Infiltration by Algis Budrys

_If werewolves exist, they don't necessarily / conform to all the superstitions people have. / They may even know fear._

Sunset. _They're coming for me, tonight_, he knew as he woke.

Sunset. Not really -- if he were to get dressed now, and go out on the street, the red globe would still be hanging over the cliffs of New Jersey. But the shadow of the building next door had fallen over his apartment windows, and he sleepily pushed a cigarette between his numb lips and swung his feet over the side of the bed, fumbling with a match as he walked over to the small radio on the windowsill and turned it on. There was a double-header between the Giants and Cincinnati -- the first game was probably in its last inning.

Sunset -- odd, how the conditioning worked. Was it conditioning? Or were the old wives' tales not so absurd, after all? But he _could_ go out in the sunlight -- had done it many times. His tan proved it. He touched silver and cold iron countless times each day, crossed running water -- and he'd gone to church every Sunday, until he was twelve. No, there _was_ a core of truth under the fantastically complex shell of nonsense, but the old limitations were not part of it. He shrugged. Neither were most of the powers.

Still, he liked to sleep in the daytime. His schedule seemed to gain an hour at night, lose one in the morning, until, almost unnoticeably, it had slipped around the clock.

He went into the bathroom while the worn tubes in the radio warmed up slowly, and washed his face, brushed his teeth, shaved. He combed his hair, then paused thoughtfully. Wouldn't do any harm. _No full moon in here, either_, he thought, looking up at the circular fluorescent tube in the ceiling, but he noticed no impediment as he coalesced, dropped to all fours, and ran his pelt against the curry-combs he had screwed to the bathroom door. He did a thorough job, enjoying it, and, after he had realigned, walked out of the bathroom in time to hear the Giants making their final, fruitless out of the first game. Five-Zero, Cincinnati, and he grimaced in disgust. Four shut-outs in the last five games.

He laughed at himself, then, for actually being annoyed. Still and all, it wasn't the first time a man became emotionally involved in a mirage.

Was it a mirage? True, there weren't really any such things as the San Francisco Giants -- but a man could certainly be expected to forget that, occasionally, if he were part of the same illusion at least half the time. And certainly, such stuff as dreams are made of is solid enough when you are yourself a dream.

He went out in the kitchen and started coffee, then came back and sat down next to the radio, hardly listening to the recap of the game.

Odd, how it had all started. Being suddenly marooned on this planet, forced to survive, somehow, through the long years while waiting for rescue. How many years had it been, now? Some five hundred thousand, in the subjective reference for this particular universe. He knew the formula for conversion into objective time -- it all worked out to the equivalent of about six months -- but that wasn't what mattered, as long as they'd all had to survive in _this_ universe.

Sleep -- suspended animation, if you wanted to call it that -- had been the only answer. And they couldn't do _that_, directly. They'd had to resort to chrysalids.

He smiled to himself, got up, and turned down the fire under the pot until the coffee was percolating softly.

The original plan had snowballed, somewhat.

Resolving chrysalids was one thing -- making them eternal was another, and unnecessary. It was far simpler to arrange the chrysalids so they'd be able to reproduce themselves. And, of course, in order to survive, and take care of itself, a chrysalis had to have some independent intelligence.

And, so it worked. The chrysalis housed a sleeper, operating unawares and completely independent of him -- or her -- until the chrysalis wore out. Then the sleeper was passed on to a new chrysalis, with neither of the chrysalids involved -- nor, for that matter, the sleeper -- conscious of the transfer. So it would continue, through the weary, subjective years; generation upon generation of chrysalids, until, finally, the paramathematical path drifted back to touch this universe, and the sleepers could wake, and continue their journey.

And if the human race chose to speculate on its origins in the meantime, well, that was part of the snowball.

He got up again, and turned off the flame under the coffeepot. _Now, if I were a sorcerer -- as defined by Cotton Mather's ilk, of course -- _, he thought, _I should be able to (a) turn the fire off without getting up, or, (b) generate the flame without the use of Con Edison's gas, or, (c), if I had any self-respect at all, conjure hot coffee out of thin air._ His lips twisted with nausea as he thought that nine out of ten people would expect him to be drinking blood, as a matter of course.

He sighed with some bitterness, but more of resignation. Well, that was just another part of the snowball.

Because the chrysalids had done a magnificent job in all three of its subdivisions. They had kept the sleepers safe -- and reproduced, and used their intelligence to survive. They had survived in spite of pestilence, famine, and flood -- by learning enough to wipe out the first two, and control the third. It would seem that progress was not a special quality to be specially desired. Most of the chrysalids were consumed by a fierce longing for the Good Old Days, as a matter of fact. It was merely the inescapable accretion to sheer survival.

And so came civilization. With civilization: recreation. In short, the San Francisco Giants, and -- He reached over, suddenly irritated at the raspy-voiced and slightly frantic recapitulation of the lost ballgame, and changed the station. And Beethoven.