Ward yelled, “Red! I understand now! Don’t open it!”
Red’s face was a mask of hate and conflicting emotions in the yellow glow. The make-up was almost all gone, giving his face a ragged, weird aspect.
“Right, Doc,” he said. “A radical male. A revolting male. We get them every once in a while here. There are many kinds of mutation. They use them for experimentation in the laboratories. You should see the laboratories here, Doc, with bugs secreting chemicals and living bodies as test tubes. I was one of their recent experiments with humanoid duplication. They thought they had disposed of me, but I eluded them. I’m a slippery individual, you know. I found out about your work and knew you were right, and I decided to help you. Only I could have helped you, Doc. Thanks, Doc, for the adventure. You’ll never know what it means to feel the grandeur of the stars—you’ve never been a myopic bug.”
The gray pulpy mass in the bowl was shivering now, pulsing in great heavings like a heart, dying. And then a dull growing swishing was audible from all sides like a slowly rising wind.
Ward saw the polyglot of insect horror that was edging in through the various tunnels and corridors. Great, jumping spiders with hairy legs and many coal-black glittering eyes and poison fangs dripping below. Winged Hippiscus with huge jaws working hungrily. Sharp-jawed Paratenodera, and shining-winged Cementarium. And countless others, though ant and termite forms dominated, with a grotesque intermingling of anthropomorphic shapes that had assumed almost every possible degree of distortion of human development.
And in the center of the ring stood Red with the cage unfastened. Ward’s mouth was cotton. His heart pounded madly. His face exuded streams of sweat. Red, a Mo-Sanshon, a rebel, a mutant. No wonder he had talked of how he longed for freedom. How he had hated female culture, the Mo-Sanshon! The synthesization and study had brought about a high degree of anthroponomy, although his acquired knowledge of human culture had been of the past rather than the present. His revolt had been one of extremes. He came from a social system whose complete submergence in the colony struck his individualism with horror, and he had reacted to the opposite extreme—a worship of anarchy.
“No, Red!” Ward was screaming wildly, irrationally. “Don’t open it! If you do—” But then the ring of monsters would anyway.