Through the Eye of a Needle

2. Details

In spite of what had happened at the dock, the jeep reached the Kinnaird home very shortly behind the bicycles. The few minutes rest as they drove restored Bob enough to let him get into the house without assistance, though the luggage stayed in the car for the moment.

The suitcase Daphne had carried was of course inside; her mother had yielded to the pressure, and carried it home on her own bicycle. The child promptly dragged it over to the couch on which her brother had thankfully collapsed.

She wanted it opened at once, of course, and the resulting activities filled the time until food was served. Every minute of rest that Bob could get was good, of course and it was fortunate that Daphne was content to let him stay on the couch and hand out presents- very much plural, to the little girl's delight-which made up most of the contents of the suitcase.

The Hunter was getting quite impatient by the time she was sent to bed. Mrs. Kinnaird was perfectly aware that something was wrong by this time, though her husband had spoken only a word or two to her after his arrival; she, too, wanted to hear the details. Eventually, protesting but not really resentful, Daphne was dismissed upstairs to what had formerly been her brother's room. Fortunately, since he could certainly not have handled stairs too many times a day, Bob was to sleep in a wing which his father had built at the back of the house during the past year-largely a matter of luck, since he certainly had not foreseen his son's troubles.

Eventually the child was quiet, and the rest of the family was able to get down to business. Bob had long ago planned what he should say. The Hunter knew that he wouldn't enjoy listening, since the words could not possibly make him look very good, but was mature enough to face the situation. It was the mother who opened the conversation, after a final trip upstairs to make sure the child was asleep.

"You're not just tired, are you, Bob? There's something more serious."

"I'm afraid so, Mom," was the answer. "I don't know just how serious-it might drag on for a long time, but it wouldn't be very smart to count on that.

This actually started before I was home two years ago. It wasn't very bad then, and it didn't seem a good idea to worry either you or Doc Seever with it, but it's been getting worse ever since, and something really has to be done now."

"Does the Hunter have a reliable prognosis? I mean, has he encountered this sort of thing before?" Bob's father cut in.

"Not personally, he says. He's heard about it historically; when his species meets a new type of host it wouldn't have happened now if he were a doctor instead of a detective. Let me give it to you. From the beginning." Both his parents nodded their approval.

"You both know what the Hunter and his people are like-about four pounds of something vaguely like human protoplasm, but made of molecule-sized units instead of the relatively huge, cells of our tissue. His people can live independently, at least on their own planet, but normally exist inside the body of a larger creature in a state of symbiosis. The Hunter has been doing that with me for years, sharing the food I eat, seeing through my eyes, hearing with my ears, and paying for his keep by destroying invading germs, stopping blood loss from cuts, and so on. Also, he's a personal friend, though not as close as we might be on his home world; we don't have the facilities here which would let him live a normal life, and we don't have very similar interests. He's a detective, and his partner at home was also a police official; he went through my chemical and other courses in college with me, but didn't enjoy them as much as I did. On his world, partners don't join up until they've known each other for a long time. Here, he didn't have much choice.

"His people have had contact, since they've developed space travel, with other more or less humanlike races, and have been able to carry on the same sort of life-sharing with these. It's not so routine, though. No two planets, as far as their experience goes, seem to produce fife with identical chemistry, and a lot has to be learned before the symbiosis really goes smoothly.

"Naturally, the Hunter's partnership with me is in the less well organized category. He was never completely sure that he wouldn't do me some harm. We're enough like the other humanoids he's known so that he could recognize and offset my normal immunity reactions in about the same way he was used to, and of course with him there I didn't need them-he could take care of infections, just the same, he would check every few days to make sure his neutralization of my immune response to him hadn't had more general effects, for example, if I got a splinter in my finger he'd wait to make sure my body reacted normally before he cleaned up the intruding bacteria.

A couple of years ago, I failed one of those tests. I got badly infected from a minor scratch, and the Hunter found that my immunity chemistry just wasn't working at all any more. He took its place, of course; there was no danger as long as he was with me. Of course, if anything were to happen to him-" Bob didn't finish, but his parents nodded.

