Bolden's Pets

Lee Bolden came to Van Daamas to negotiate for labor, not to die. But the planet has other plans: he contracts the Bubble Death, a fast-moving plague with no known cure, and finds himself stranded in an alien landscape with his body failing. The native tribe offers an impossible gift in exchange for his negotiations: a strange, unknowable creature from their world. At first it seems like a curiosity, a strange souvenir of first contact. But as Bolden weakens, he discovers the creature's body produces something his desperate system craves. It can save him. The cost is something he never anticipated. F.L. Wallace's 1955 novella is stripped-down, efficient science fiction that earns its emotional punches through restraint. The alien isn't a monster or a savior but something genuinely other, and Bolden's relationship with it evolves from suspicion to something that might be love, or might be something the word doesn't have yet. It's a story about what we owe to things that keep us alive, and whether survival is worth its price.