone you’d always loved, and that was why you’d married me.
“And when I scowled and asked her name you said she had no name and had never existed on Earth. But that I had her eyes and hair and thoughts, and was just as slim, and that when I walked I reminded you of her, and even when I just sat
