Strange Highways

feelers explored his face with a spider-soft touch, and he shuddered in revulsion. Then the stalk moved away from his face, curved toward his chest, and with horror he felt it growing with amazing rapidity through his clothes, through his skin, through his breastbone, and into his body cavity. He felt the nine tendrils spreading through him, and then he fainted before he could go insane.

    4

ON THIS WORLD, ITS NAME WAS SEED. AT LEAST THAT WAS WHAT IT SAW in the mind of its first host. It was not actually a plant - nor an animal, in fact - but it accepted the name that Teel Pleever gave it.
     Seed extruded itself entirely from the pod in which it had waited for hundreds of years and inserted all of its mass into the body of the host. Then it closed up the bloodless wounds by which it had entered Pleever.
     It required ten minutes of exploration to learn more about human physiology than humans knew. For one thing, humans apparently didn't understand that they had the ability to heal themselves and to daily repair the effects of aging. They lived short lives, oddly unaware of their potential for immortality. Something had happened during the species' evolution to create a mind-body barrier that prevented them from consciously controlling their own physical being.
     Strange.
     Sitting on the rock between the pine trees, in the body of Teel Pleever, Seed took an additional eighteen minutes to acquire a full understanding of the depth, breadth, and workings of the human mind. It was one of the most interesting minds that Seed had encountered anywhere in the universe: complex, powerful - distinctly psychotic.
     This was going to be an interesting incarnation.
     Seed rose from the rock, picked up the rifle that belonged to its host, and headed down the forested hills toward the place where Teel Pleever had parked the jeep wagon. Seed had no interest in deer poaching.

    5

JACK CASWELL SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE, WATCHING HIS WIFE AS SHE got ready for school that Monday morning, and he knew beyond a doubt that he was the luckiest man in the world. Laura was so lovely, slender, long limbed, and shapely that Jack sometimes felt as if he were dreaming his life rather than actually living it, for surely in the real world he would not have merited a woman like Laura.
     She took her brown-plaid scarf from one of the hooks by the back door and wrapped it around her neck, crossing the fringed ends over her breasts. Peering through the half-steamed window in the door, she read the outside temperature on the big thermometer mounted on the porch. "Thirty-eight degrees, and it's only the end of October."
     Her thick, soft, shiny, chestnut-brown hair framed a perfectly proportioned face reminiscent of the old movie star Veronica Lake. She had enormous, expressive eyes so dark brown that they were almost black; they were the clearest, most direct eyes that Jack had ever seen. He doubted that anyone could look into those eyes and lie - or fail to love the woman behind them.
     Removing her old brown cloth coat from another hook, slipping into it, closing the buttons, she said, "We'll have snow well before Thanksgiving this year, I'll bet, and the whitest Christmas in ages, and we'll be snowbound by January."
     "Wouldn't mind being snowbound with you for maybe six or eight months," he said. "Just the two of us, snow up to the roof, so we'd have to stay in bed, under the covers, sharing body heat to survive."
     Grinning, she came to him, bent, and kissed him on the cheek. "Jackson," she said, using her pet name for him, "the way you turn me on, we'd generate so darn much body heat that it wouldn't matter if the snow was a mile higher than the roof. Regardless of how cold it was outside, it'd be sweltering in here, temperature and humidity over a hundred degrees, jungle plants growing out of the floorboards, vines crawling up the walls, tropical molds in all the corners."
     She went into the living room to get the briefcase that was on the desk at which she planned her school lessons.
     Jack got up from the table. A little stiffer than usual this morning but still in good enough shape to shuffle around without his cane, he gathered up the dirty breakfast dishes. He was still thinking about what a lucky man he was.
     She could have had any guy she wanted, yet she had chosen a husband with no better than average looks and with two bum