Read In Deep for Free Online Page B

limb.”
    “Good Lord,” said Gumbs. “Stupid of me not to think of that. But look here, Meister, does that mean we were simply wasting our time trying to kill one another? I mean to say—”
    “No. If you’d crushed my brain, I think the organism would have digested it, and that would be the end of me. But short of anything that drastic, I believe we’re immortal.”
    “Immortal,” said Gumbs. “Good Lord… That does rather put another face on it, doesn’t it?”
    The bank was becoming a little lower, and at one point, where the raw earth was thickly seeded with boulders, there was a talus slope that looked as if it could be climbed. George started up it.
    “Meister,” said Gumbs after a moment.
    “What do you want?”
    “You’re right, you know-I’m getting some feeling back already… Look here, Meister, is there anything this beast can’t do? I mean, for instance, do you suppose we could put ourselves back together the way we were, with all the appendages, and so on?”
    “It’s possible,” George said curtly. It was a thought that had been in the back of his mind, but he didn’t feel like discussing it with Gumbs just now.
    They were halfway up the slope.
    “Well, in that case—” said Gumbs meditatively. “The thing has military possibilities, you know. Man who brought a thing like that direct to the War Department could write his own ticket, more or less.”
    “After we split up,” George said, “you can do whatever you please.”
    “But, dammit,” said Gumbs in an irritated tone, “that won’t do.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because,” said Gumbs, “they might find you.” His hands reached up abruptly, grasped a small boulder, and before George could stop him, pried it sidewise out of its socket in the earth.”
    The larger boulder above it trembled, dipped and leaned ponderously outward. George, directly underneath, found that he could move neither forward nor back.
    “Sorry again,” he heard Gumbs saying, with what sounded like genuine regret. “But you know the Loyalty Committee. I simply can’t take the chance.”
    The boulder seemed to take forever to fall. George tried twice more, with all his strength, to move out of its path. Then, instinctively, he put his arms straight under it.
    At the last possible instant he moved them to the left, away from the center of the toppling gray mass.
    It struck.
    George felt his arms breaking like twigs, and saw a looming grayness that blotted out the sky; he felt a sledge-hammer impact that made the earth shudder beneath him.
    He heard a splattering sound.
    And he was still alive. That astonishing fact kept him fully occupied for a long time after the boulder had clattered its way down the slope into silence. Then, finally, he looked down to his right.
    The resistance of his stiffened arms, even while they broke, had been barely enough to lever the falling body over, a distance of some thirty centimeters… The right half of the monster was a flattened shattered ruin. He could see a few flecks of pasty gray matter, melting now into green-brown translucence as the mass flowed slowly together again.
    In twenty minutes the last remains of a superfluous spinal cord had been reabsorbed, the monster had collected itself back into its normal lens shape, and George’s pain was diminishing. In five minutes more his mended arms were strong enough to use. They were also more convincingly shaped and colored than before—the tendons, the fingernails, even the wrinkles of the skin were in good order. In ordinary circumstances this discovery would have left George happily bemused for hours; now, in his impatience, he barely noticed it. He climbed to the top of the bank.
    Thirty meters away a humped green-brown body like his own lay motionless in the dry grass.
    It contained, of course, only one brain. Whose?
    McCarty’s, almost certainly; Vivian hadn’t had a chance.
    But then how did it happen that there was no visible trace of McCarty’s