And then I repented of the impulse which had momentarily made me despise her. How could such a beautiful, spoiled child be asked to have more strength and courage than I myself had shown? I couldn't deny her the hope that cried out in her words, the terrified plea that was expressed in every straining curve of her body. I couldn't refuse to help her. For this was not an alien. This was another helpless human being whose life had touched mine, and who was now, because of that briefly intimate contact, in a state of almost mindless panic.
Mindless. I remembered Mike Boyle and how viciously he had been used.
"Yes," I said flatly. "I'll help you. I'll come."
She began to babble in an hysteria of relief, the words tumbling meaninglessly over each other. Love. Darling. Help me. Anything you want. Alone. Come. Please. Anything, anything, anything. I didn't bother to listen. When she had run down I stared at the young, lovely, tear-stained face and felt an inexpressible pity.
"You don't have to worry," I said. "I'll be there."
I did not want to go. When I thought about what I would find on that isolated beach, I cringed inside. It was no good pretending the fear did not exist, but I pushed it into a corner and tried not to look at it.
And yet I had to consider some facts. How vulnerable were the aliens? What weapons would touch them? If the bodies in which they lived were destroyed, would the aliens perish? Or did they so infuse and inform their hosts that their apparently human forms became immune to the violence which would destroy an ordinary human body? From the conversation overheard in the Dugout I had acquired the vague idea that somehow the furious energy of the aliens sapped the very flesh of the hosts they inhabited. One of them had urged the other to maintain a tight, constant control over the body to keep it from—what had he said?—to keep it from disintegrating. To hold it together. What did that mean? Could a mind hold matter in a fixed state, retaining an exterior form, when there was no longer any intrinsic unity of the body? Mind over matter, mind ruling matter. The possibility was not so fantastic. It was even a subject of scientific inquiry on earth.
But what weapons might affect a body so controlled? Would a bullet smashing into that occupied brain destroy the alien's hold? I had no way of knowing. In any event I didn't have a gun. It would have to be some other weapon.
I made a hasty but thorough search of my trailer. I took a small knife with a retractable blade from a drawer in the kitchen. As I pulled open other drawers and rummaged through them, I kept wishing that I had had the sense to arm myself with some kind of pistol. My choice of weapons was pitifully limited. In the bottom drawer of a small cabinet built into the corridor, among a jumbled collection of tools and gadgets, I found a small pocket flame-thrower, one of those all-purpose gas-fired lighters that is adjustable for the small flame needed to light a cigarette or the steady blaze that will ignite charcoal for a fire or even a miniature jet of heat suitable to cut thin pieces of metal. I started to discard the gadget but some obscure tug of memory stopped me. Heat. Heat brought more than searing pain. It consumed. All living organisms were vulnerable to it. On those planets where the temperature was too high, scientists agreed, life could not exist.
I stuck the little flame-thrower in my pocket. At least some of the time I had spent in the library had not been wasted, I thought, though the gadget seemed ridiculously small and ineffectual as a potential weapon against super-human beings.