Chapter 5

We showed up before anything interesting happened. The ogres looked into the darkness, trying to see if we were around, I supposed. Of course, by standing in the light and looking into the dark, we were completely invisible as long as we were still. Movement might have given us away, but we were smart enough not to do that.

After a few minutes, one of the ogres gave an order, and the workers began to move to different places in the work area. Naturally, before long, one of them tripped a booby trap. The explosion tore a pile of sheet metal into shards that flew in all directions. Potter had done an excellent job of placing his charge.

Several of the ogres were shredded by flying metal, and others were injured to various degrees. It was hard for us to tell just how much damage we had done because the lights suddenly went out, and there was a chaotic scramble to get back into the ship. At that point, one of my charges was somehow set off and a chunk was blown out of the "wing." We couldn't tell if any of the aliens were injured by that blast, but it sure made a mess of that section of the spaceship.

In only a few seconds, every one of the aliens was back in the spaceship, and everything was quiet in the work area. We hung around for about an hour, but there was no further sign of the aliens, so we decided to call it a night.

We made it back to our base with no trouble. We saw several of the large native animals, but none tried to bother us. By now, we could see so well in the very dim light of the stars that we never even stumbled as we walked over the rough ground to our home.

That night, as we were lying in our bunk, Sue rubbed her hand over my chest. "Dammit, Andy, it feels like you are starting to grow a heavy coat of fur over your chest."

At first, I thought that she was joking, but I rubbed my hand gently over my chest and damned if it did not feel like that. I kind of laughed it off, but I did rub my hand over Sue's back, and I felt the same thing. "Sue, I don't want to upset you, but the skin on your back feels the same way. What could be going on?"

She looked at me like I had grown two heads or something, but she rubbed her hand over her belly and almost screamed before she caught herself. "Oh, no, Andy. What the hell is going on? I can feel the same thing on my belly as I can on your chest. Let's go in the shower room where there is more light and take a close look at this."

We went into the shower room and turned on all of the lights. A close examination of our skin showed what looked like very fine filaments growing from any exposed skin on our body, even my cock and scrotum, but not the cock head. My pubic hair was kept shaved off out of habit to prevent varmints from taking up residence there, so it was easy for Sue to see the new growth. I looked carefully at her tits and pussy and saw the same thing except her nipples were still clear.

As a further experiment, I got out my razor and tried shaving the "hair" from my arm. Oh, God, that hurt! Whatever that was growing on my skin was not hair, but felt like any other flesh. It certainly bled like that where I had tried to shave it off.

As a further check, Sue looked closely at my face to see what my beard was doing. The answer was nothing! As nearly as she could tell, there was no beard there; furthermore, there were signs that I was losing the hair from my head. This was enough to make me check Sue's hair on her head. I saw the same thing that she had seen: her hair was falling out. She kept the hair on her head very short, but she was upset at losing what was there. We also were losing our eyebrows, but our eye lashes still appeared to be holding out. This was enough to make us rush to the clinic to see if we had caught some weird disease.

We spent two and a half hours trying every diagnostic test that we had, and all of the machines reported that we were in perfect health. Sue said that we actually appeared to be in better health than was normal for the average human who always was carrying some sort of minor infection. In any case, there was not a damned thing that we could do about these filaments, so we just figured that they came along with the other changes that we were noticing within our bodies.

When Sharon Bixby and Jim Potter woke up, Sue was going to check them over, too. Of course, she expected to find the same thing happening to them, and we wondered what was the purpose of the filaments. We certainly could ignore them if they did not get very long and did not cause us any trouble. So far, all the changes we had seen in our bodies had been beneficial or benign, so we were not too worried at the moment. Whatever it was that was happening to us, we sure were becoming something other than human!

The next morning, both Sharon and Potter showed the same filaments that Sue and I had. They just had not noticed them yet. Sharon got a bit hysterical at first, but we were able to calm her down. Sharon had red hair, and she did not want to lose it. The fact that she did not have any choice in the matter did not make any difference to her. Well, I could not blame her for being unhappy, but I was going to jump on her with both feet if she let this new development endanger the rest of us.

After breakfast, all four of us went to see how much damage we had done to the alien spaceship. We were not all needed, but we were all curious. When we got to the spaceship, there were no aliens to be seen. We figured that they were scared to come out where we could shoot at them, and we couldn't blame them.

We were sitting around waiting for the aliens to do something when Potter mentioned, "Hey, Lieutenant, what did you do to come up with such great camouflage? You are damned near impossible to see, and I know exactly where you are because I can see your shorts and boots.

By this time, we had gotten into the habit of wearing only the minimum of clothing because of the ambient temperature. No bugs bothered us, so we did not need any covering. We men were wearing only shorts and boots, and the women had added only a bra to give them some added comfort.

Now that Potter mentioned it, we all looked around and noticed that we were all damned difficult to see where we were not wearing clothes. None of us had put on any camouflage, so it had to be something else causing the change in skin color. Sue was the first one to pick up on the filaments that we were covered with. She tried an experiment of laying her arm over a dark stick and watched it change color to come close to matching the stick. Oh, my God, we had all become chameleons!

As a further experiment, I took off a boot and sock, and there was a tremendous contrast between the almost glaring white color of my ankle and foot and the rest of my body. Within a couple of seconds, the white color disappeared, and my foot took on the color of the grass it was resting on. This was a characteristic that any soldier would want because no enemy could shoot what he couldn't see. Just for the hell of it, I took off my other boot and sock, and figured to go around like that until my feet got too sore from the stuff I was stepping on.

I told the others to keep their boots on until I had a good idea of how this was going to work. I sure didn't want them to be incapacitated by sore feet if this was not going to work out. They agreed without argument, so I did not have to make it an order, but I was prepared to if necessary. Even Sharon appeared to be changing her attitude and was becoming more military. That was a relief, but I was not sure how long the change would last.

After a while, we got bored and decided to return to base. I was not sure how well I was going to make out walking in bare feet over ground littered with rocks and sticks. Amazingly enough, I got all the way back to base without a bit of trouble. It seemed like the soles of my feet had toughened enough to make shoes unnecessary.

By the way, by the time we got back to base, every one of us was bald. All of our hair had fallen out, and Sharon was on the verge of crying. Sue tried to console her, but it was hard to tell how much difference her comments made. When we got back inside, the first thing we did was to shower to wash the loose hair off our bodies. That damned hair was making us itch. Strangely, even Sharon loosened up after she saw the rest of us without hair. I guess that she felt better when she could see that we were all in the same boat.