I went down into the compartment where we kept them in their cages. The
rats started squeaking at me and the zartyls from Centauri started
screeching at me and the punkins from Polaris made an unholy racket,
because the punkins are hungry all the time. You just can’t give them
enough to eat. Turn them loose with food and they’d eat themselves to
death.
It was quite a job to get them all lugged up to the port and to rig up a
sling and lower them to the ground, but I finally finished it without
busting a single cage. That was an accomplishment. Usually I smashed a cage
or two and some of the animals escaped and then Weber would froth around
for days about my carelessness.
I had the cages all set out in rows and was puttering with canvas flies to
protect them from the weather when Kemper came along and stood watching me.
“I have been wandering around,” he announced. From the way he said it, I
could see he had the wind up.
But I didn’t ask him, for then he’d never have told me. You had to wait for
Kemper to make up his mind to talk.
“Peaceful place,” I said and it was all of that. It was a bright, clear day
and the sun was not too warm. There was a little breeze and you could see a
long way off. And it was quiet. Really quiet. There wasn’t any noise at
all.
“It’s a lonesome place,” said Kemper.
“I don’t get you,” I answered patiently.
“Remember what I said last night? About this planet being too simplified?”
He stood watching me put up the canvas, as if he might be considering how
much more to tell me. I waited.
Finally, he blurted it. “Bob, there are no insects!” “What have insects -”
“You know what I mean,” he said. “You go out on Earth or any Earthilke
planet and lie down in the grass and watch. You’ll see the insects. Some of
them on the ground and others on the grass. There’ll be all kinds of them.”
“And there aren’t any here?”
He shook his head. “None that I could see. I wandered around and lay down
and looked in a dozen different places. Stands to reason a man should find
some insects if he looked all morning. It isn’t natural, Bob.”
I kept on with my canvas and I don’t know why it was, but I got a little
chilled about there not being any insects. Not that I care a hoot for
insects, but as Kemper said, it was unnatural, although you come to expect
the so-called unnatural in this planet-checking business.
“There are the bees,” 1 said.
“What bees?”
“The ones that are in the critters. Didn’t you see any?’
“None,” he said. “I didn’t get close to any critter herds. Maybe the bees
don’t travel very far.”
“Any birds?”
“I didn’t see a one,” he said. “But I was wrong about the flowers. The
grass has tiny flowers.”
“For the bees to work on.”
Kemper’s face went stony. “That’s right. Don’t you see the pattern of it,
the planned -”
“I see it,” I told him.
He helped me with the canvas and we didn’t say much more. When we had it
done, we walked into camp.
Parsons was cooking lunch and grumbling at Oliver and Weber, but they
weren’t paying much attention to him. They had the table littered with
different parts they’d carved out of the critter and they were looking
slightly numb.
“No brain,” Weber said to us accusingly, as if we might have made off with
it when he wasn’t looking. “We can’t find a brain and there’s no nervous
system.”
“It’s impossible,” declared Oliver. “How can a highly organized, complex
animal exist without a brain or nervous system?”
“Look at that butcher shop!” Parsons yelled wrathfufly from the stove. “You
guys will have to eat standing up!”
“Butcher shop is right,” Weber agreed. “As near as we can figure out, there
are at least a dozen different kinds of flesh – some fish, some fowl, some
good red meat. Maybe a little lizard, even.”
“An all-purpose animal,” said Kemper. “Maybe we found something finally.”
“If it’s edible,” Oliver added. “If it doesn’t poison you. If it doesn’t
grow hair all over you.”
“That’s up to you,” I told him. “I got the cages down and all lined up. You
can start killing off the little cusses to your heart’s content.”
Weber looked ruefully at the mess on the table.
“We did just a rough exploratory job,” he explained. “We ought to start
another one from scratch. You’ll have to get in on that next one, Kemper.”
Kemper nodded glumly.
Weber looked at me. “Think you can get us one?”
“Sure,” I said. “No trouble.”
It wasn’t.
Right after lunch, a lone critter came walking up, as if to visit us. It
stopped about six feet from where we sat, gazed at us soulfully, then
obligingly dropped dead.
During the next few days, Oliver and Weber barely took time out to eat and
sleep. They sliced and probed. They couldn’t believe half the things they
found. They argued. They waved their scalpels in the air to emphasize their
anguish. They almost broke down and wept. Kemper filled box after box with
slides and sat hunched, half petrified, above his microscope.
Parsons and I wandered around while the others worked. He dug up some soil
samples and tried to classify the grasses and failed, because there weren’t
any grasses – there was just one type of grass. He made notes on the
weather and ran an analysis of the air and tried to pull together an
ecological report without a lot to go on.
I looked for insects and I didn’t find any except the bees and I never saw
those unless I was near a critter herd. I watched for birds and there were
none. I spent two days investigating a creek, lying on my belly and staring
down into the water, and there were no signs of life. I hunted up a sugar
sack and put a hoop in the mouth of it and spent another two days seining.
I didn’t catch a thing – not a fish, not even a crawdad, not a single
thing.
By that time, I was ready to admit that Kemper had guessed right.
Fullerton walked around, too, but we paid no attention to him. All the
Double Eyes, every one of them, always were looking for something no one
else could see. After a while, you got pretty tired of them. I’d spent
twenty years getting tired of them.
The last day I went seining, Fullerton stumbled onto me late in the
afternoon. He stood up on the bank and watched me working in a pool. When I
looked up, I had the feeling he’d been watching me for quite a little
while.
“There’s nothing there,” he said.
The way he said it, he made it sound as if he’d known all along there was
nothing there and that I was a fool for looking.
But that wasn’t the only reason I got sore.
Sticking out of his face, instead of the usual toothpick, a stem of grass
and he was rolling it around in his lips chewing it the way he chewed the
toothpicks.
“Spit out that grass!” I shouted at him. “You fool, spit it out!”
His eyes grew startled and he spit out the grass.
“It’s hard to remember,” he mumbled. “You see, it’s my first trip out and
-”
“It could be your last one, too,” I told him brutally. “Ask Weber sometime,
when you have a moment, what happened to the guy who pulled a leaf and
chewed it. Absent-minded, sure. Habit, certainly. He was just as dead as if
he’d committed suicide.”
Fullerton stiffened up.
“I’ll keep it in mind,” he said.
I stood there, looking up at him, feeling a little sorry that I’d been so
tough with him.
But I had to be. There were so many absent-minded, well-intentioned ways a
man could kill himself.
“You find anything?” I asked.
“I’ve been watching the critters,” he said. “There was something funny that
I couldn’t quite make out at first…”
“I can list you a hundred funny things.”
“That’s not what I mean, Sutter. Not the patchwork color or the bushes
growing out of them. There was something else. I finally got it figured
out. There aren’t any young.”
Fullerton was right, of course. I realized it now, after he had told me.
There weren’t any calves or whatever you might call them. All we’d seen
were adults. And yet that didn’t necessarily mean there weren’t any calves.
It just meant we hadn’t seen them. And the same, I knew, applied as well to
insects, birds and fish. They all might be on the planet, but we just
hadn’t managed to find them yet.