The Vibration Wasps
Copyright© 2024 by Frank Belknap Long
Chapter 4: Eddington’s Oscillations
Horror and sick revulsion came into me as I stared down at the great wasps, with their many-faceted eyes seeming to probe the Jovian mists through a solid metal bulkhead!
They thought we were Jovian caterpillars! Evidently there were flabby, white larva-shapes out in the mist as large as men—with the habit perhaps of rearing upright on stumpy legs like terrestrial measuring worms. We looked enough like Jovian caterpillars to deceive those Jovian wasps.
They had apparently seen us through the walls of the ship, and their egg-laying instincts had gone awry. They had plunged ovipositors into our flesh, spun webs about us and hung us up to dry out while their loathsome progeny feasted on our flesh.
The whitish substance exuding from the mouth-parts of one of the photographed wasps had evidently been mucilaginous web material.
There was no other possible explanation. And suddenly as I lay there with thudding temples something occurred which increased my horror ten-fold.
Zigzagging, luminous lines appeared on the ribbed metal wall opposite the quartz port and a wasp materialized amidst spectral bands of radiance which wavered and shimmered like heat waves in bright sunlight.
A coldness itched across my scalp. Dangling from the wasp’s right fore-leg was the web-enmeshed form of the fuel unit control pilot. Young Darnel’s hair was tousled, and his metacloth pilot tunic had been partly torn away, leaving his ribs exposed.
I had never seen anything quite so horrible. Embedded in Darnel’s flesh was a huge, faintly luminous grub, its rudimentary mouth-parts obscurely visible beneath the drum-tight skin over his breastbone.
His hands closed and unclosed as I stared down at him. His forehead was drenched with sweat and he writhed as though in unbearable anguish, a hectic flush suffusing his cheeks.
My throat felt hot and swollen but I managed to whisper: “Darnel. Darnel, my lad.”
Slowly his eyelids flickered open and he stared up at me, a grimace of agony convulsing his haggard features.
“Nothing seems quite real, sir,” he groaned. “Except—the pain.”
“Is it very bad?”
“I’m in agony, sir. I can’t stand it much longer. It’s as though a heated iron were resting on my chest.”
“Where did that wasp take you?”
“Into the chart room, sir. When I struggled in the web it carried me into the chart room and stung me again.”
I swallowed hard. “Did you experience any pain before that, lad?”
“I felt a stab the first time it plunged its stinger into me, but when I came to in the web there was no pain. The pain started in the chart room.”
I was thinking furiously. Stinger—ovipositor. A few species of stinging terrestrial insects possessed organs which combined the functions of both. Evidently the wasps had simply stung us at first—to paralyze us. Now they were completing the gruesome process of providing a feast for their avaricious progeny. One of the wasps had taken Darnel from the web, and deposited a fertile, luminous egg in his flesh.
It was becoming hideously clear now. The wasp’s retreat into the chart room had been motivated by a desire to complete its loathsome task in grim seclusion. It had withdrawn a short distance for the sake of privacy, passing completely through the wall out of sight.
My stomach felt tight and hollow when I contemplated the grub, which had apparently hatched out almost instantly. It seemed probable that Darnel’s anguish was caused by the grub’s luminosity searing his flesh, as its mouth-parts were still immobile.
“Darnel,” I whispered. “The paralysis wore off. They couldn’t sting us into permanent insensibility. The pain may go too.”
He looked at me, his eyes filming. “I don’t understand, sir. Paralysis?”
I had forgotten that Darnel wasn’t even aware of what we were up against. He couldn’t see the grub. He didn’t know that we were—caterpillars.
He was in torment, and I was powerless to help him. I was glad he didn’t know, despite my certain knowledge that I was about to share his fate. I whispered hoarsely: “Can you see Joan, lad. Is she—”
“She’s lying in the web next to you, sir. Dawson and Stillmen have been out.”
“Taken out.”
“There are two empty webs, sir. Oh, God, the pain—I can’t stand it.”
The great wasp was moving now. It was moving slowly across the chamber toward the quartz port, between its motionless companions. Its wings were vibrating and it was raising Darnel up as though it were about to hurl him out through the inches-thick quartz into the mist.
Suddenly as I stared the utter strangeness of something that had already occurred smote me with the force of a physical blow. The wasp had carried Darnel right through the wall—from the pilot chamber to the chart room, and back again.
Apparently the great wasps could make us tenuous too! Close and prolonged contact with the energies pouring from them had made Darnel’s body as permeable as gamma light. Horribly it was borne in on me that Darnel’s anguish was caused by a pervasive glow which enveloped him from head to foot. It was fainter than the radiance which poured from the wasps and was almost invisible in the fluorescent cube-light, but I could see it now.
The wasp didn’t hurl Darnel out. It simply vanished with him through the quartz port, its wings dwindling to a luminous blur which hovered for an instant before the inches-thick crystal before it dwindled into nothingness.
The same instant a voice beside me moaned. “Richard, I can’t move.”
“Joan,” I gasped. “Oh, my dearest—”