Knight, Damon - Four in one

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Four In One

By Damon Knight (1953)

George Meister had once seen the nervous system of a man--a display specimen, achieved by

coating the smallest of the fibers until they were coarse enough to be seen, then dissolving all

the unwanted tissue and replacing it with clear plastic. A marvelous job; that fellow on Torkas

III had done it--what was his name? At any rate: having seen the specimen, Meister knew

approximately what he himself must look like at the present moment.

Of course, there were distortions: for example, he was almost certain that the neurons between

his visual center and his eyes had produced themselves by at least thirty centimeters. Also, no

doubt, the system as a whole was curled up and spread out rather oddly, since the

musculature it had originally controlled was gone; and he had noticed certain other changes which

might or might not be reflected by gross structural differences. The fact remained that he--all

that he could still call _himself_--was nothing more than a brain, a pair of eyes, a spinal cord,

and a spray of neurons.

George closed his eyes for a second. It was a thing he had learned to do only recently, and he

was proud of it. That first long period, when he had had no control whatever, had been very bad,

He had decided later that the paralysis had been due to the lingering effects of some anaesthetic--

the agent, whatever it was, that had kept him unconscious while his body was being--Well.

Either that, or the neuron branches had simply not yet knitted firmly in their new positions.

perhaps he could verify one or the other supposition at some future time. But at first, when he

had only been able to see and not to move, knowing nothing beyond the moment when he had fallen

face first into that mottled green and brown puddle of gelatin... that had been upsetting.

He wondered how the others were taking it. There were others, he knew, because occasionally he

would feel a sudden acute pain down where his legs belonged, and at the same instant the motion of

the landscape would stop with a jerk. That could only be same other brain, trapped like his,

trying to move their common body in another direction.

Usually the pain stopped immediately, and George could go on sending messages down to the nerve

endings which had formerly belonged to his fingers and toes, and the gelatinous body would keep on

creeping slowly forward. When the pains continued, there was nothing to do but to stop moving

until the other brain quit--in which case George would feel like an unwilling passenger in a very

slow vehicle--or try to alter his own movements to coincide, or at least product: a vector with

the other brain's.

He wondered who else had fallen in--Vivian Bellis? Major Gumbs? Miss McCarty? Or all three of

them? There ought to be some way of finding out.

He tried looking down once more, and was rewarded with a blurry view of a long, narrow strip of

mottled green and brown, moving very slowly forward along the dry stream bed they had been

crossing for the last hour or more. Twigs and shreds of dry vegetable matter were stuck to the

dusty, translucent surface.

He was improving; the last time, he had only been able to see the thinnest possible edge of his

new body.

When he looked up again, the far edge of the stream bed was perceptibly closer. There was a

cluster of stiff-looking, dark-brown vegetable shoots just beyond, on the rocky shoulder; George

was aiming slightly to the left of it. It had been a plant very much like that one that he'd been

reaching for when he lost his balance and got himself into this condition. He might as well have a

good look at it, anyhow.

The plant would probably turn out to be of little interest. It would be out of all reason to

expect every new life form to be a startling novelty; and George was convinced that he had already

stumbled into the most interesting organism on this planet.

Something _meisterii_, he thought. He had not settled on a species name--he would have to learn

more about it before he decided--but _meisterii_ certainly. It was his discovery, and nobody could

take it away from him. Or unhappily--him away from it.

It was a really lovely organism, though. Primitive--less structure of its own than a jellyfish,

and only on a planet with light surface gravity, like this one, could it ever have hauled itself

up out of the sea. No brain, no nervous system at all, apparently. But it had the perfect

survival mechanism. It simply let its rivals develop highly organized nervous tissue, sat in one

place (looking exactly like a deposit of leaves and other clutter) until one of them fell into it,

and then took all the benefit.

It wasn't parasitism, either; it was a true symbiosis, on a higher level than any other planet,

so far as George knew, had ever developed. The captive brain was nourished by the captor;

wherefore it served the captive's interest to move the captor toward food and away from danger.

