Chapter III

There was at first the feeling of warm sunlight on his flesh, then a pungent scent of crushed foliage, green and heady, very strong and familiar.

As his mind took hold, a whisper of wind hummed into his consciousness and a shimmering golden brightness began to grow upon his closed eyelids. Abruptly, unity of sensation was achieved. Jerry Norcriss "was" in a sunlit part of the woods near the mines, feeling the alien's perceptions as though they were his own.

He crinkled his eyes against the glare, then slowly opened them.

As he blinked his eyes to focus the golden glare, he spotted a strange little cluster of tiny sticks, with miniature leaves sprouting greenly on thread-like branches. Halfway between his face and this fragile copse slithered a brilliant blue line, ribbon-thin, through a serpentine gouge along the earth. On the far side of this trickle lay a rich tumble of soft green velvet, ending at a group of more of those twig-copses. Puzzled, Jerry turned his gaze skyward. Within the warm blue canopy overhead he saw clouds ... but clouds unlike any he'd ever seen for size. None of them could have been more than a foot in diameter. They hung against the sky like cotton-covered basketballs.

He returned his gaze groundward, and for the first time saw the scuffed grayish area of earth between himself and the trickle. A wiry network of metal glittered there, the wires in pairs, and the pairs disappearing into small square punctures against a wall of banked soil.

Then Jerry gasped. His mind had apprehended the implications of his vista so suddenly that he was staggered.

All the facts sprang into proper perspective. The twigs were actually tall trees, the tumble of velvet a wide stretch of grassy sward, the trickle was a rushing blue river, and the tiny wire-network in the grayish area was the tracks for the mine-cars, leading down into the planet through those tiny square adits.

Jerry had unconsciously been receiving sensations in terms of his host's size. A quick calculation showed him that his head must be easily five hundred feet in the air.

Cautiously, he glanced for the first time toward the body of his host, to see what sort of creature he was in Contact with.

There was nothing whatever to be seen.

Yet when he closed his eyelids once again, golden opacity returned. He reopened them thoughtfully. The alien, apparently, could cut off its vision. Yet the eyes of a creature so high must be many feet in diameter. And, at this height, twin opacities would be spotted even from the nearby town.

But no such sight had been reported. Therefore, the lids were opaque only from the inside. Which was ridiculous. Yet it was happening.

Jerry's thoughts were interrupted by a giddy realization. He, in this alien body, was not standing. He was seated cross-legged on the ground. That meant a height of not five hundred feet, but nearer seven hundred.

* * * * *

Cautiously, he extended a hand toward one of the tiny mine-cars. He had a little difficulty directing a hand and arm he could not see; but, by feeling along the earth, he got hold of the dull gray object and tried to lift it. It came up with featherweight ease.

Then, halfway to his eyes, it began to glow, to smoke, to grow terribly hot. And as Jerry released it with a reflex of pain, it burst into white flame and hit the ground as a shapeless gobbet of molten slag. Jerry's hand came to his mouth automatically. He sucked and licked at the sore surfaces of his finger and thumb, trying to drain some of the hurt out of them.

Then he froze.

After a heartbeat, he felt carefully about the interior of his mouth with a forefinger. Gums. Warm, wet, soft-boned toothless gums. Whatever the alien looked like--it was still only a baby.

Which meant--

Quickly Jerry looked at the sky again. Not a cloud had moved. Their rotund fleeciness might have been carven there. He gave himself a mental kick. Hadn't one of his first alien awarenesses been the sound of wind? And yet the grass lay still. The trees stood silent. And the clouds, so nearly over his head that he could have touched one, hung quietly against a perfectly calm sky.

It was not the wind he had heard. It was air. Just molecules of air, as they shifted and flew about at incredible speeds.

The alien-baby's time-sense was occluded, as that of any Earth-baby, by shortness of life. It was the paradox of relative lifetime.

A lifetime, Old Peters had said, training the eager young men who were to become graduate Space Zoologists, is a lifetime. He'd written it on the blackboard so they might understand he was not speaking in circles.

