The Taking

22

ON ONE KNEE IN THE JANITORIAL CLOSET, WITH Molly crouching more at his side now than behind him, and with Neil standing over him, Derek withdrew a Swiss Army knife from a pocket of his tweed sports jacket.

Molly could think of no one less likely to be carrying a Swiss Army knife than this bow-tied academic. Then she realized that among the tools included in that clever instrument were a corkscrew and a bottle opener.

Derek employed neither of those devices but instead extracted the spear blade. He hesitated with the point of the knife above one of the clustered fungi.

His hand shook. These tremors weren't the consequence of either intoxication or alcohol withdrawal.

"When I did this before," he said, "I was pleasantly soused, full of the giddy curiosity that makes dipsomania such an adventure. Now I'm sober, and I know what I'm going to find-and I'm astonished that I had the courage to do this the first time."

Having steeled himself, he poked the blade into the tubular cap of one of the fattest of the fungi.

The entire colony, not just the pierced specimen, quivered like gelatin.

From the wound, a puff of pale vapor escaped with an audible wheeze, suggesting that the interior of the mushroomlike structure had been pressurized. The malodorous vapor reeked like a concoction of rot-en eggs, vomit, and decomposing flesh.

Molly gagged, and Derek said, "I should have warned you. But it dissipates quickly."

He slit the membrane that he had already punctured, revealing the inner structure of the fungus.

The interior was not solidly meaty, like that of an ordinary mushroom, but a hollow chamber. A graceful architecture of spongy struts supported the surface membrane that Derek had slit.

A wet mass, the size of a hen's egg, lay at the center of this chamber. At first glimpse, Molly thought of intestines because these looked, in miniature, like ropey human guts, but gray and mottled as if corrupted, infected, cancerous.

Then she saw that these coils and loops were slowly moving, sliding lazily over and around one another. The better comparison was to a knot of copulating earthworms.

The reeking vapor lost, the black-and-yellow membrane slit, these worm forms continued their sensuous writhing for only three or four seconds-and abruptly disengaged, bristled to every curve of the chamber. They became a dozen questing tentacles much quicker than worms, connected to something unseen at the bottom of the hollow, as quick and jittery as spider legs, frenziedly probing the knife-torn edges of the ruined canopy.

Molly tensed, shrank back, certain that the repulsive resident of the fungus would spring out of its lair and, loose, would prove to be faster than a cockroach.

"It's all right," Derek assured her.

Neil said, "The fungus is a home to something, like the shell of a conch."

"No, I don't think so." Derek wiped the blade of his knife on his display handkerchief. "You can strain for earthly comparisons, but there really isn't one. From what I can tell, this squirmy little creepshow is part of the fungus itself."

The frenetic lashing of the small tentacles subsided. They continued to move quickly, but now in a more calculated manner.

Molly sensed that they were embarked on some task, though she could not at once discern their purpose.

"The rapid movement," Neil said, "the ability to flex at will and manipulate appendages… those things indicate animal life, not plants."

Molly agreed. "There's got to be muscle tissue involved, which plants don't have."

Discarding his soiled display handkerchief, Derek said, "On the planet they come from, there may not be as clear a division between plant and animal life as we have on this world."

Beginning at both ends of the torn canopy, the tentacles had begun to repair the gash.

"I'd need to look more closely than I care to," Derek said, "and perhaps with a magnifying glass, to be able to tell exactly how they knit the wound shut. The tentacles appear to be exuding a bonding material…"

Molly could see a pinkish ooze seeping from the tips of some of those busy appendages.

"… but I think I also detect microfilaments, as well… as if the damn thing is stitching itself shut much the way a surgeon might close an incision." He shrugged. "All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance."

With a fascination equal to her disgust and dread, Molly could not look away from the self-repairing fungus-if that was the right name for it.

"Imagine," Derek proposed, "a world filled with a variety of hideous plants that all present a still exterior… but teem with secret internal life."

Molly knew that on the distant world from which it had come, this fungus had been as natural and unremarkable in its environment as a dandelion in an earthly field. Reason did not allow her to attribute a moral value to it any more than she could rationally ascribe conscious intention to a carrot.

Nevertheless, judging only by the evidence of her eyes, she felt that this thing was profoundly malignant. On an intuitive level, she knew that it harbored malice, that in some strange way it dreamed of violence, as a trapdoor spider might dream of sucking the juices from the beetle that sooner or later would fall into its lair, though this thing dreamed of cruelty with a glee that no spider could ever experience, with a ferocity that transcended nature. On a level even deeper than intuition, in that realm of belief that is of the heart rather than of the mind, and might be called faith, she had no doubt whatsoever that this life form, whether fungus or not, whether plant or animal or something between, was not just poisonous but evil.

As the repulsive thing finished sewing itself together from the inside, as the squirming gray tentacles disappeared behind the glossy black-and-yellow-spotted skin, it seemed to have no rightful place in a universe created by the God of light, but belonged in another universe than this one, where the divine impulse had been dark and twisted, the divine intention cruel beyond imagining.

Folding the blade of his knife into the handle, pocketing it, Derek looked at Molly. "You still think it might be just an exotic mushroom you've never happened to run across before?"

"No," she admitted.