The first thing it did was rush toward the scarlet surface of the boiling sulphur pit near the cub. The muscles relaxed and showed no sign of relaxing in that flame-bound gallop, and Jerry grabbed at its mind and got back in control just as its forefeet stood on the brink of that blue-flaming red pool.
"Oh, damn!" he groaned, agonized by both his fear of fire and the growing discomfort within his stomach. "Of all the creatures in the universe, I have to hit one with the lemming-instinct. This damn thing's bent on boiling itself alive if I let go. And if I stay in control, I die of ptomaine!"
Jerry Norcriss wasted nearly thirty seconds feeling sorry for himself. And then he remembered something about lemmings. And also something about cubs.
Lemmings, those strange little rodents that take it periodically in their heads to all go rushing into the ocean and drown, are not suicide-bent. Their ancestry is older than the continent on which they live. At one time the spot wherein they plunge into the ocean was linked with the next continent over. The migration—for that's what it is with lemmings—had at one time been perfectly safe. So safe that the migration of the lemmings became instinctive. And, after the continents separated, or the band of land joining them sank beneath the sea, the lemmings blithely continued their trek, and perished. Lemmings might die, but the ages-old instinct of the specie wouldn't.
No animal, Jerry realized, is deliberately self-destructive. No animal but man—who is more than animal, and can decide upon his own destiny despite what his instincts buck for.
And cubs, Jerry recalled with chagrin, are not always born knowing survival-tactics. Some cubs have to be taught how to survive. And this one is still in the process of learning, and only senses that—since it is becoming deathly ill—something is horribly wrong. It wants its sire to show it survival, and its sire is in the hands of a nincompoop like me....
Fortunately for Jerry and the cub, his thoughts on cubs and lemmings lasted only a fractional second, so all-inclusive is the mind's apprehension of a situation.
And then Jerry, feeling greatly relieved, let go of the controls once more and let the lion-thing bend and drink from the blazing sulphur-pool at its feet.
Of what the host was constructed, Jerry had no idea. Its cell-structure might be high in silicates, or possibly be akin to asbestos. Whatever it was, the blazing red sulphur went down its gullet like sweet warm wine, and the decaying squirrel-thing was transformed into chemicals that were comfortably digestible.