Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

‘Undoubtedly,” Dr. Chase-Huebner said, “though that seems to me to be small

consolation. And in addition I have a few other discoveries to report to

you all, none of which you are going to like very much. You have all seen

these brittle little molluscs with the silicon shells crawling around on

the rocks. They are no joke either, it turns out. All the time we have been

ignoring them, they have been crawling over the Javelin as well, working

hard on all the ship’s outside sensing instruments which have fused quartz

lenses; and they have ruined about twenty per cent of them and damaged

almost half of the rest. These two examples,

128 fames Blish plus that of the inflated tiger that you ran afoul of, Jorn,

suddenly made a pattern in my mind and I asked the natives about it, with

Ailiss to help me over the hard spots. My conclusion is that the probable

and possible dangers of this kind that we will encounter if we expand over

this planet are just about numberless.”

“Of what kind?” Ertak said. I can’t see anything in common among the

three.”

“I’m not surprised, but I should have, long before this. In brief,

Director, what has happened here is that on this planet, evolution has

adopted nearly every imaginable path for giving its creatures structural

rigidity. This includes both plants and animals, and a good many borderline

or mixed forms; I can show you a catalogue later. And it has also produced

all the compensatory attack mechanisms.

Some of these, like the inflated tiger and the thorn, don’t represent any