Invasion of the Body Snatchers (originally The Body Snatchers) by Jack Finney.

[midnight_birth]

Title: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (originally The Body Snatchers).
Author: Jack Finney.
Genre: Literature, fiction, science fiction, horror, alien fiction.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1954.
Summary: On a quiet fall evening in the peaceful town of Mill Valley California, Dr. Miles Bennell discovers an insidious, horrifying plot. Subtly, almost imperceptibly, alien life forms are taking over the bodies and minds of his neighbors, friends, family, the woman he loves, and the entire world as he knows it.

My rating: 7.5/10.
My review:


♥ "I've always heard that if you think you're losing your mind, you're not."

"There's a lot of truth in that," I said, though there isn't.

♥ I muttered some nonsense about relaxing, taking it easy, not worrying, and so on, and Wilma smiled gently and put her hand on my arm the way a woman does when she forgives a man for failing her.

♥ Maybe that sounds heartless; maybe you think I should have been worrying about Wilma, and in a way I was, far back in my mind. But a doctor learns, because he has to, not to worry actively about patients until the worrying can do some good; meanwhile, they have to be walled off in a quiet compartment of the mind. They don't teach that at medical school, but it's as important as your stethoscope. You've even got to be able to lose a patient, and go back to your office and treat a cinder in the eye with absolute attention. And if you can't do it, you give up medicine. Or specialize.

♥ I don't claim a lot of experience with crying women, but in stories I read, the man always holds the woman close and lets her cry. And it always turns out to have been the wise, understanding thing to do; I've never heard of a single authenticated case where the wise, understanding thing was to distract her with card tricks or tickling her feet. So I was wise and understanding: I held Becky close and let her cry, because I didn't know what else to do or say.

♥ She was not, after all, turning out to be just a good pal who happened to wear skirts. Put a nice-looking woman you're fond of in your arms, I was realizing, have her weep a little, and you're a cinch to feel pretty tender and protective. Then that feeling starts to get mixed up with sex, and if you're not careful, you've made at least a start toward something I'd meant to avoid for a while.

♥ "Hello," I said, and as I spoke I heard the phone at the other end crash down into its cradle. I knew I'd answered at the first ring; no matter how tired I am at night, I always hear and answer the telephone instantly. I said, "Hello!" again, a little louder, jiggling the phone, the way you do, but the line was dead, and I put the phone back. In my father's day a night operator, whose name he'd have known, could have told him who'd called. It would probably have been the only light on her board at that time of night, and she'd have remembered which one it was, because they were calling the doctor. But now we have dial phones, marvelously efficient, saving you a full second or more every time you call, inhumanly perfect, and utterly brainless; and none of them will ever remember where the doctor is at night, when a child is sick and needs him. Sometimes I think we're refining all humanity out of our lives.

♥ When a general practitioner hangs out his little shingle, he knows he's going to be telephoned out of bed for the rest of his life perhaps. In a way he gets used to it, and in a way never does. Because most often the phone late at night is something serious; frightened people to deal with, and everything you do twice as hard; maybe pharmacists to roust out of bed, hospitals to stir into action. And underneath it all, to hide from the patient and his family, are your own night-time fears and doubts about yourself to beat down; because everything depends on you now and nobody else-you're the doctor. The phone at night is no fun, and sometimes it's impossible not to resent those branches of medicine that never, or rarely, have emergency calls.

♥ "The human mind is a strange and wonderful thing," he said reflectively, "but I'm not sure it will ever figure itself out. Everything else, maybe-from subatomic particles to the universe-except itself."

♥ In pre-med college, I once sat in a classroom listening to a psychology professor quietly lecturing, and now, sitting there on the edge of the road, the sun warming against my face, I was remembering how the door of that classroom had suddenly burst open, as two struggling men stumbled into the room. One man broke loose, yanked a banana from his pocket, pointed it at the other, and yelled, "Bang!" The other clutched his side, pulled a small American flag from his pocket, waved it violently in the other man's face, then they both rushed out of the room.

The professor said, "This is a controlled experiment. You will each take paper and pencil, write down a complete account of what you just saw, and place it on my desk as you leave the room."

Next day, in class, he read our papers aloud. There were some twenty-odd students, and no two accounts were alike, or even close. Some students saw three men, some four, and one girl saw five. Some saw white men, some blacks, some Orientals, some saw women. One student saw a man stabbed, saw the blood spurt, saw him hold a handkerchief to his side which quickly became blood-soaked, and could hardly believe it when he found no bloodstains on the floor, as he left his paper at the professor's desk. And so on, and so on. Not a single paper mentioned the American flag or the banana; those objects didn't fit into the sudden violent little scene that had burst on our senses, so our minds excluded them, simply ruled them out and substituted other more appropriate things such as guns, knives, and blood-soaked rags that we were each of us absolutely certain we'd seen. We had seen them, in fact; but only in our minds, hunting for some explanation.

So now I wondered if Mannie weren't right, and it was strange; I felt a sense of disappointment, a real let-down at the thought, and realized that I was trying to resist believing him. We do prefer the weird and thrilling, as Mannie had said, to the dull and commonplace.