They remembered the circumstances which had caused them to learn about the Hunter-Seever, the island doctor, had been the only one Bob had let into the secret before the police project had been concluded. Bob had bluffed the alien fugitive into leaving his father's body, and destroyed the creature by fire; but the departure had been very hasty. A short time later, Arthur Kinnaird had fallen ill. The symptoms were a blend of pneumonia and meningitis, and Seever had been mystified. Eventually, he and Bob had persuaded the reluctant Hunter to transfer to Arthur Kinnaird's body to investigate.

The problem had been straightforward enough; virus like cells left behind by the fugitive in its hasty departure had lost the control and coordination of an intelligent creature and were simply living without regard for the welfare of their host-the sort of thing, on a much cruder level, which the organism originating them had done and which had made it a criminal by the standards of its species. The Hunter had had no trouble incorporating the units into his own structure. Seever had felt it necessary to give the whole story to Bob's mother, who was quite intelligent enough to recognize and be bothered by any half-truths; and later on, when her husband had regained his senses, he had also been told. Under the circumstances they had little choice about believing, and had eventually come to take the Hunter for granted-even addressing him directly at times, though of course their son had to transmit any answers.

"In a way," Bob went on, “I'm a sort of addict of my symbiont. It's not just the immunity thing, now. Other parts of my personal chemistry keep going hay-wire every few months. Sometimes the Hunter can spot the actual cause and do something about it, sometimes he has to use his own abilities in a way not really related to my own body's handling of the same problem-for example, the way he handles infection by consuming the organisms responsible instead of chemical neutralization.

"He's described the whole thing as a juggling act. As time goes on, he has to devote more and more, effort and attention to keeping my machinery going. Quite often some step he takes interferes with, one or more of the things that he's already doing; or that my own biochemistry is normally doing. Unless we can find some fairly simple key cause for all this and do something effective about it-well, he admits, that sooner or later the juggler is bound to drop a plate."

"I suppose he can't just withdraw entirely and let nature take care of the situation," Mrs. Kinnaird asked.

"Nature isn't that interested in me," her son replied. "The juggling act is just what every living body goes into, and drops out of, sooner or later. Letting things go on their own and shutting eyes and ears may produce 'natural' results, but there's no way to be sure your own survival is included in the meaning of 'natural.' Knowledge is what is needed if you hope for things to go your way."

"But surely the Hunter has the knowledge! You told us he could identify thousands, maybe millions, of chemicals-even unbelievably complex things like proteins-by his own senses. He can produce lots of them deliberately. You once said that if you got diabetes he could take over the making of insulin for you."

"I did, I do, and he does. He can do a lot. He is doing a lot, but he has his limits, and they're a long way short of complete takeover of the chemical machinery of a human body. What you miss is the fact that, unbelievable as his abilities are, the complexity of the problem is even more unbelievable. You're more realistic than the weirdoes who think you can heal a burn by shining the proper color of light on it, but you're still not really in touch with the problem."

"Then this weakness of yours is a continuing thing?" Bob's father asked.

"Not exactly-that is, I'm not weak and tired all time. One of the plates that's slipping has something to do with my muscles. The Hunter can't spot anything specifically wrong with them, or with their individual cells, or with the way the cells are interacting and using food, or with the nerves connected with them; but after I've started to get tired-only a little tired, or what should make me only a little tired, they just lose power. The Hunter not only can't sense the cause, he can't even provide a makeshift remedy like delivering sugar or other necessities to the cells directly-it doesn't work. It isn't a matter of getting more fuel to the cells, or running stronger messages along the nerves, or a lot of other things-he could tell us thousands of things it isn't."

There was silence for many minutes.

