"Symbiont"
by Robert Silverberg
Form: Novelette
Year: 1985
ID: 1133
Publication history:
- 1985: Playboy June 1985, Magazine
- 1992: Pluto in the Morning Light (The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg Volume 1), Grafton Trade paperback, ISBN 0-586-21369-4, 396 pp.
- 1992: Secret Sharers (The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg Volume 1), Bantam Trade paperback, ISBN 0-553-37068-5, 546 pp.
- 1992: Secret Sharers (The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg Volume 1), Bantam Hard cover book, 546 pp.
- 2000: Fictionwise, Fictionwise Online
- 2003: Voile vers Byzance: Nouvelles au fil du temps, tome 3, 1981-1987, Flammarion Trade paperback, ISBN 2080682547, 768 pp., in French as Symbiote
Other resources:
[None on record]
Comments:
This great story was consciously written to update the style of old pulp magazines like Planet Stories. Chollie and Fazio are grunts in the long war against the alien Ovoids. The Ovoids use a nasty biological weapon called a synsym, which invades its victim's nervous system in a particularly nasty way. The two soldiers have a pact: if either of them should be attacked by a synsym, the other will shoot him immediately to avoid infection. But when it comes right down to it, could you really kill your own buddy?