♥ The human animal won't take a straight diet of any emotion: fear, happiness, horror, grief, or even contentment. It was queer: after the night we'd all spent, breakfast was fun.

♥ "Well"-he got slowly to his feet-"there are a couple hundred queer little happenings that I've collected in just a few years; and you could find thousands more." He began slowly pacing the kitchen floor. "I think they prove at least this; that strange things happen, really do happen, every now and then, here and there throughout the world. Things that simply don't fit in with the great body of knowledge that the human race has gradually acquired over thousands of years. Things in direct contradiction to what we know to be true. Something falls up, instead of down."

Reaching out to the toaster on the drainboard of the sink, Jack touched a finger tip to a crumb, and lifted it to his tongue. "So this is my point, Mike. Should they always be explained away? Or laughed away? Or simply ignored? Because that's what always happens." He resumed his slow pacing about the big old kitchen. "I guess it's only natural. I suppose nothing can be given a place in our body of accepted knowledge, except what is universally experienced. Science claims to be objective, though." He stopped, facing the table, "To consider all phenomena impartially and without prejudice. But of course it does no such thing. This kind of occurrence"-he nodded at the little mound of paper on the table-"it dismisses with automatic habitual contempt. From which the rest of us take our cue. What are these things, say the scientific attitude? Why, they're only optical illusions, or self-suggestion, or hysteria, or mass hypnosis, or when everything else fails-coincidence. Anything and everything, except that possibly they really happened. Oh, no"-Jack shook his head smiling-"you must never admit for a moment that anything we don't understand may nevertheless have occurred."

As I believe most wives, even the wisest, do with any real conviction held by their husbands, Theodora accepted this and made it her own. "Well, it's stupid," she said, "and how the human race ever learns anything new, I really don't know."

"It takes a long time," Jack agreed. "Hundreds of years to accept the fact that the world is round. A century resisting the knowledge that the earth revolves around the sun. We hate facing new facts or evidence, because we might have to revise our conceptions of what's possible, and that's always uncomfortable."

♥ He picked up a handful of clippings and let them flutter down onto the table again, "Miles, these are lies, most of them, for all I know. Some are most certainly hoaxes. And maybe most of the rest are distortions, exaggerations, or simple errors of judgement or vision; I have sense enough to know that. But, damn it, Miles, not all of them, past, present, and future! You can't explain them all away, perpetually and forever!"

♥ But mostly, leaning towards the mirror scraping my face, I was annoyed; I didn't want Becky Driscoll living here in my house, where I'd see her more every day than I ordinarily would in a week. She was too attractive, likable, and good-looking.

I talk to myself when I shave. "You handsome bastard," I said to my face. "You can marry them, all right; you just can't stay married, that's your trouble. You are weak. Emotionally unstable. Basically insecure. A latent thumb-sucker. I cesspool of immaturity, unfit for adult responsibility." I smiled, and tried to think of some more. "You are undoubtedly a quack, and a Don Juan personality. A pseudo-" I cut it out and finished shaving with the uncomfortable feeling that for all I knew it wasn't funny but true, that having failed with one woman, I was getting too involved with another, and that for my sake and hers, she should be anywhere but here under my roof.

♥ Jack came down, and we had supper on the porch. It had been a clear, blue-sky day, pretty warm for the time of year, but now-no longer full daylight-it was just exactly right. There was a tiny, very balmy breeze, and you could hear the leaves of the big old trees that lined the street stirring and sighing with pleasure. The birds chirped, and from down the block you could hear the far-off rackety clatter of a lawnmower, one of the best sounds there is. We sat there on the wide old porch in the comfortable battered wicker furniture, or the porch swing, eating bacon-and-tomato sandwiches on toast, sipping coffee, talking about nothing much, with frequent easy silences, and I knew this was one of those occasional wonderful moments you remember always.

♥ I saw my father's wooden filing cabinet, his framed diplomas stacked on top of it, just as they'd been brought from his office. In that cabinet lay records of the colds, cut fingers, cancers, broken bones, mumps, diphtheria, births and deaths of a large part of Mill Valley for over two generations. Half the patients listed in those files were dead now, the wounds and tissue my father had treated only dust.

♥ I knew a lot of them, at least by sight, or to nod or speak to on the street. I'd grown up here; from boyhood I'd known every street, house, and path, most of the backyards, and every hill, field, and road for miles around.

And now I didn't know it any more. Unchanged to the eye, what I was seeing out there now-in my eye, and beyond that in my mind-was something alien. The lighted circle of pavement below me, the familiar front porches, and the dark mass of houses and town beyond them-were fearful. Now they were menacing, all these familiar things and faces; the town had changed or was changing into something very terrible, and was after me. It wanted me, too, and I knew it.

♥ He looked up at me, and spoke quietly, his voice rigidly calm. "They won't let the call get through, Miles. There's someone there, we heard him answer, but they won't ring the number again for us. Miles, they've got the telephone office now, and God knows what else."

I nodded. "Looks like it," I said, and then the panic ripped loose in our minds.

