Woman from another planet

by Frank Belknap Long

Its attitude was just as terrifying, the body poised as if for attack, a rapier sharpness in the writhing mandibles, a wire-tight tension in the rhythmically vibrating thorax, the slender abdomen, and the long, hairy legs which terminated in rust-colored, cuplike disks.

Loring's thoughts went into a mind-chilling whirl. The human mind does not associate ferocity with an ordinary fly. A house fly, a fruit fly, even a blue-bottle fly hovering over carrion and evoking no more than a slight, momentary shiver of disgust. But wasps and hornets are flylike in aspect and they are equally graceful in flight. Winged insects of great beauty, delicately constructed and the opposite of revolting. Yet wasps and hornets can inflict stings that can paralyze and kill.

A long blue hornet in a drowsy woodland glade can be a flying torpedo, a death-dealing precision instrument, as billions of fat, sluggish caterpillars have discovered over a very long period of geologic time. And if a hornet could become large enough....

A gigantic hornet might well find a man more to its liking on an alien world, a far more delectable feast for its larvae when paralyzed with care and stored in a clay-constructed hive. Or a metal-constructed hive.

The solitary wasps. The mud builders. Every schoolboy was familiar with them, every young naturalist exploring the countryside near his home, the autumn leaves turning red and yellow, the tang of woodsmoke in the air. The small, gray, skillfully cemented-over openings to their nests deep underground where unspeakable acts of insect vampirism took place. The paralyzed caterpillar shrinking, turning sere, losing its substance but remaining tormentingly alive while the gnawing, insatiable grubs waxed fat and strong. Dying in the end, its substance liquefying.... And a human caterpillar?

Despite his terror Loring knew that he was letting his imagination get out of control. He was taking too much for granted, letting his thoughts lead him into a dark abyss which probably had no basis in reality. The hideous thought had leapt unbidden into his mind and he had elaborated upon it, filling in the total blankness of the unknown with images so ghastly that they glowed blood-red. It was exactly what an expressionistic artist might have been forced to do if his morbidity became a genius-inspired flame and he could no longer restrain an impulse to torture himself to win immortality for what could be, at best, a purely symbolical vision of madness completely remote from reality.

Again he was merely a very frightened man with no particular liking for morbidity who had been trapped in total darkness on an alien planet and had everything to lose by abandoning himself to wild conjecture when only clear, logical, determined thinking could save him.

If he had thought at all of wasps and hornets, if he had instantly seized upon such a comparison—there had to be a reason behind such a forceful, almost irresistible distortion of thought.

He was almost sure that it was a distortion. The mere appearance of a flylike creature close to him in the darkness, huge and malignant as it appeared to be, would not ordinarily have started such a train of thought in his mind and opened up vistas so specifically ghastly.

In all probability his thoughts had been deliberately guided. The paralyzed caterpillar-feasting grub comparison had been firmly implanted in his mind by a skillful mental manipulation of his imagination.