and his hands were knotting into fists, then straightening out again.
“Sutter,” he said unhappily, “I don’t know why you do this – this mocking
of yours. Somewhere in this universe there is immortality. Somewhere,
somehow, it has been accomplished. And the human race must find it. We have
the space for it now – all the space there is – millions of planets and
eventually other galaxies. We don’t have to keep making room for new
generations, the way we would if we were stuck on a single world or a
single solar system. Immortality, I tell you, is the next step for
humanity!”
“Forget it,” I said curtly, but once a Double Eye gets going, you can’t
shut him up.
“Look at this planet,” he said. “An almost perfect Earth-type planet.
Main-sequence sun. Good soil, good climate, plenty of water – an ideal
place for a colony. How many years, do you think, before Man will settle
here?”
“A thousand. Five thousand. Maybe more.”
“That’s right. And there are countless other planets like it, planets
crying to be settled. But we won’t settle them, because we keep dying off.
And that’s not all of it…”
Patiently, I listened to all the rest – the terrible waste of dying – and I
knew every bit of it by heart. Before Fullerton, we’d been saddled by one
Double Eye fanatic and, before him, yet another. It was regulation. Every
planet-checking team, no matter what its purpose or its destination, was
required to carry as supercargo an agent of Immortality Institute.
But this kid seemed just a little worse than the usual run of them. It was
his first trip out and he was all steamed up with idealism. In all of them,
though, burned the same intense dedication to the proposition that Man must
live forever and an equally unyielding belief that immortality could and
would be found. For had not a lost spaceship found the answer centuries
before – an unnamed spaceship on an unknown planet in a long-forgotten
year!
It was a myth, of course. It had all the hallmarks of one and all the
fierce loyalty that a myth can muster. It was kept alive by Immortality
Institute, operating under a government grant and billions of bequests and
gifts from hopeful rich and poor – all of whom, of course, had died or
would die in spite of their generosity.
“What are you looking for?” I asked Fullerton, just a little wearily, for I
was bored with it. “A plant? An animal? A people?”
And he replied, solemn as a judge: “That’s something I can’t tell you.”
As if I gave a damn!
But I went on needling him. Maybe it was just something to while away my
time. That and the fact that I disliked the fellow. Fanatics annoy me. They
won’t get off your ear.
“Would you know it if you found it?”
He didn’t answer that one, but he turned haunted eyes on me.
I cut out the needling. Any more of it and I’d have had him bawling.
We sat around a while longer, but we did no talking.
He fished a toothpick out of his pocket and put it in his mouth and rolled
it around, chewing at it moodily. I would have liked to reach out and slug
him, for he chewed toothpicks all the time and it was an irritating habit,
that set me unreasonably on edge. I guess I was jumpy, too.
Finally he spit out the mangled toothpick and slouched off to bed.
I sat alone, looking up at the ship, and the lantern light was just bright
enough for me to make out the legend lettered on it: ‘Caph VII – Ag Survey
286’, which was enough to identify us anywhere in the Galaxy.
For everyone knew Caph VII, the agricultural experimental planet, just as
they would have known Alderbaran XII, the medical research planet, or
Capella IX, the university planet, or any of the other special departmental
planets.
Caph VII is a massive operation and the hundreds of survey teams like us
were just a part of it. But we were the spearheads who went out to new
worlds, some of them uncharted, some just barely charted, looking for
plants and animals that might be developed on the experimental tracts.
Not that our team had found a great deal. We had discovered some grasses
that did well on one of the Eltanian worlds, but by and large we hadn’t
done anything that could be called distinguished. Our luck just seemed to
run bad – like that Hamal poison ivy business. We worked as hard as any of
the rest of them, but a lot of good that did.
Sometimes it was tough to take – when all the other teams brought in stuff
that got them written up and earned them bonuses, while we came creeping in
with a few piddling grasses or maybe not a thing at all.
It’s a tough life and don’t let anyone tell you different. Some of the
planets turn out to be a fairly rugged business. At times, the boys come
back pretty much the worse for wear and there are times when they don’t
come back at all.
But right now it looked as though we’d hit it lucky – a peaceful planet,
good climate, easy terrain, no hostile inhabitants and no dangerous fauna.
Weber took his time relieving me at guard, but finally he showed up.
I could see he still was goggle-eyed about the critter. He walked around it
several times, looking it over.
“That’s the most fantastic case of symbiosis I have ever seen,” he said.
“If it weren’t lying over there, I’d say it was impossible. Usually you
associate symbiosis with the lower, more simple forms of life.”
“You mean that brush growing out of it?” He nodded.
“And the bees?”
He gagged over the bees.
“How are you so sure it’s symbiosis?”
He almost wrung his hands. “I don’t know,” he admitted.
I gave him the rifle and went to the tent I shared with Kemper. The
bacteriologist was awake when I came in.
“That you, Bob?”
“It’s me. Everything’s all right.”
“I’ve been lying here and thinking,” he said. “This is a screwy place.”
“The critters?”
“No, not the critters. The planet itself. Never saw one like it. It’s
positively naked. No trees. No flowers. Nothing. It’s just a sea of grass.”
“Why not?” I asked. “Where does it say you can’t find a pasture planet?”
“It’s too simple,” be protested. ‘Too simplified. Too neat and packaged.
Almost as if someone had said ‘let’s make a simple planet, let’s cut out
all the frills, let’s skip all the biological experiments and get right
down to basics. Just one form of life and the grass for it to eat.'”
“You’re way out on a limb,” I told him. “How do you know all this? There
may be other life-forms. There may be complexities we can’t suspect. Sure,
all we’ve seen are the critters, but maybe that’s because there are so many
of them.”
“To hell with you,” he said and turned over on his cot.
Now there’s a guy I liked. We’d been tent partners ever since he’d joined
the team better than ten years before and we got along fine.
Often I had wished the rest could get along as well. But it was too much to
expect.
The fighting started right after breakfast, when Oliver and Weber insisted
on using the camp table for dissecting. Parsons, who doubled as cook,
jumped straight down their throats. Why he did it, I don’t know. He knew
before be said a word that he was licked, hands down. The same thing had
happened many times before and he knew, no matter what he did or said, they
would use the table.
But he put up a good battle. “You guys go and find some other place to do
your butchering! Who wants to eat on a table that’s all slopped up?”
“But, Carl, where can we do it? We’ll use only one end of the table.”
Which was a laugh, because in half an hour they’d be sprawled all over it.
“Spread out a canvas,” Parsons snapped back.
“You can’t dissect on a canvas. You got to have -”
“Another thing. How long do you figure it will take? In a day or two, that
critter is going to get ripe.”
It went on like that for quite a while, but by the time I started up the
ladder to get the animals, Oliver and Weber had flung the critter on the
table and were at work on it.
Unshipping the animals is something not exactly in my line of duty, but
over the years I’d taken on the job of getting them unloaded, so they’d be
there and waiting when Weber or some of the others needed them to run off a
batch of tests.