We thought we were thinking, but actually we moved on wild mindless impulse. We had the women on their feet, blinking in the light, questioning us bewilderedly, but at the looks on our faces when we didn't reply, the panic leaped from us to them like a contagion. Then all of us rushed through the house, gathering up clothes; Jack had a butcher knife thrust into his belt, I took every cent of money I had in the place, and we found Theodora down in the kitchen, half dressed, packing canned goods into a small carton; I don't know what she thought she was doing.

♥ Then Jack had the keys, yanking them from the lock. He found the right one, inserted it, turned, then heaved up the lid of the trunk. And there they lay, in the advancing, retreating waves of flickering red light: two enormous pods already burst open in one or two places, and I reached in with both hands, and tumbled them out onto the dirt. They were weightless as children's balloons, harsh and dry on my palms and fingers. At the feel of them on my skin, I lost my mind completely, and then I was trampling them, smashing and crushing them under my plunging feet and legs, not even knowing that I was uttering a sort of hoarse, meaningless cry-"Unhh! Unhh! Unhh!"-of fright and animal disgust. The wind had the flares twisting the flames till they sputtered and choked, and on the high cutaway embankment beside me, I saw a giant shadow-mine-squirming and dancing in a wild flickering, insane caper, the whole nightmare scene bathed in a mad light the color of froth from a wound, and I think I came close to losing my mind.

Jack was yanking hard on my arm, dragging me away, and we turned to the trunk again. Jack pulled out the spare can of gasoline and he carried. He got the top off, and there at the side if the road, in the pink washes of smoky light, he drenched those two great weightless masses, and they dissolved into a mushy pulp of nothingness. Then I had a flare, wrenching it from the ground, and, running back, I hurled it into the soupy mass lying there in the dirt and gravel.

♥ When Jack put it into words, anything but going back home to Mill Valley was unreal, without force or conviction. It was morning now, the air bright with sun, I'd had half a night's sleep, and my brain was washed clear of horror again. The fear was there still, active and real, but I was able to think without panic. We'd had our running away, and it had done us good; me, anyway. But we belonged at home, not in some vague, unknown, mythical new place. And now it was time to go back, to the place we belonged, which belonged to us, and fight against whatever was happening, as best we could, and however we could. Jack knew it, and now so did I.

♥ I don't know how many people still live in the town they were born in, these days. But I did, and it's inexpressibly sad to see that place die; maybe even worse than the death of a friend, because you have other friends to turn to. We did a great deal, and a lot of things happened, in the hour and fifty-five minutes that followed; and in every minute of it my sense of loss deepened and my sense of shock grew at what we saw, and I knew that something dear to me was lost.

♥ "Miles," she said in a cautious, lowered tone, "am I imagining it, or does this street look-dead?"

..It was true; we walked three more blocks, to Blithedale, and then onto Throckmorton, and saw not a sign of change. We might have been on a finished stage set, completed to the last nail and final stroke of a brush. Yet you can't walk for blocks on an ordinary street inhabited by human beings without seeing evidences of, say, a garage being built, a new cement sidewalk being laid, a yard being spaded, a new window being installed-at least some little signs of the endless urge to change and improve that marks the human race.

♥ It wasn't a guess, but a sudden stab of direct intuitive knowledge-I knew, that's all-and I swung in my chair to stare across the room at Miss Weygand. She stood motionless behind the big desk, her eyes fastened on us, and in the instant I swung to look at her, her face was wooden, devoid of any expression, and the eyes were bright, achingly intent, and as inhumanly cold as the eyes of a shark. The moment was less than a moment-the flick of an eyelash-because instantly she smiled, pleasantly, inquiringly, her brows lifting in polite question. "Anything I can do?" she said with the calm, interested eagerness typical of her in all the years I had known her.

..Then I stood up to face her, my face a few inches from hers. I said, "Don't bother, Miss Weygand, or whatever you are. Don't bother to put on an act for me." I leaned closer, staring her directly in the eyes, and my voice dropped. "I know you," I said softly. "I know what you are."

For a moment she still stood, glancing helplessly from me to Becky in utter bewilderment; then suddenly she dropped the pretense. Gray-haired Miss Weygand, who twenty years ago had loaned me the first copy of Huckleberry Finn I ever read, looked at me, her face going wooden and blank, with an utterly cold and pitiless alienness. There was nothing there now, in that gaze, nothing in common with me; a fish in the sea had more kinship with me than this staring thing before me. Then she spoke. I know you, I'd said, and now she replied, and her voice was infinitely remote and uncaring. "Do you?" she said, then turned on her heel and walked away.

I gestured at Becky and we walked on out of the library. Outside, on the sidewalk, we took half a dozen steps in silence, then Becky shook her head. "Even her," she murmured, "even Miss Weygand," and the tears shone in her eyes. "Oh, Miles," she said softly, and glanced around, first over one shoulder, then the other, at the houses, quiet lawns, and the street beside us, "how many more?" I didn't know the answer to that, and I just shook my head, and we walked on, toward Becky's house.

