DROP DEAD
Clifford D. Simak
THE CRITTERS were unbelievable. They looked like something from the maudlin
pen of a well-alcoholed cartoonist.
One herd of them clustered in a semicircle in front of the ship, not
jittery or belligerent – just looking at us. And that was strange.
Ordinarily, when a spaceship sets down on a virgin planet, it takes a week
at least for any life that might have seen or heard it to creep out of
hiding and sneak a look around.
The critters were almost cow-size, but nohow as graceful as a cow. Their
bodies were pushed together as if every blessed one of them had run
full-tilt into a wall. And they were just as lumpy as you’d expect from a
collision like that. Their hides were splashed with large squares of pastel
color – the kind of color one never finds on any self-respecting animal:
violet, pink, orange, chartreuse, to name only a few. The overall effect
was of a checkerboard done by an old lady who made crazy quilts.
And that, by far, was not the worst of it.
From their heads and other parts of their anatomy sprouted a weird sort of
vegetation, so that it appeared each animal was hiding, somewhat
ineffectively, behind a skimpy thicket. To compound the situation and make
it completely insane, fruits and vegetables – or what appeared to be fruits
and vegetables – grew from the vegetation.
So we stood there, the critters looking at us and us looking back at them,
and finally one of them walked forward until it was no more than six feet
from us. It stood there for a moment, gazing at us soulfully, then dropped
dead at our feet.
The rest of the herd turned around and trotted awkwardly away, for all the
world as if they had done what they had come to do and now could go about
their business.
Julian Oliver, our botanist, put up a hand and rubbed his balding head with
an absentminded motion.
“Another what is it coming up!” he moaned. “Why couldn’t it, for once, be
something plain and simple?”
“It never is,” I told him. “Remember that bush out on Hamal V that spent
half its life as a kind of glorified tomato and the other half as grade A
poison ivy?”
“I remember it,” Oliver said sadly.
Max Weber, our biologist, walked over to the critter, reached out a
cautious foot and prodded it.
“Trouble is,” he said, “that Hamal tomato was Julian’s baby and this one
here is mine.”
“I wouldn’t say entirely yours,” Oliver retorted. “What do you call that
underbrush growing out of it?”
I came in fast to head off an argument. I had listened to those two
quarreling for the past twelve years, across several hundred light-years
and on a couple dozen planets. I couldn’t stop it here, I knew, but at
least I could postpone it until they had something vital to quarrel about.
“Cut it out,” I said. “It’s only a couple of hours till nightfall and we
have to get the camp set up.”
“But this critter,” Weber said. “We can’t just leave it here.”
“Why not? There are millions more of them. This one will stay right here
and even if it doesn’t -”
“But it dropped dead!”
“So it was old and feeble.”
“It wasn’t. It was right in the prime of life.”
“We can talk about it later,” said Alfred Kemper, our bacteriologist. “I’m
as interested as you two, but what Bob says is right. We have to get the
camp set up.”
“Another thing,” I added, looking hard at all of them. “No matter how
innocent this place may look, we observe planet rules. No eating anything.
No drinking any water. No wandering off alone. No carelessness of any
kind.”
“There’s nothing here,” said Weber. “Just the herds of critters. Just the
endless plains. No trees, no hills, no nothing.”
He really didn’t mean it. He knew as well as I did the reason for observing
planet rules. He only wanted to argue.
“All right,” I said, “which is it? Do we set up camp or do we spend the
night up in the ship?”
That did it.
We had the camp set up before the sun went down and by dusk we were all
settled in. Carl Parsons, our ecologist, had the stove together and the
supper started before the last tent peg was driven.
I dug out my diet kit and mixed up my formula and all of them kidded me
about it, the way they always did.
It didn’t bother me. Their jibs were automatic and I had automatic answers.
It was something that had been going on for a long, long time. Maybe it was
best that way, better if they’d disregarded my enforced eating habits.
I remember Carl was grilling steaks and I had to move away so I couldn’t
smell them. There’s never a time when I wouldn’t give my good right arm for
a steak or, to tell the truth, any other kind of normal chow. This diet
stuff keeps a man alive all right, but that’s about the only thing that can
be said of it.
I know ulcers must sound silly and archaic. Ask any medic and he’ll tell
you they don’t happen any more. But I have a riddled stomach and the diet
kit to prove they sometimes do. I guess it’s what you might call an
occupational ailment. There’s a lot of never-ending worry playing nursemaid
to planet survey gangs.
After supper, we went out and dragged the critter in and had a closer look
at it.
It was even worse to look at close than from a distance.
There was no fooling about that vegetation. It was the real McCoy and it
was part and parcel of the critter. But it seemed that it only grew out of
certain of the color blocks in the critter’s body.
We found another thing that practically had Weber frothing at the mouth.
One of the color blocks had holes in it – it looked almost exactly like one
of those peg sets that children use as toys. When Weber took out his
jackknife and poked into one of the holes, he pried out an insect that
looked something like a bee. He couldn’t quite believe it, so he did some
more probing and in another one of the holes he found another bee. Both of
the bees were dead.
He and Oliver wanted to start dissection then and there, but the rest of us
managed to talk them out of it.
We pulled straws to see who would stand first guard and, with my usual
luck, I pulled the shortest straw. Actually there wasn’t much real reason
for standing guard, with the alarm system set to protect the camp, but it
was regulation – there had to be a guard.
I got a gun and the others said good night and went to their tents, but I
could hear them talking for a long time afterward. No matter how hardened
you may get to this Survey business, no matter how blase´, you hardly ever
get much sleep the first night on any planet.
I sat on a chair at one side of the camp table, on which burned a lantern
in lieu of the campfire we would have had on any other planet. But here we
couldn’t have a fire because there wasn’t any wood.
I sat at one side of the table, with the dead critter lying on the other
side of it and I did some worrying, although it wasn’t time for me to start
worrying yet. I’m an agricultural economist and I don’t begin my worrying
until at least the first reports are in.
But sitting just across the table from where it lay, I couldn’t help but do
some wondering about that mixed-up critter. I didn’t get anywhere except go
around in circles and I was sort of glad when Talbott Fullerton, the Double
Eye, came out and sat down beside me.
Sort of, I said. No one cared too much for Fullerton. I have yet to see the
Double Eye I or anybody else ever cared much about.
“Too excited to sleep?” I asked him.
He nodded vaguely, staring off into the darkness beyond the lantern’s
light.
“Wondering,” he said. “Wondering if this could be the planet.”
“It won’t be,” I told him. “You’re chasing an El Dorado, bunting down a
fable.”
“They found it once before,” Fullerton argued stubbornly. “It’s all there
in the records.”
“So was the Gilded Man. And the Empire of Prester John. Atlantis and all
the rest of it. So was the old Northwest Passage back on ancient Earth. So
were the Seven Cities. But nobody ever found any of those places because
they weren’t there.”
He sat with the lamplight in his face and he had that wild look in his eyes