"A lifetime," he'd said, "is the time one spends from birth until any present moment. A lifetime is the actual count of moments of existence from birth. When a baby has been born for an hour, its lifetime is sixty minutes. And to the baby, that sixty minutes is a lifetime."

He'd written the two words on the board, and would point from one to the other as he spoke, so the class could understand the distinction visually, and not have to rely on his inflection to tell which term he'd used.

"A lifetime," he'd continued, "is subjective; a lifetime is objective. The first deals in one's personal sense of time passed. The second is simply readings from a clock. When a man turns ninety, he is usually surprised to find how short a life he's seemed to have had. His ninety years seem hardly longer to him than a single day seemed when he was a baby.

"It is a lucky thing that we cannot penetrate the mind of an intelligent creature. If any of us got into the mind of a baby, we'd soon start going out of our minds with the maddening length of a day's time, seen from a baby's viewpoint. Remember, when you are in Contact with an alien mind, for that immutable forty minutes your _sensation_ of elapsed time will be subject to that of your host. To a baby, forty minutes is forever."

* * * * *

And here Jerry Norcriss was, in a baby's mind.

No wonder no tree had rippled, no cloud had blown. The baby-senses were geared to a near-eternal forty minutes. For all practical purposes, Jerry was stuck in one frame of a movie film, trapped for who-knows-how-long till the next frame came by.

"_That's_ why the car melted!" he realized. "The movement of the car toward me, in my hand, must have been infinitely shorter than the few seconds it seemed to take. I tried to make the mine car move more than five hundred feet, in an actual time less than a thousandth of a _second_!"

Jerry wasn't overly concerned about the duration itself. He'd been in subjectively-slow creatures before. If things got too boring, he could always doze off; that usually served to pass the time. Even a baby's time-sense jumps long gaps when it sleeps.

The thing that puzzled him was this: If the mine car had burnt up from moving too far too fast, why hadn't the baby's hand and arm been scorched by the motion? The heat of the car had affected it, so that let out inborn heat-resistance....

His hands once again went to his face. He felt not only the features--familiar features, eerily like a human baby's--but the skull-size. When he'd finished, he no longer had reason to doubt that the baby was of an intelligent species. Too much cranial allotment to think any differently.

The whole situation, Jerry mused with grim humor, was screwy. The six-month roborocket could not have missed a creature with such an intense life-pulse, but it had. Contact could not be achieved with an intelligent mind, but it had been. Invisibility--except for certain species of underwater, creatures--was supposed to be impossible for a living organism. Yet here it was.

Three separate impossibles ... all accomplished.

"Still," said Jerry to himself, "that's not the main puzzle. The vanishing of those two shifts of miners is still beyond me. They could, of course, have simply walked head-on into this invisible leviathan. But how fast can a man walk? And would they _all_ have done it? Now, if this kid happened to pick one of them _up_--" Jerry gave a shudder at the thought of what had happened to that metal mine car. "Still," he sighed, baffled, "a man who bursts into flame is no more fun to hold than a hot mine car. After maybe two or three deaths at the _outside_, the kid would've learned not to touch them."

Then he had an even eerier thought. If this creature were a baby--where did its mother and father lurk?

The thought of two more invisible giants at large on the planet was unbearable.

* * * * *

Jerry decided to chance losing control over the alien mind, to let its own instincts come to the fore.

There was the possibility that it knew where its folks were, and would try moving in that direction. Or it might cry for its mother, and she'd hurry back. If there _were_ invisible giants, the sooner the colony was informed the better.

As Jerry's control of his host grew tenuous, he could feel the baby's mind taking over once again. Feeble pulsations reached him--nothing like solid thought, but mere urgencies about comfort, food and affection.

Jerry waited, in the background of the unformed mind, for something to happen. Then, suddenly, there was a shifting, something like a metal earthquake. A cold hard light of awareness focused on him, where he'd thought he was safely hidden in the background.

"Who are you?" asked the awareness.

It is not in so many words, of course. A mind speaks to another mind in incredibly swift shorthand. The actual thought-impulse that came to Jerry was a thick wave of curiosity, its stress laid upon identity.