♥ This is very hard to explain, but-when I was in college, a middle-aged black man had a shoeshine stand, on the sidewalk before one of the older hotels, and he was a town character. Everyone patronized Billy, because he was everyone's notion of what a "character" should be. He had a title for each regular customer. "Mornin', Professor," he'd say soberly to a thin glasses-wearing businessman who sat down for a shoeshine each day. "A greetin' to you, Captain," he's day to someone else. "Howdydo, Colonel," "Nice evenin', Doctor," "General, I'm pleased to see you." The flattery was obvious, and people always smiled to show they weren't taken in by it; but they liked it just the same.

Billy professed a genuine love for shoes. He'd nod with approving criticalness when you showed up with a new pair. "Good leather," he'd murmur, nodding with a considered conviction, "pleasure to work on shoes like these," and you'd feel a glow of foolish pride in your own good taste. If your shoes were old, he might hold one cupped in his hand when he'd finished with it, twisting it a little from side to side to catch the light. "Nothin' takes a shine like good aged leather, Lieutenant, nothin'." And if you ever showed up with a cheap pair of shoes, his silence gave conviction to his compliments of the past. With Billy, the shoeshine man, you had the feeling of being with that rarest of persons, a happy man. He obviously took contentment in one of the simpler occupations of the world, and the money involved seemed actually unimportant. When you put them into his hands, he didn't even look at the coins you had given him; his acceptance was absent-minded, his attention devoted to your shoes, and to you, and you walked away feeling a little glow, as though you'd just done a good deed.

One night I was up till dawn, in a student escapade of no importance now, and, alone in my old car, I found myself in the run-down section of town, a good two miles from the campus. I was suddenly aching for sleep, too tired to drive on home. I pulled to the curb, and, with the sun just beginning to show, I curled up in the back seat under the old blanket I kept there. Maybe half a minute later, nearly asleep, I was pulled awake again by steps on the sidewalk beside me, and a man's voice said quietly, "'Morning, Bill."

My head below the level of the car window, I couldn't see who was talking, but I heard another voice, tired and irritable, reply, "Hi, Charley," and the second voice was familiar, though I couldn't quite place it. Then it continued, in a suddenly strange and altered tone. "'Mornin' Professor," it said with a queer, twisted heartiness. "'Mornin'!" it repeated. "Man, just look at those shoes. You had them shoes-lemme see, now!-fifty-six years come Tuesday, and they still takes a lovely shine!" The voice was Billy's, the words and tone those the town knew with affection, but-parodied, and a shade off key. "Take it easy, Bill," the first voice murmured uneasily, but Billy ignored it. "I just love those shoes, Colonel," he continued in a suddenly vicious, jeering imitation of his familiar pattern. "That's all I want, Colonel, just to handle people's shoes. Le'me kiss 'em! Please le'me kiss your feet!" The pent-up bitterness of years tainted every word and syllable he spoke. And then, for a full minute perhaps, standing there on a sidewalk of the slum he lived in, Billy went on with this quietly hysterical parody of himself, his friend occasionally murmuring, "Relax, Bill. Come on, now; take it easy." But Billy continued, and never before in my life had I heard such ugly, bitter, and vicious contempt in a voice, contempt for the people taken in by his daily antics, but even more for himself, the man who supplied the servility they bought from him.

Then abruptly he stopped, laughed once, harshly, and said, "See you, Charley," and his friend laughed too, uncomfortably, and said, "Don't let 'em get you down, Bill." Then the footsteps resumed, in opposite directions.

I never again had my shoes shined at Billy's stand, and I was careful never even to pass it, except once, when I forgot. Then I heard Billy's voice say, "Now, there's a shine, Commander," and I glanced up to see Billy's face alight with simply pleasure in the gleaming shoe he held in his hand. I looked at the heavy-set man in the chair, and saw his face, smiling patronizingly at Billy's bowed head. And I turned away and walked on, ashamed for us all.

♥ "Don't worry about me; I'll be keeping out of their way; but I've got to stay here. I want you out of the way, though, and safe."

She stared back at me, but her lip, then shook her head. "I don't want safety without you. What good is that?" I started to speak, but she said, "Don't argue, Miles; there just isn't time."

♥ Professor Budhog brought his hands together over his chest, the finger tips of one hand touching the tips of the other, and it occurred to me that professors must get so they unconsciously act the way people think professors ought to act; and I wondered if doctors did, too.

♥ "The theory, the notion, whatever you want to call it, that some of our plant life drifted onto this planet from space, is hoary with age. It's a perfectly respectable, reputable theory, and there is nothing sensational or even startling about it. Lord Kelvin-you undoubtedly know this, Doctor-Lord Kelvin, one of the great scientists of modern times, was one of many adherents to this theory, or possibility. Perhaps no life at all began in this planet, he said, but it drifted here through the depths of space. Some spores, he pointed out, have enormous resistance to extremes of cold; and they may have been propelled into the earth's orbit by light pressure. Any student of the subject is familiar with the theory, and there are arguments for and against it.

