countryside as if there were a moon.
I walked over to where the rest of the men were sitting. “It looks like
we’ll be here for a while,” I said. “Tomorrow we might as well get the ship
unloaded.”
No one answered me, but in the silence I could sense the half-hidden
satisfaction and the triumph. At last we’d hit the jackpot! We’d be going
home with something that would make those other teams look pallid. We’d be
the ones who got the notices and bonuses.
Oliver finally broke the silence. “Some of our animals aren’t in good
shape. I went down this afternoon to have a look at them. A couple of the
pigs and several of the rats.”
He looked at me accusingly.
I flared up at him. “Don’t look at me! I’m not their keeper. I just take
care of them until you’re ready to use them.”
Kemper butted in to bead off an argument. “Before we do any feeding, we’ll
need another critter.”
“I’ll lay you a bet,” said Weber.
Kemper didn’t take him up.
It was just as well he didn’t, for a critter came in, right after
breakfast, and died with a savoir faire that was positively marvelous. They
went to work on it immediately.
Parsons and I started unloading the supplies. We put in a busy day. We
moved all the food except the emergency rations we left in the ship. We
slung down a refrigerating unit Weber had been yelling for, to keep the
critter products fresh.
We unloaded a lot of equipment and some silly odds and ends that I knew
we’d have no use for, but that some of the others wanted broken out. We put
up tents and we lugged and pushed and hauled all day. Late in the
afternoon, we had it all stacked up and under canvas and were completely
bushed.
Kemper went back to his bacteria. Weber spent hours with the animals.
Oliver dug up a bunch of grass and gave the grass the works. Parsons went
out on field trips, mumbling and fretting.
Of all of us, Parsons had the job that was most infuriating.
Ordinarily the ecology of even the simplest of planets is a complicated
business and there’s a lot of work to do. But here was almost nothing.
There was no competition for survival.
There was no dog eat dog. There were just critters cropping grass.
I started to pull my report together, knowing that it would have to be
revised and rewritten again and again. But I was anxious to get going. I
fairly itched to see the pieces fall together – although I knew from the
very start some of them wouldn’t fit. They almost never do.
Things went well. Too well, it sometimes seemed to me.
There were incidents, of course, like when the punkins somehow chewed their
way out of their cage and disappeared.
Weber was almost beside himself.
“They’ll come back,” said Kemper. “With that appetite of theirs, they won’t
stay away for long.”
And he was right about that part of it. The punkins were the hungriest
creatures in the Galaxy. You could never feed them enough to satisfy them.
And they’d eat anything. It made no difference to them, just so there was a
lot of it. And it was that very factor in their metabolism that made them
invaluable as research animals.
The other animals thrived on the critter diet. The carnivorous ones ate the
critter-meat and the vegetarians chomped on critter-fruit and
critter-vegetables. They all grew sleek and sassy. They seemed in better
health than the control animals, which continued their regular diet. Even
the pigs and rats that had been sick got well again and as fat and happy as
any of the others.
Kemper told us, “This critter stuff is more than just a food. It’s a
medicine. I can see the signs: ‘Eat Critter and Keep Well!'”
Weber grunted at him. He was never one for joking and I think he was a
worried man. A thorough man, he’d found too many things that violated all
the tenets he’d accepted as the truth. No brain or nervous system. The
ability to die at will. The lingering hint of wholesale symbiosis. And the
bacteria.
The bacteria, I think, must have seemed to him the worst of all.
There was, it now appeared, only one type involved.
Kemper had hunted frantically and had discovered no others, Oliver found it
in the grass. Parsons found it in the soil and water. The air, strangely
enough, seemed to be free of it.
But Weber wasn’t the only one who worried. Kemper worried, too. He unloaded
most of it just before our bedtime, sitting on the edge of his cot and
trying to talk the worry out of himself while I worked on my reports.
And he’d picked the craziest point imaginable to pin his worry on.
“You can explain it all,” he said, “if you are only willing to concede on
certain points. You can explain the critters if you’re willing to believe
in a symbiotic arrangement carried out on a planetary basis. You can
believe in the utter simplicity of the ecology if you’re willing to assume
that, given space and time enough, anything can happen within the bounds of
logic.”
“You can visualize how the bacteria might take the place of brains and
nervous systems if you’re ready to say this is a bacterial world and not a
critter world. And you can even envision the bacteria – all of them, every
single one of them – as forming one gigantic linked intelligence. And if
you accept that theory, then the voluntary deaths become understandable,
because there’s no actual death involved – it’s just like you or me
trimming off a hangnail. And if this is true, then Fullerton has found
immortality, although it’s not the kind he was looking for and it won’t do
him or us a single bit of good.
“But the thing that worries me,” he went on, his face all knotted up with
worry, “is the seeming lack of anything resembling a defense mechanism.
Even assuming that the critters are no more than fronting for a bacterial
world, the mechanism should be there as a simple matter of precaution.
Every living thing we know of has some sort of way to defend itself or to
escape potential enemies. It either fights or runs and hides to preserve
its life.”
He was right, of course. Not only did the critters have no defense, they
even saved one the trouble of going out to kill them.
“Maybe we are wrong,” Kemper concluded. “Maybe life, after all, is not as
valuable as we think it is, Maybe it’s not a thing to cling to. Maybe it’s
not worth fighting for. Maybe the critters, in their dying, are closer to
the truth than we.”
It would go on like that, night after night, with Kemper talking around in
circles and never getting anywhere. I think most of the time he wasn’t
talking to me, but talking to himself, trying by the very process of
putting it in words to work out some final answer.
And long after we had turned out the lights and gone to bed, I’d lie on my
cot and think about all that Kemper said and I thought in circles, too. I
wondered why all the critters that came in and died were in the prime of
life. Was the dying a privilege that was accorded only to the fit? Or were
all the critters in the prime of life? Was there really some cause to
believe they might be immortal?
I asked a lot of questions, but there weren’t any answers.
We continued with our work. Weber killed some of his animals and examined
them and there were no signs of ill effect from the critter diet. There
were traces of critter bacteria in their blood, but no sickness, reaction
or antibody formation. Kemper kept on with his bacterial work. Oliver
started a whole series of experiments with the grass. Parsons just gave up.
The punkins didn’t come back and Parsons and Fullerton went out and hunted
for them, but without success.
I worked on my report and the pieces fell together better than I had hoped
they would. It began to look as though we had the situation well nailed
down. We were all feeling pretty good. We could almost taste that bonus.
But I think that, in the back of our minds, all of us were wondering if we
could get away scot free. I know I had mental fingers crossed. It just
didn’t seem quite possible that something wouldn’t happen.
And, of course, it did.
We were sitting around after supper, with the lantern lighted, when we
heard the sound. I realized afterward that we had been hearing it for some
time before we paid attention to it. It started so soft and so far away