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on the backrest and his chin resting on the back of his left hand. The
creature stared back at him through eyes which now seemed very nearly human.
Its face, too, had lost much of its rodent identity and had taken on more
nearly human outlines. The leech-like body sac was elongating, losing its dark
colour and corrugations. Legs were developing, and arms - and breasts?
'What?' Agursky hissed the single word from between clenched teeth.
'What. .
.?'
The spurious pebble-examining member shrank, was withdrawn into the main mass
of the body. That body was now very nearly human, in shape if nothing else. It
was like a girl, even had a girl's flowing hair. But on the creature's head
that mass of hair was coarse and lacklustre, like the false hair of a poorly
made doll. The breasts were lumpy and without nipples, like pallid blobs of
flesh stuck on a flat male chest. The size, too, was wrong, for the thing only
had the mass of a large dog, which even remodelled made for a very small
woman.
With every passing second the expression on Agursky's face grew that much more
disgusted. The creature was attempting to resemble a woman, but it was making
a nightmarishly horrific job of it. Its 'hands' had now shaped themselves into
appendages very like human hands, but the nails on the too-slender fingers
were bright scarlet and far too long. Worse, its 'feet' were also hands: the
creature couldn't discriminate. Then . . . the thing's simpering, idiot face
smiled at Agursky, and suddenly he knew where he'd seen that smile before.
It was the face and smile, even the hair, of that sex-starved hag Klara
Orlova, a spindly theoretical physicist who was fascinated by the creature and
occasionally came in here to admire it! It had seen her face, her hands with
their brightly painted nails, the upper roundness of her bosom where she wore
that gown of hers unbuttoned to titillate the common soldiers - but it didn't
know she had nipples, and it hadn't seen her feet at all. It had simply
assumed that her feet were like her hands!
Agursky checked himself: no, for that would be to grant the thing too high a
level of intelligence, and he had already satisfied himself that it was not
especially bright.
This mimicking was like the mindless, human-seeming cry of a parrot, or the
ape wearing spectacles to 'read' a book. Indeed it was less than the latter,
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for it was purely instinctive. Like the colour change of a chameleon, or
better still the chameleon's colour control plus the elasticity of the
octopus.
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Even while he was thinking these thoughts the thing had been ironing out
certain imperfections. The skin tone was more nearly correct, as was the
painted Cupid's bow of the mouth. The vampire's nose and dark nostrils,
however, were still ugly and alien, ridged, convoluted and quivering. In its
natural environment (wherever the hell that was) its sense of smell might well
be its most important tool for survival; to change that organ's shape would be
to drastically degrade its function. In any event, the final image which the
thing presented - for all that it was still wrong, still grotesque - was at
least something of ... an attempt?
But an attempt at what?
Suddenly, unreasonably, Agursky felt fury surging in him. Was this . . . this
damned, flesh-eating slime actually trying to seduce him?
'Damn you - you thing! -
that's it, isn't it?' he cried, jumping to his feet. 'You know the difference
between us - or at least you sense it. And you'd like to use it! You think
I'll be a little nicer to my plastic, blood-guzzling, alien little whore if 1
think I can maybe make love to it, eh? By God! - have you got the wrong man!'
Like a playful cat the thing stretched, rolled on its back, thrust its pale,
useless breasts at him. There was no navel in its belly, but a little below
where a navel should be was a protuberant, pulsing tube of flesh that could
only be the thing's conception of a human vulva. The sexual implications
turned Agursky white with rage in a moment.
The thing was trying to seduce him! He yanked a black card from the pocket of
his smock, showed it to the half-smiling, half-grimacing thing.
'You see this, you motherless monstrosity? How'd you like to dance for uncle,
eh? You don't like that, do you?' But it was a bluff and the creature knew it.
Its limpid eyes looked through the glass, this way and that all around the
room, but Agursky hadn't brought the shock-box with him. He was impotent to
carry out his threat.
The gurgling, crimson mess from the feeder tube continued to pump into the
tank. The container was almost empty, and still the thing hadn't been tempted
to start feeding.
But now, as Agursky tremblingly took his seat again, a stream of scarlet
seepage from the pile of offal found a zigzag route to the creature and
touched its side. The metamorphosis which took place in it then was rapid
indeed.
Its neck twisted round at an impossible angle to allow its quasi-human face to
peer at the blood spreading round its flank. Then the face turned back and
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