"So 'Yes,' I said to the reporter; these could be spores from 'outer space'; why not? I simply didn't know, and he joined two of my words as a single phrase. 'Space spores,' he said in a pleased tone, and wrote the phrase on a scrap of paper he was carrying, and I began to see headlines in the making.

.."Now you understand, that I wasn't speaking the strict truth. It is perfectly possibly for 'space spores,' if you want to use so dramatic a term, to drift onto the surface of the earth. I think it's quite probably that they have, in fact, though I personally doubt that all life on this planet originated in this way. Advocates of the theory do point out, however, that our planet was once a seething mass of inconceivably hot gas. When finally it cooled to the point at which life was possible, where else could life have come from, they ask, than from outer space?"

.."'Light pressure,' you said, Professor Budlong. These pods might have been propelled through space by the pressure of light. That interests me."

"Well"-he smiled-"it interested young Beekey, too. And he had me; I'd given him part of the theory, I had to give him the rest. There's nothing mysterious about it, Doctor. Light is energy, as you know, and any object drifting in space, seed pods or anything else, would indisputably be pushed along by the force of light. Light has a very definite, measurable force; it even has weight. The sunlight lying on an acre of farm land weighs several tons, believe it or not. And if seed pods, for example, out in space, lay in the pat of light that eventually reaches the earth-the light from distant stars, or any source at all-they would be propelled toward it by the stream of light steadily beating against them."

"Be pretty slow, though, wouldn't it?" I smiled at him.

He nodded. "Infinitely slow, so slow it would hardly be measurable. But what is infinite slowness in finite time? Once you assume these spores may have drifted in from space, then it is equally true that they may have been out there for millions of years. Hundreds of millions of years; it simply doesn't matter. A cocked bottle tossed into the ocean may circle the globe, given enough time. Expand the speck that is our globe into the immense distances of space, and it is still true that, given enough time, any of these distances may be crossed. So if these, or any spores, drifted to earth, they may well have begun their journey ages before there even was an earth."

♥ Fear-a stimulant at first, the adrenalin pumping into the blood stream-is finally exhausting.

♥ I've long since learned that thinking is mostly an unconscious process: that it's usually best not to force it, particularly when the problem itself is vague in your mind, and you don't really know what sort of answer you're hunting for. So I rested-tired, but not sleepy-watching the street, waiting for something to happen inside my mind.

There's fascination about monotony in motion: the steady flicker of a fire, an endless series of waves slowly crashing on a beach, the unvarying movement of a piece of machinery. And I stared down at the street for minute after minute, watching the shifting patters that over and over almost, but never quite, repeated themselves: women walking into the market, and women coming out, arms around brown-paper sacks, clutching at purses or children, or both; cars moving out of the sparking spaces, others slipping into the white-ruled slots; a mailman moving into and out of one store after another; an old man plodding along; three young boys horsing around.

It all looked so ordinary..

♥ My arm still around her, I turned to look at Becky, and she stared at me for a moment, then pursed her lips and shrugged, and I smiled a little in response. There was nothing more to do or say, and I wasn't aware of any particular emotion; certainly there was no new one, and I felt none of the old ones any more strongly. We'd simply reached a limit beyond which there was nothing more to be said or felt.

But I was finally aware-now I knew it for sure-that the entire town of Mill Valley was taken, that not a soul in it but ourselves, and possibly the Belicecs, was what he had been, or what he seemed still, to the naked eye. The men, women, and children in the street and stores below me were something else now, every last one of them. They were each our enemies, including those with the eyes, faces, gestures, and walks of old friends. There was no help for us here, except from each other, and even now the communities around us were being invaded.

♥ "Consider, Doctor, that there are planets and life incalculably older than ours; what happens when an ancient planet finally dies? The life form on it must reckon with and prepare for that fact-to survive."

Budlong sat forward in his chair, staring at me, fascinated by what he was saying. "A planet dies," he repeated, "slowly and over immeasurable ages. The life form on it-slowly and over immeasurable ages-must prepare. Prepare for what? For leaving the planet. To arrive where? And when? There is no answer, but one; which they achieved. It is universal adaptability to any and all other life forms, under any and all other conditions they might possibly encounter."

Budlong grinned at us happily, and sat back in his chair; he was having a fine time. Outside on the street, a car honked, and a child began to wail. "So in a sense, of course, the pods are a parasite on whatever life they encountered," Budlong went on. "But they are the perfect parasite, capable of far more than clinging to the host. They are completely evolved life; they have the ability to re-form and reconstitute themselves into perfect duplication, cell for living cell, of any life form they may encounter in whatever conditions that life has suited itself for."

My face must have shown what I was thinking, because Budlong grinned, and held up a hand. "I know; it sounds like gibbering-insane raving. That's only natural. Because we're trapped by our own conceptions, Doctor, our necessarily limited notions of what life can be. Actually, we can't really conceive of anything very much different from ourselves, and whatever other life existed on this one little planet. Prove it yourself; what do imaginary men from Mars, in our comic strips and fiction, resemble? Think about it. They resemble grotesque versions of ourselves-we can't imagine anything different! Oh, they may have six legs, three arms, and antennae sprouting from their heads"-he smiled-"like insects we're familiar with. But they are nothing fundamentally different from what we know."