The older people could not, of course, believe that there was no solution to the problem. This was their child. No longer really a child, and not even their only one, but theirs. They had taken for granted that he would still be alive when their own jugglers dropped the last plate. They would have been embarrassed to say aloud that there had to be an answer, but neither could think along any other line. Neither thought consciously of blaming the Hunter for what had happened, though the wife thought fleetingly that it would have been nice if the alien had chosen to take up existence with the doctor after completion of his police project-Seever might have been able to take effective steps while the problem was still simple. She never brought this point up aloud, however. It was she who finally broke the silence. "What do you and the Hunter plan to do, now that you're here?" she asked. ''You must have a plan- you'd be looking even worse than you do, without one."

"Do you really think Ben Seever can do anything?" was Arthur Kinnaird's contribution. "He can't possibly know as much as the Hunter, even if he is a doctor rather than a detective."

Bob nodded basic agreement with the point; it was one he and the Hunter had considered long before.

"I don't know what he can do, Dad, but we can't help being better off with him than without him. We're telling him the whole story tomorrow. I'd have to see him anyway, since I'll be expected to have a checkup before reporting to work; tomorrow's Friday, and I'm sure PFI will expect my muscles to be available Monday. If nothing else, Doc may be able, to think of something which will keep me out of heavy-muscle work. If I don't do anything useful at all, they'll want to send me to the States or Japan for a real medical going-over, and we've got to stay here." "Why?" both parents asked at once. Bob smiled. "Don't give up when you first hear it. The basic assumption may be wrong, but at least it's not ridiculous. Our first job is to find one or both of the ships that crashed near Ell nearly eight years ago. What do you know about self-contained diving gear, Dad?"

Arthur Kinnaird, quite predictably, ignored the question and put one of his own.

"What good will the ships do? Are there supposed to be medical supplies in them? Would anything useful have lasted this long under water?"

"Probably not," admitted Bob. "We're not looking for supplies or equipment. The Hunter's ship was certainly thoroughly wrecked, and it's likely the other one was too. We need something else.

"We-the Hunter and I-have been thinking this through for over two years now, and we've reached one very firm conclusion. This problem can be solved, if at all, only by specialists among the Hunter's own races. This sort of thing has happened to them before when they encountered new species, and at least some of the time they have found answers."

Arthur Kinnaird was frowning thoughtfully; his son's expression was more hopeful.

The man spoke. "How on Earth, if the phrase means anything, will finding either of those ships get you in touch with specialists from the Hunter's world? Do you think there are radios in them that will reach that far? And did you ever figure out where he came from, anyway? I thought he said he was hopelessly lost among the stars?"

"Let's see, Dad; in order, if I can. No, neither of us expects to find anything usable in either ship. Radios wouldn't mean anything even if they worked; it would take fifty years or so for electromagnetic waves to make the trip one way. Our idea is a little less direct and maybe a little less promising, but we think it's more than just wishing.

"It's true that when I first knew him, and for quite a while afterward, the Hunter believed he was hopelessly lost. It wasn't until I took an astronomy course, with him looking on of course, that he got a reasonable idea of how thinly the stars are scattered in space, and how few are the possibilities that would have to be considered by the people who might be looking for him. He knows the time he traveled, though not the distance in any of our units. His departure direction was known to his own people, though of course they won't know how far he went. He feels sure that when he failed to return in a few of our months, searchers would have followed his line. He is even more sure that he did not pass at all close to any stars likely to distract those searchers; ours was the first that he and his quarry came at all close to. His friends should have had no trouble in finding this planetary system."

"But there are nine planets going around our sun," Mrs. Kinnaird pointed out, "and even if they narrowed it down to this one there are a lot of square miles to cover."

"That's why-or one reason why-we need to find the ships. They'll help us estimate the searchers' chance of narrowing down. The Hunter says that even when they're shut down, the faster-than-light engines involve force fields which can be spotted from millions of miles away-that's how he was able to follow the other ship. He's not sure how long the fields would last, or how far away they can be sensed, after the sort of violence which his own ship suffered. Sooner or later corrosion would destroy them so completely that no field effects would remain, and that's another reason we want to find them-to see how far that process may have gone."

