Mimic by Donald A Wollheim.txt

7/22/2019 Mimic by Donald A Wollheim.txt

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Mimic by Donald A Wollheim

IT IS less than five hundred years sincean entire half of the world was discovered.It is less than two hundredyears since the discovery of the last continent.The sciences of chemistry andphysics go back scarce one century. Thescience of aviation goes baclc forty years.The science of atomics is being born.And yet we think we know a lot.We know little or nothing. Some of the,most startling things are unknown to us.When they are discovered they may shockus to the bone.We search for secrets In the far Islandsof the Pacific and among the ice fields ofthe frozen North while under our verynoses, rubbing shoulders with us everyday, there may walk the undiscovered.ItIs a curious fact of nature that that whichis In plain view Is oft best hidden.1 have always known of the man in the

black cloak. Since I was a child he hasalways lived on my street, and his eccentricitiesare so familiar that they go unmentionedexcept among casual visitors.Here, in the heart of the largest city inthe world, in swarming New York, theeccentric and the odd may flourish unhindered.As children we had hilarious fun jeeringat the man in black when he displayedhis fear of women. We watched, in ourevil, childish way, for those moments; wetried to get him to show anger. But heignored us completely, and soon we paid

him no further heed, even as our parentsdid.We saw him only twice a day. Once inthe early morning, when we would see hissix-foot figure come out of the grimy darkhallway of the tenement at the end ofthe street and stride down towards theelevated to workagain when he cameback at night. He was always dressedin a long black cloak that came to hisankles, and he wore a wide-brimmed blackhat down far over his face. He was asight from some weird story out of the old

lands. But he harmed nobody, and paidattention to nobody. .Nobodyexcept perhaps women.When a woman crossed his path, hewould stop in his stride and come to a deadhalt. We could see that he closed his eyesuntil she had passed. Then he would snapthose wide watery blue eyes open andmarch on as if nothing had happened.He was never known to speak ,to a woman.



He would buy some groceries maybeonce a week, at Antonio'sbut only whenthere were no other patrons there. Antoniosaid once that he never talked, he justpointed at things he wanted and paid forthem in bills that he pulled out of a pocketsomewhere under his cloak. Antonio didnot like him, but he never had any troublewith him either.Now that I think of it, nobody ever didhave any trouble with him.We got used to him. We grew up on thestreet; we saw him occasionally when hecame home and went back into the darkhallway of the house he lived in.One of the kids on the block lived inthat house too. A lot of families did. Antoniosaid they knew nothing much abouthim either, though there were one or twofunny stories.He, never had visitors, he never spoke toanyone. And he had once built somethingin his room out of metal.He had then, years ago, hauled up some

long flat metal sheets, sheets of tin oriron, and they had heard a lot of hammeringand banging in his room for severaldays. But that had stopped and that wasall there was to that story.Where he worked I don't know and neverfound out. He had money, for he wasreputed to pay his rent regularly whenthe janitor asked for it.Well, people like that inhabit big citiesand nobody knows the story of their livesuntil they're all over. Or until somethingstrange happens.

I grew up, I went to college, I studied.Finally I got a job assisting a museumcurator. I spent my days mounting beetlesand classifying exhibits of stuffed animalsand preserved plants, and hundreds andhundreds of insects from all over.Nature is a strange thing, I learned. Youlearn that very clearly when you work ina museum. You realize how nature usesthe art of camouflage. There are twig insectsthat look exactly like a leaf or abranch of a tree. Exactly. Even to havingphony vein markings that look just like the

real leaf's. You can't tell them apart, unlessyou look very carefully.Nature is strange and perfect that way.There is a moth in, Central America thatlooks like a wasp. It even has a fakestinger made of hair, which it twists andcurls just like a wasp's stinger. It has thesame colorings and, even though its bodyis soft and not armored like a wasp's. Itis colored to appear shiny and armored.



It even flies in the daytime when waspsdo, and not at riight like, all the othermoths. It moves like a wasp. It knowssomehow that it is helpless and that it cansurvive only by pretending to be as deadlyto other insects as wasps are.I learned about army ants, and theirstrange iinitators.Army ants travel in huge colums ofthousands and hundreds of thousands.They move along in a flowing stream severalyards across and they eat everythingin their path. Everything in the jungle isafraid of them. Wasps, bees, snakes, otherants, birds, lizards, beetleseven men runaway, or get eaten.But in the midst of the army ants therealso travel many other creaturescreaturesthat aren't ants at all, and that thearmy ants would kill if they Icnew of them.But they don't know of them becausethese other creatures are disguised. Someof them are beetles that look like ants. Theyhave false markings like ant-thoraxes and

they run along in imitation of ant speed.There is even one that is so long it ismarked like three ants in single file. Itmoves so fast that the real ants never giveit a second glance.There are weak caterpillars that looklike big armored beetles. There are allsorts of things that look like dangerousanimals. Animals that are the killers andsuperior fighters of their groups have noenemies. The army ants and the wasps,the sharks, the hawk and the feliries. Sothere are a host of weak things that try

to hide among themto mimic them.And man is the greatest killer, the greatesthunter of them all. The whole worldof nature knows man for the irresistiblemaster. The roar of his gun, the cunningof his trap, the strength and agility of hisarm place all else beneath him.i" WAS, as often happens to be the case,sheer luck that I happened to be on thestreet at that dawning hour when thejanitor came running out of the tenementon my street shouting for help. I had beenworking all night mounting new exhibits.