He held up a finger, as though reproving a unprepared pupil. "But to accept our own limitations, and really believe that evolution through the universe must, for some reason, follow paths similar to our own, in any least way, is"-he shrugged, and smiled-"rather insular. In fact, downright provincial. Life takes whatever form it must: a monster forty feet high, with an immense neck, and weighing tons-call it a dinosaur. When conditions change, and the dinosaur is no longer possible, it is gone. But life isn't; it's there, in a new form. Any form necessary." His face was solemn. "The truth is what I say. It did happen. The pods arrived, drifting onto our planet as they have onto others, and they preformed, and are now performing their simple and natural function-which is to survive on this planet. And they do so by exercising their evolved ability to adapt and take over and duplicate cell for cell, the life this planet is suited for."

♥ He didn't get mad. "We know," he said simply. "There is"-he shrugged-"not memory; you can't call it that; can't call it anything you could ever recognize. But there is knowledge in this life form, of course, and-it stays. I am still what I was, in every respect, right down to a scar on my foot I got as a child; I am still Bernard Budlong. But the other knowledge is there, too, now. It stays, and I know. We all do."

For a moment he sat staring at nothing, then he looked up at us again. "As to how does it happen, how do they do what they do?" He grinned at me. "Come now, Doctor Bennell; think how little we actually know on this raw, new little planet. We're just out of the trees; still savages! Only two hundred years ago, you doctors didn't even know blood circulated. You thought it was a motionless fluid filling the body like water in a sack. And in my own lifetime, the existence of brain waves wasn't even suspected. Think of it, Doctor! Brain waves, actual electrical emanations from the brain, in specific identifiable patterns, penetrating the skull to the outside, to be picked up, amplified, and carted. You can sit and watch them on a screen. Are you an epileptic, actual or even potential? The pattern of your own individual brain waves will instantly answer that question, as you very well know; you're a doctor. And brain waves have always existed; they weren't invented, only discovered. People have always had them, just as they've always had fingerprints; Abraham Lincoln, Pontius Pilate, and Cro-Magnon man. We just didn't know it, that's all."

♥ "Yes, Doctor Bennell, your body contains a pattern, all living matter does-it is the very foundation of cellular life. Because it is composed of the tiny electrical force-lines that hold together the very atoms that constitute your being. And therefore it is a pattern-infinitely more perfect and detailed than any blueprint could be-of the precise atomic constitution of your body at exactly that moment, altering with every breath you take, and with every second of time in which your body infinitesimally changes. And it is during sleep, incidentally, when that change occurs least; and during sleep when that pattern can be taken from you, absorbed like static electricity, from one body to another."

Again he nodded. "So it can happen, Doctor Bennell, and rather easily; the intricate pattern of electrical force-lines that knit together every atom of your body to form and constitute every last cell of it-can be slowly transferred. And then, since every kind of atom in the universe is identical-the building blocks of the universe-you are precisely duplicated, atom for atom, molecule for molecule, cell for cell, down to the tiniest scar or hair in your wrist. And what happens to the original? The atoms that formerly composed you are-static now, nothing, a pile of gray fluff. It can happen, does happen, and you know that it has happened; and yet you will not accept it."

♥ I looked up at Mannie, sitting there on the edge of the chesterfield, eyes wide, his face looking compassionate and anxious, wanting me to believe him; and I wondered if what he said wasn't the simple truth. Even if it wasn't, holding Becky, feeling the tiny tremble of her body, and knowing how terrified she was, was more than I could take, and I knew there was something more I could do for her than simply sitting there stroking her head. I could persuade her. I could accept what Mannie had said-accept and believe it-and then let my conviction convince her. It might even be true; it might.

My hand steadily stroking Becky's hair, holding her tight to me, I thought about it, feeling the steady trembling of her body, feeling my own weariness, letting the will to believe strengthen and grow. Then... Budlong was right; the will to survive cannot be denied-and I knew we'd fight, that we had to. Like a condemned man futilely holding his last breath in a gas chamber, we had to hold out as long as we possibly could, struggling and hoping even when there was no possible hope left. And now I turned to Budlong, trying to think of something, anything, to say, to keep us awake, to find some point of attack, hoping for I didn't know what.

♥ "You told me in your study that you were working on a thesis, or paper of some sort; a scientific study, and an important one to you."

"Yes."

I leaned toward him, my eyes holding his, and Becky lifted her head, to stare at my face, then turned to Budlong. "There was only one way Wilma Lentz knew Ira wasn't Ira. There was no emotion, not really, not strong and human, but only the memory and pretense of it, in the thing that looked, talked, and acted like Ira in every other way."

My voice dropped. "And there's none in you, Budlong; you can only remember it. There's no real joy, fear, hope, or excitement in you, not any more. You live in the same kind of grayness as the filthy stuff that formed you." I smiled at him. "Professor, there's a look papers get when they're left spread out on a desk for days. They lose their freshness, somehow; they look different; the paper wilts, wrinkles a little from the air and moisture,or I don't know what. But you can tell by looking that they've been there a long time. And that's how yours looked; you haven't touched them since the day, whenever it w
as, that you stopped being Budlong. Because you don't care any more; they mean nothing to you! Ambition, hope, excitement-you haven't any."