"But no matter what their condition, what can you and the Hunter, or the rest of us, do about it?" asked his father.

"It will affect our plans. If the ships were detectable, searchers will have already covered this island very thoroughly-probably when the Hunter and I weren't here. If they weren't, at least the searchers would have found Earth, and the Hunter is certain they'd have been interested, in the planet and in humanity. They'd have gone home, reported, and by now a team would be somewhere on the planet giving it a going-over for five to ten years to decide whether they should make open contact with humanity. If I could be sure of living ten years, we could sit back and wait."

"Assuming they decided in favor," his mother pointed out."

"Yes-I suppose I shouldn't be taking that for granted; In any case we can't wait. The real question we have to solve is whether there'd be members of the Hunter's species here on Ell, as there would be if they'd found the ships, or whether all of Earth has to be searched. I must admit I'm hoping for the first,"

"But would they still be here if they had found them?"

"Not steadily, but they'd come back from time to time to check on the pilots. They'd have found no trace of them, and they'd want to rescue the Hunter and arrest the other one."

"Why should they care about the arrest, alter such a long time?" the woman asked. "Was he that terrible a criminal?"

"I don't know-just a minute." Bob waited while the Hunter covered the point, then relayed. "He had done things for his own convenience which endangered his host, without the latter's consent. He was therefore self-centered enough to be a danger to any human beings he used; they'd want to get him as a protection to our own people." "Would he have done what the Hunter has done to you?" asked his father. It was the first time he had let bitterness enter the conversation.

"That's not fair, Dad. The Hunter didn't do this on purpose, and he's trying to repair the trouble. The other one would simply have found himself another host when I became too messed up to be useful-probably long before now, since it's taking a lot of effort to keep me going already."

"All right, sorry. Why wouldn't these searchers have left messages around for the Hunter?

"Because they couldn't be sure the other one had been disposed of, of course. For the next obvious question with a less obvious answer, where would the Hunter leave messages for the searchers-except in the ships? It would have to be someplace they'd examine closely, and they won't check every drain pipe on this island, much less on Earth. Anything which could be seen from any distance would attract human attention, which would be very bad until the team decides about open contact."

"And if they haven't found the ships?"

"Then neither of us has any good ideas. The best is to publish some of the Hunter's police codes, transcribed as closely into local alphabets as possible, in large-circulation papers; but that's not very promising with, say, fifty investigators scattered over the planet. We'll try that if we have to-it'll take even more help than the other operation-but we certainly hope we don't have to."

"So do I." Arthur Kinnaird's voice had dropped from its earlier rather sharp intensity. "All right. You've made your case for doing some diving. We'd better find out whether those mine detectors they used in the war will work under water-"

"In principle, yes," Bob interrupted. "We'd have to make sure water didn't get into their circuitry, though. Do you think we can get hold of one? It should make a big difference, especially if the ships are under coral or mud by now."

"We'll try. There's nothing else we can do. I wish I could be more optimistic. Hunter, when you come right down to it, you really can't be sure whether any of your people have reached or will reach Earth, can you?"

The alien relayed a "No" through his young host, very reluctantly. He had problems enough without destroying Bob's morale, he felt. However, the word seemed to make no difference to the young chemist. Certainly his father noticed nothing, and was not thinking along such lines, for he went on,

"Is it really possible you can feel sure they can find this solar system? I can see their picking out Earth if they do, but photos I've seen of the Milky Way star clouds look pretty discouraging when it comes to a hide and seek game. Bob, look at the ceiling and start reading the Hunter's answer to that. I don't want to discourage anyone-I don't want to be discouraged myself, but I've got to have a realistic idea."

"He doesn't talk to me by shadowing the retinas any more, Dad; he speaks directly into my ear bones. But I'll relay."

The Hunter couldn't afford to hesitate, under the circumstances. He spoke, and his host quoted.