The policeman on the beat and I werethe only people besides the janitor to seethe things that we found in the two dingyrooms occupied by the, stranger of theblack cloak.The janitor explainedas the officer andI dashed up the narrow rickety stairsthat he-had been awakened by the soundof heavy thuds and shrill screams in thestranger's rooms. He had gone out in the



hallway to listen.Severe groaning as of someone in terriblepainthe noise of someone thrashingaround in agony^was coming from behindthe closed door of the stranger's apartment.The janitor had listened, then runfor help.When we got there the place was silent.A faint light shone from under the doorway.The policeman knocked; there wasnqanswer. He put his ear to the door andso did, I.We heard a' faint rustlinga continuousslow rustling as of a breeze blowing paper.The cop knocked again but there was stillno response.Then,-together, we threw our weight atthe door. Two hard blows and the rottenold lock gave way. We burst in.The room was filthy, the floor coveredwith scraps of torn paper, bits of detritusand garbage.. The room was unfurnished,which i thought was odd.In one corner there stood a metal box,

about four feet square. A tight box, heldtogether with screws and ropes. It had alid, opening at the top, which was downand fastened with a sort of wax seal.The stranger of the black cloak lay inthe middle of the floordead.He was still wearing the cloak. The bigslouch' hat was lying on the floor somedistance away. From the inside of thebox the faint rustling was coming.We turned over the stranger, took thecloak off.' For several instants we sawnothing amiss

At first we saw a man, dressed in a somber,featureless black suit. He had a coatand skin-tight pants.His hair was short and curly brown. Itstood straight up in its inch-long length.His eyes were open and staring. I noticedfirst that he had no eyebrows, only a curiousdal'k line in the flesh over each eye.It was then that I realized that he had"no nose. But no one had ever noticed that,before. His skin was oddly mottled. Wherethe nose should have been there were darkshadowings that made the appearance of

a nose, if you only just glanced at him.Lilte the, work of a skillful artist. in apainting.His mouth was as it should be, aindslightly openbut he had no teeth. Hishead perched upon a thin neck.The suit wasnot a suit. It was part ofhim. It was his body.What we thought was a coat was a hugeblack wing sheath, like a beetle has. He



had a. thorax like an insect, only the wingsheath covered it and you couldn't noticeIt when. he wore the cloak. The body'bulged out below, tapering off into the twolong, thin hind legs. His arms came outfrom under the top of the ''coat." He hada tiny secondary pair of arms folded tightly 'across his^chest. There was a sharp roundhole newly pierced in his chest just abovethese.arms still oozing a watery liquid.The janitor fled gibbering. The officerwas pale but standing by his duty. I heardhim muttering under his breath an endlessstream of Hail Marys.Tile lower thoraxthe "abdomen"wasvery long arid insectlike. It was crumpledup now like the wreck of an airplanefuselage:I recalled the appearance of a femalewasp that had just laid, eggs-r-her thoraxhad had that empty appearance.The sight was a shock such "as leavesone in full control. The mind rejects it,and it is only in afterthought that one can

feel the dim shuiJder of horror.'The rustling was still coming from thebox. I onotioned the white-faced cop andwe went over and stood before it. He tookhis nightstick and knocked a\^y thewaxen seal.-Then we heaved and pulled the lid open.A wave of noxious vapor assailed us.We staggered back as suddenly a stream offlying things shot out of the huge ironcontainer. The window was open, andstraight out into the first glow of dawnthey flew. - '

There must have been dozens of them.They were about two or three inches longand they flew on'wide gauzy beetle wings.They, looked like little men, strangely terrifyingas they flew^-clad in their blacksuits, with expressionless faces and theirdots of watery blue eyes. Arid they,flew outori transparent wings that came fromunder their black beetle coats..I ran to the window, fascinated, almosthypnotized. The horror of it had notreached my mind at once. Afterwards I/.

have had spasins of numbing terror as mymind tries to put the things together. Thewhole business was so utterly unexpected.We knew of army ants and their imitators,yet it,never occurred to us that wetoo were army ants of a sort: We knew ofstick insectsand it never-occurred to usthat there might, be others that disguisethemselves to fool, not other animals, butthe supreme animal himselfman.



We found some bones in the bottom ofthat iron case afterwards. But we couldn'tideritify them.Perhaps we did not try hard.- They niighthave been humanI suppose the stranger of the: blackcloak did not fear women so much as itdistrusted .them. Women notice men, perhaps,more closely then other men do.Women might become suspicious soonerof the inhumanity, the deception. Andthen there might perhaps have been sometouch of instinctive feminine jealousy. Thestranger was disguised as a man, but itssex was surely female. The things in theiron box were its young..)UT it is the other thing I saw when II ran to the 'window that- has shakenme most. The policeman did not see It.Nobody else isaw it but me, and I only foran instant. ... Nature practises deceptions in everyangle. Evolution will create a being for .any niche, no matter how unlikely.

When I went to the window, I saw thesmall cloud of flying things rising up' intothe sky and.sailing away into the purpledistance. The dawn was breaking and thefirst rays of the sun were just strikingover the housetops. .Shaken, I looked away from that fourthfloor tenement room over the roofs of thelower buildings. Chimneys and walls andempty clotheslines made the scenery overwhich the tiny mass of horror passed.. And then I saw a chimney, not thirtyfeet away on the next roof. It was squat

arid red brick and had two black pipe endsflush with its top. I saw it suddenly vibrate,oddly. And its red brick surfaceseem to peel away, and the black pipeopenings turn suddenly white.I saw two big eyes staring up into the sky.A great, flat-v/inged thing detached itselfsilently from the surface of the realchimney and darted hungrily after thecloud of flying things.I watched until all had lost themselvesin the sky.

Mimic by Donald A Wollheim.txt

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