.."Miles, I mean it"-his brows raised persuasively-"it's not so bad. Ambition, excitement-what's so good about them?" he said, and I could tell he meant it. "And do you mean to say you'll miss the strain and worry that goes along with them? It's not bad, Miles, and I mean that. It's peaceful, it's quiet. And food still tastes good, books are still good to read-"

"But not to write," I said quietly. "Not the labor, hope, and struggle of writing them. Or feeling the emotions that make them. That's all gone, isn't it, Mannie?"

He shrugged. "I won't argue with you, Miles. You seem to have guessed pretty well how things are."

"No emotion." I said it aloud, but wonderingly, speaking to myself. "Mannie," I said, as it occurred to me, "can you make love, have children?"

He looked at me for a moment. "I think you know that we can't, Miles. Hell," he said then, and it was as close to anger as he was capable of coming, "you might as well know the truth; you're insisting on it. The duplication isn't perfect. And can't be. It's like the artificial compounds nuclear physicists are fooling with: unstable, unable to hold their form. We can't live, Miles. The last of us will be dead"-he gestured with a hand, as though it didn't matter-"in five years at the most."

"And that's not all," I said softly. "It's everything living; not just men, but animals, trees, grass, everything that lives. Isn't that right, Mannie?"

He smiled wryly, tiredly. Then he stood, walked to the windows, and pointed. There, in the afternoon sky, hung a crescent moon, pale and silvery in the daylight, but very clear. A thin streamer of fog was moving across it. "Look at it, Miles-it's dead; there hasn't been a particle of change on its surface since man began studying it. But haven't you ever wondered why the moon is a desert of nothingness? The moon, so close to the earth so very much like it, once even a part of it; why should it be dead?"

He was silent for a moment, and we stared at hte silent, unchanging surface of the moon. "Well, it wasn't always," Mannie said softly. "Once it was alive." He turned away, back to the chesterfield. "And the other planets, revolving around the same life-giving sun as this one; Mars, for example." His shoulder lifted slightly. "Traces of the beings that once lived there still survive in the deserts. And now... it's the earth's turn. And when all of these planets are used up, it doesn't matter. The spores will move on, back into space again, to drift for-it doesn't matter for how long or to where. Eventually they'll arrive... somewhere. Budlong said it: parasites. Parasites of the universe, and they'll be the last and final survivors in it."

"Don't look so shocked, Doctor," Budlong was saying mildly. "After all, what have you people done-with the forests that covered the continent? And the farm lands you've turned into dust? You, too, have used them up, and then... moved on. Don't look so shocked."

I could hardly say it. "The world," I whispered. "You're going to spread over the world?"

He smiled tolerantly. "What did you think. This country, then the next ones; and presently northern California. Oregon, Washington, the West Coast, finally; it's an accelerating process, ever faster, always more of us, fewer of you. Presently, fairly quickly, the continent. And then-yes, of course, the world."

.."The world," I said softly, then I cried out, "But why? Oh, my God, why?"

If he could have been angry, he would have. But Budlong only shook his head tolerantly. "Doctor, Doctor, you don't learn. You don't seem to take it in. What have I been telling you? What do you do, and for what reason? Why do you breathe, eat, sleep, make love, and reproduce your kind? Because it's your function, your reason for being. There's no other reason, and none needed." Again he shook his head in wonder that I failed to understand. "You look shocked, actually sick, and yet what has the human race done except spread over this planet till it swarms the globe several billion strong? What have you done with this very continent but expand till you fill it? And where are the buffalo who roamed this land before you? Gone. Where is the passenger pigeon, which literally darkened the skies of America in flocks of billions? The last one died in a Philadelphia zoo in 1913. Doctor, the function of life is to live if it can, and no other motive can ever be allowed to interfere with that. There is no malice involved; did you hate the buffalo? We must continue because we must; can't you understand that?" He smiled at me pleasantly. "It's the nature of the beast."

And so finally I had to accept it, the condemned man finally exhaling, pausing, then sucking death into his lungs because he can't hold out any longer. There was nothing I could do, but this: I could make the last little time left to us as easy as possible on Becky-if we could only spend it alone.

"Mannie"-I looked up at him-"you said we were friends once, that you remember how it was."

"Of course, Miles."

"I don't think you really feel it any more, but if you can still remember anything of how it was, then leave us alone in here. Lock us in my office, and you'll have just the one hall door to guard. But leave us alone now, Mannie; wait in the hall. Give us that much; we can't get away, and you know it. And how can we sleep with you watching us? It'll come faster this way. Lock us in my office, then wait in the hall, Mannie. It's the last chance we'll ever have to know what really being alive is, and maybe you can remember a little of how that was, too."

♥ We sat, Becky in the leather chair, I at my desk; then Becky began speaking. Slowly, doubtfully, and pausing often to look at me questioningly, she described an idea that had occurred to her.