"The only doubt is raised by the nature of your Sun, which is much brighter and hotter than ours. It is possible that there are stars more like our own which lay fairly close to our line of flight; I can only say that my instruments failed to detect them. If they got a really good fix our departure direction, which they should have very easily, they would have to examine this system. It is possible they'll have to check others, too, but I've been here for nearly eight of your years. I honestly consider the chances very good indeed that some of my species are on Earth right now."

"There was no chance of his dodging?" "He was an even less experienced astronaut than I. If he ever wanted to get back home, he would not have dodged."

"Would he have wanted to get back? What was he running from? Enough to make him panic?"

"Nothing capital. He would have been sentenced to ten or fifteen of your years in symbiosis with an un-intelligent work animal-a hard labor sentence." "And how long is that to your people, subjectively? How long do you normally live?" The Hunter had never expected that question, and was totally unprepared to dodge it. He had never intended to discuss the matter with any human being, least of all with his own host. However, the questioner was waiting for an answer, and any sort of hesitation would do more harm than good.

"Our own life spans are rather indefinite, though we do die eventually. The beings we originally learned to live with, on my home world, usually last about forty of your years with our help. We average perhaps a dozen times that, but cannot count on it. The sentence, if anything, would have seemed milder to him than to you. In any case, we are now guessing about what other people would be guessing. I must admit that there is no absolute certainty that my people have come or will come to this planet, but I consider the chances good enough to justify planning on that basis, especially when such a relatively short distance seems to be involved."

"Short distance? Then you think you've identified your home star?" Mrs. Kinnaird's voice was eager.

"We think so." Bob was speaking on his own, now. "It's a very funny group of stars, and only one system like it was ever mentioned in my astronomy course. We think it must be Castor. That's a six-star system -two bright ones very much like Sirius, each with a faint companion which we don't know much about because we can't see it-they just cause a periodic Doppler shift in the bright stars' spectra-and finally a pair of red dwarf suns, circling the others a long way out. We know a lot about those because they form an eclipsing spectroscopic pair; we think they must be the suns for the Hunter's planet, because everything we could check about brightness and periods and so on seemed to fit. They're what are called flare stars, which fits, too. The whole thing is forty-five or fifty light-years away. The Hunter isn't really sure about the speeds of their interstellar flyers, but thinks the distance is reasonable."

"You've mixed a few pronouns up-mostly the 'we's'-" his mother said, "but I think we get the picture. All right, we'll be optimistic too-we have to be, just as both of you do." The Hunter appreciated her choice of words; after the confession about his life span, it would not have been unreasonable for a human being to suspect that Bob was just another incident in his life, who would be dying a little sooner than his other hosts. In fact, the alien was seriously disturbed, by Bob's situation, and at least as much bothered by his own responsibility for it. He was not permitting himself to think about his own future if they failed to save Bob's life.

Bob's father might have been as aware of this as his wife seemed to be, but his words provided no evidence either way. His job with PFI involved enough responsibility to make him a forceful and decisive person, and his words, after a few moments' thought, concerned only the actions to be taken.

"All right. Step one, Bob gets a good night's sleep so he can at least start tomorrow looking and acting normal. Two, he visits Ben Seever first thing in the morning, tells him everything, and takes whatever steps possible to get an assignment which won't make his condition any worse. It would be nice if it left him free for work on the search project, but we'll stay with possibles for the moment.

"Three, I do what I can about getting hold of free-diving equipment-I know there isn't any on Ell, but I think the company is experimenting with it on Tahiti. I also do research on metal-detecting equipment, its availability and usefulness for underwater work.

"The Hunter thinks of every possible way to get the attention of any of his people who may be on the island, or on Earth, without going to the extreme of publishing the whole story worldwide. I wouldn't mind doing that myself, but if it would interfere with whatever they'd normally be doing here, it might cause them to give up Earth as a bad job and leave. I don't see that that is really likely, but we're not taking the chance.

"Finally, both Bob and the Hunter give serious thought to which, and how many, additional people we might let into the business. I doubt that five people, one in shaky health and one restricted in his physical movements, are going to be enough. I know it will take thinking, but think."

But it was not thought which started the first recruiting action.