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file:///F|/rah/Damon%20Knight/Knight,%20Damon%20-%20Four%20In%20One.txt

_You steer me, I feed you._ It was fair.

They were close to the plant now, almost touching it. George inspected it; as he had thought, it

was a common grass type, of no particular interest.

Now his body was tilting itself up a ridge he knew to be low, although from his eye level it

looked tremendous. He climbed it laboriously and found himself looking down into still another

gully. This could go on, no doubt, indefinitely. The question was, did he have any choice?

He looked at the shadows cast by the low-hanging sun, He was heading approximately northwest, or

directly away from the encampment. He was only a few hundred meters away; even at a crawl, he

could make the distance easily enough ... if he turned back.

He felt uneasy at the thought, and didn't know why. Then it struck him that his appearance was

not obviously that of a human being in distress; the chances were that he looked rather more like

a monster which had eaten and partially digested one or more people.

If he crawled into camp in his present condition, it was a certainty that he would be shot at

before any questions were asked, and only a minor possibility that narcotic gas would be used

instead of a machine rifle.

No, he decided, he was on the right course. The idea was to get away from camp so that he

wouldn't be found by the relief party which was probably searching for him now. Get away, bury

himself in the forest, and study his new body: find out how it worked and what he could do with

it, whether there actually were others in it with him, and if so, if there was any way of opening

communications with them.

It would take a long time, he thought, but he could do it, Limply, like a puddle of mush oozing

over the edge of a tablecloth, George started down into the gully.

The circumstances leading up to George's fall into the something _meisterii_ were, briefly, as

follows:

Until as late as the mid-twenty-first century, a game invented by the ancient Japanese was still

played by millions in the eastern hemisphere of Terra. The game was called _go_. Although its

rules were almost childishly simple, its strategy included more permutations and was more

difficult to master than that of chess.

_Go_ was played, at the height of its development--just before the geological catastrophe that

wiped out most of its devotees--on a board with nine hundred shallow holes, using small pill-

shaped counters. At each turn, one of the two players placed a counter on the board, wherever he

chose, the object being to capture as much territory as possible by surrounding it completely.

There were no other rules; and yet it had taken the Japanese almost a thousand years to work up

to that thirty-by-thirty board, adding perhaps one rank and file per century. A hundred years was

not too long to explore all the possibilities of that additional rank and file.

At the time George Meister fell into the gelatinous green-and-brown monster. toward the end of

the twenty third century A.D., a kind of _go_ was being played in a three-dimensional field which

contained more than ten billion positions. The galaxy was the board, the positions were star

systems, men were the counters. The loser's penalty was annihilation.

The galaxy was in the process of being colonized by two opposing federations, In the early

stages of this conflict, planets had been raided, bombs dropped, and a few battles had even been

fought by fleets of spaceships. Later that haphazard sort of warfare became impossible. Robot

fighters, carrying enough armament to blow each other into dust, were produced in trillions. In

the space around the outer stars of a cluster belonging to one side or the other, they swarmed

like minnows.

Within such a screen, planets were utterly safe from attack and from any interference with their

commerce ... unless the enemy succeeded in colonizing enough of the circumambient star systems to

set up and maintain a second screen outside the first. It was _go_, played for desperate stakes

and under impossible conditions.

Everyone was in a hurry; everyone's ancestors for seven generations had been in a hurry. You got

your education in a speeded-up, capsulized form. You mated early and bred frantically. And if you

were assigned to an advance ecological team, as George was, you had to work without any decent

preparation.

The sensible, the obvious thing to do in opening up a new planet with unknown life forms would

have been to begin with at least ten years of immunological study conducted from the inside of a

sealed station. After the worst bacteria and viruses had been licked, you might proceed to a

little cautious field work and exploration. Finally--total elapsed time fifty years, say--the

colonists would be shipped in.

There simply wasn't that much time.

Five hours after the landing, Meister's team had unloaded fabricators and set up barracks

enough to house its two thousand, six hundred and twenty-eight members. An hour after that,

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