You've heard the jokes about coat-hangers
and paper clips breeding -- but where certain books are concerned,
the joke may be on us.
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Avon Camelot • 1999
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I'm not easily scared by stories, but even though I wrote this
one myself, it worries me. I mean, how else do you explain why
there are so many copies of certain series books in used bookstores?
Read an Excerpt....
Scientists back home claim our ancestors
learned how to contact-shift way back when we were hunter-predators.
We don’t use the ability much anymore, though, and
it’s degenerated over the last thousand years.
Now we need amplifying gear to force a change on
anything much bigger or more complicated than a loaf of bread.
There was an amplifier in our spaceship, but the
ship had burned up in Earth’s atmosphere.
So the fact that a half-dozen shift-victims were
sitting on a bookshelf in front of me meant two things: Arel had
survived, and he’d brought the amplifier down in his lifepod.
The question was why, and as I studied the “books”
as carefully as I could without touching them, I tried to work out
an explanation.
As I did so, I discovered that the situation was even
stranger than I’d imagined.
The energy-auras of the shapechanged books were
dimmer than mine or Arel’s.
But they were also somehow more intense.
There was too much dormant energy trapped in those
“books”, and without proper equipment, it was hard to tell what it
was doing there. One worrisome possibility did occur to me, and I could
think of only one way to test it.
So I slipped quietly out of the kids’ aisle and back
to the stock room, going into hunter-predator mode myself.
Despite three lives as a cat, I’ve never been much of a
mouser, and it took me most of two hours to find a mouse and catch
it.
The last half hour was the hardest, because I didn’t want to kill
the mouse, and I had to work out how to stun it so I could pick it
up and carry it back to the kids’ section.
Eventually, though, I trotted into the proper aisle,
mouse in mouth, and walked up to the shelf with the shapechanged
books in it. Fortunately, it was a bottom shelf, so I could reach it
without having to stretch.
I shook my head back and forth a couple of times,
batting the mouse’s nose with a paw to make sure it was still alive.
Then, with a mighty toss, I opened my mouth and
threw the mouse at my target.
Considering that it was nearly impossible to aim, I didn’t do
badly. The mouse struck the row of books at the right edge of the
cluster of chameleon-victims,
and had just enough time to squeak angrily at me before it was
caught by exactly the effect I’d suspected.
There was a faint flash of “light”--again, something
I could see but no human could detect--and by the time the mouse hit
the floor, it wasn’t a mouse anymore.
Instead, it was an exact duplicate of the sixth
changed “book” in the row, right down to the grape juice stain at
the bottom of the spine.
We can’t do that kind of relayed shapeshifting by
ourselves, but you can program an amplifier for it.
And if the target object (or mouse, or person) isn’t
a chameleon, it’s
stuck in whatever form it’s been turned into.