"I am a Learner," Jerry's thought replied. It was a self-sufficient response, since Jerry's concept of all that a Learner was was incorporated in the thought.

"I see," said the alien. "You have memories of antagonism which are now gone from your intent. Explain."

"I came to find a menace. I found a helpless child."

"I see," came the cold, thoughtful reply. "Yes, that is how I sensed it."

"Is your mother around?" asked Jerry. "Or father?"

"Dead," said the awareness. "I am alone."

At the thought, the intense thought of loneliness, a kindred spark flared in Jerry's own mind. The alien caught at the spark, recognized it.

"Strange," it said. "You, too, are alone. But it is a different aloneness."

Jerry's thoughts were whirling in confusion. To be read so easily by a baby was incredible to him. Yet the situation was without precedent. Perhaps a baby's mind was brighter than science gave credit. Since a mind needed no words or manual skills, the mind of a baby might be open to learn the thousand things necessary for adult survival. Maybe as a man learned to use his body, he forgot in proportion how to use his mind.

"How can you know my aloneness?" asked Jerry.

"I see it, there in your mind. It is plain to me. You have been misled. You are a helpless pawn of a singularly wicked scheme. The victim of a lie."

* * * * *

Jerry's recollection flashed to his conversation with Ollie Gibbs, to the things he had wanted to tell the other man but was unable to put into words. All the heaviness he had borne alone these many years was apparent to this mind he enhosted. The alien mind knew. _Knew!_

"I see," it said again, though Jerry was unaware of expressing any conscious thought. "It is clear to me now. You have suffered much--will suffer much. No hope for you, is there?"

There was warmth in the words--warmth, friendship and compassionate understanding. Suddenly, to this mind of an alien in its incongruous, invisible baby's body, Jerry found himself blurting the things he had never told to any man. Things which no Space Zoologist had ever discussed even with another member of that hapless clan.

"They never told us," he said to the alien. "I don't hold any rancor because of it; they dared not tell us, lest we refuse to become one with them. They were fair, though. Long before we were indoctrinated, long before we'd been allowed to attempt our first Contact, we were told that there were dangers. Not the dangers we had heard about, such as the imminent peril of dying if the host died while we were in Contact. Another danger was implied, one which we could only learn of by actually becoming Learners, and one which--once we had learned of it--would be impossible to escape.

"With a little thought along the proper lines, we might almost have guessed it. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. One of Newton's laws, applied in an area he did not even suspect existed.

"Oh, we were a brave, adventurous lot, all of us. We would be Learners; no alien mind but we could enter it, and actually become the alien for the period of Contact. Thrills, danger and hairsbreadth escapes would be ours. Ultimate adventurers, they called us. And all along, we were fools."

The alien refrained from comment, although Jerry could feel its mind waiting, listening, assimilating.

"Contact had a drawback. A basic one which we might have guessed, if we hadn't been going around with stars in our eyes and a delightful feeling of superiority over the men who would never know the interior on any minds but their own. In Contact, just as in sunbathing, there is a delayed reaction, a kickback."

"Sunbathing?" thought the alien.

Jerry's mind swiftly opened for the alien's inspection his full storehouse of information on the subject. In an instant, the alien apprehended the fate that lay in wait for the careless Space Zoologist--

* * * * *

"Sure is warm in here," said Bob, running a finger around inside his sweat-dampened uniform collar.

"You have to be careful," said Jana, indicating the quartz panes that formed the ceiling and three walls of the solarium. "The quartz passes ultraviolet, unlike glass. You can pick up a severe burn if you sit out here too long without some sort of protection for your skin."

The tech nodded. "The insidious thing about sunburn is that you only turn a little pink as long as you're out in the sunlight. It's when you've gone indoors, or the sun has set, or you put your clothes back on that the red-hot burn begins to show up on your flesh."

"It's the light-pressure," said Jana. "As long as there's an influx of ultraviolet, the flesh continues to absorb it without showing much reaction. But as soon as you get away from the rays--the burns show up.... I wonder how Norcriss is making out."