I listened, and when she stopped, waiting or an answer from me, I smiled and nodded a little, trying not to look immediately discouraging. "Becky, it might-it probably would-work, as far as it goes. But I'd still end up, struggling on a floor, with two or three men on top of me."

She said, "Miles, I know there's no reason why anything we can think of has to work out at all. But now you're thinking like a movie. Most people do-sometimes, anyway. Miles, there are certain activities most people never actually encounter all of their lives, so they picture them in terms of movie-like scenes. It's the only source most people have for visualizing things they've had no actual experience of. And that's how you're thinking now: a scene in which you're struggling with two or three men, and-Miles, what am I doing in that scene in your mind? You're seeing me cowering against a wall, eyes wide and frightened, my hands raised to my face in horror, aren't you?"

I thought about it, and she was right, very accurate, in fact, and I nodded.

She nodded, too. "And that's how they'll think: the stereotype of a woman's role in that kind of situation. And its' exactly what I will do-until I know they've seen and noticed me. Then I can do exactly what you did; why not?"

I was considering what she's said, and Becky persisted, unable to wait. "Why not, Miles; why can't I?" She paused for an instant, then said, "I can."

♥ We weren't going to get out; that was certain, and I understood it. We could only take every last chance we could give ourselves, not giving up, yielding nothing, fighting to the very last instant of time we had left.

♥ But I told myself this: there is always a chance. Men have escaped from the most tightly guarded prisons other men could contrive. War prisoners have walked hundreds of miles through a population of millions, every one of them his enemy. Sheer luck, a momentary gap in the line at just the right instant, a mistake in identity made in the darkness-until the very moment you are caught, there is always a chance.

And then I saw that we didn't dare take even what little chance we might have had. A low swirly of fog edged off the face of the moon, and again I saw the pods, row after row of them, lying evil and motionless at our feet. If we were caught, what about these pods? We had no right to waste ourselves! We were here-with the pods-and even though it was hopeless, even though it made capture an absolute certainty, we had to use ourselves against the pods. If there was any luck to be had, this was how it had to be used.

♥ Revelation is the word for a complex of thought revealing itself instantaneously with the enormous impact of absolute truth. Standing motionless with Becky, my mouth agape, head far back, staring up at that incredible sight in the night sky, I knew a thousand things it would take minutes to explain, and others I can never explain in a lifetime.

Quite simply, the great pods were leaving a fierce and inhospitable planet. I knew it utterly and a wave of exultation so violent it left men trembling swept through my body; because I knew Becky and I had played our part in what was now happening. We hadn't, and couldn't possibly have been-I saw this now-the only souls who had stumbled and blundered onto what had been happening in Mill Valley. There'd been others, of course, individuals, and little groups, who had done what we had-who had simply refused to give up. Many had lost, but some of us who had not been caught and trapped without a chance had fought implacably, and a fragment of a wartime speech moved through my mind: We shall fight them in the fields, and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. True then for one people, it was true always for the whole human race, and now I felt that nothing in the whole vast universe could ever defeat us.

Did this incredible alien life form "think" this, too, or "know" it? Probably not, I thought, or anything our minds could conceive. But it had sensed it; it could tell with certainty that this planet, this little race, would never receive them, would never yield. And Becky and I, in refusing to surrender, but instead fighting their invasion to the end, giving up hope of escape in order to destroy even a few of them, had provided the final conclusive demonstration of that truth. And so now, to survive-their one purpose and function-the great pods lifted and rose, climbing up through the faint mist, on and out toward the space they had come from, leaving a fiercely implacable planet behind, to move aimlessly on once again, forever, or... it didn't matter.

♥ For a time I simply held Becky, squeezing her to me. Then I was aware of the murmur again-quieter now, and more subdued-of the voices around us. We looked up, and they were moving, past us and beyond us, on up the hill back to the doomed town they had come from. They straggled by, their faces bland and emotionless, a few of them glancing at us as they passed, most of them not even interested now. Then Becky and I walked down the hill, passing through them-dirty, our clothes smeared and wrinkled, and we limped, shuffling through the grass and weeds, one shoe off, one shoe on, in awkward stumbling victory. Silently we passed the last of the figures around us, and then we were walking down the slope through the weeds toward the freeway and the rest of our kind.

♥ Even now-so soon-there are times, and they come more frequently, when I'm no longer certain in my mind of just what we did see, or of what really happened here. I think it's perfectly possible that we didn't actually see, or correctly interpret, everything that happened, or that we thought had happened. I don't know, I can't say; the human mind exaggerates and deceives itself. And I don't much care; we're together, Becky and I, for better or worse.

But... showers of small frogs, tiny fish, and mysterious rains of pebbles sometimes fall from out of the skies. Here and there, with no possible explanation, men are burned to death inside their clothes. And once in a while, the orderly, immutable sequences of time itself are inexplicably shifted and altered. You read these occasional queer little stories, humorously written, tongue-in-cheek, most of the time; or you have vague distorted rumors of them. And this much I know. Some of them-some of them-are true.