Rybalko nodded approvingly.
Wilforce added, “They did this until they discovered that a mere single arm of the starfish, if it included enough of the center, could regenerate a complete new starfish.”
Rybalko looked blank. Then he said, “This happened on Earth?”
“It did. Quite a while ago, too. Our problem here has been compounded, multiplied, and raised several powers higher, so that we have what you might call a ‘star tiger’ to deal with. But even that is only about half of it. And we have to find an answer quickly.”
During the rest of the morning, Wilforce received a number of calls. Pick, perspiring heavily, told Wilforce that the half-rat from the storeroom had grown some kind of white film, out of which had emerged a little vicious furtive thing that looked like a shrew. This thing hid under every scrap of cover, and tore a chunk out of the forefinger of a pioneer who tried to uncover it. Pick mentioned this in the defensive manner of a man who doesn’t expect to be believed.
Immediately after this, Davis called, to cautiously reveal, with many roundabout expressions, that he had seen by battle transceiver a kind of big carnivore climb out through the whitish membrane around a chunk of carcass down on Bemus III. The soldiers were already so used to this that they shot the creature all over again as it emerged from the membrane. Other than this, the Forty-second had lifted from the planet without incident, but Davis was at pains to get the significance of the carnivore across to Wilforce.
No sooner was this call ended than one came in from Evaluation, and a scholarly biologist explained Traeger’s information to Wilforce all over again, with many homely analogies to make it easier for the layman to understand. He dwelt heavily on the caterpillar that spins a cocoon to emerge a moth, and nothing Wilforce could do would stop him till he ran through all the details.
In a bad mood, Wilforce called back to have Davis hold the Forty-second’s transport away from his other troops, and also to have to have the men be on the lookout for small mouse- or shrew-like creatures on the transport. Davis nodded and started explaining all over again about the carnivore coming out of the chunk of carcass. Wilforce saw little flecks dance before his eyes, and Davis hastily changed the subject.
That afternoon the task force commander called to say he had located another cylinder.
“How did you find it?”
“We figured they used three, to be reasonably sure at least one would work, and spaced them evenly about the planet. We already could make a pretty fair guess how the orbit of the one we’d found had been when the destroyer swiped it, so it seemed logical to sweep one hundred twenty degrees back with a flat pattern of reconnaissance torpedoes. This could have taken a long time, but we guessed right, and pretty soon one of the torpedoes banged into something that didn’t show up on the detectors.”
Good,” said Wilforce. “Tag that one, then see if you can find another.”
“Yes, sir.”
Wilforce blanked the screen, thinking that there might well be half-a-dozen or more of the cylinders, but that there was no point discouraging his men by mentioning things like that.
Dr. Traeger now appeared on the screen to say, “General, we did as you suggested. We ran a sealed boarding tunnel to the scout ship, and filled the air lock with meat and other edibles and organic materials.”
“What happened?”
“When the timer worked the inner lock door mechanism, the carnivore gorged on the meat, then went to sleep. We could see into the ship, and the skin and fur was gone, so evidently it had eaten that. Well, twenty minutes after gorging on the meat, it drank a great deal of water. It curled up very tightly, and its breathing became labored, as if it was struggling up a steep hill. Then the breathing gradually slowed. Three hours later the animal got up, and we could see that the form of its head, teeth, and body in general had altered to match that of the usual Bemus herbivore. It walked over to the air lock, ate up twenty-five pounds of flour, ten pounds of sugar, a ream of yellow scratch paper, a ball of twine, a uniform shirt, a pair of leather boots and a plastic ruler. Then it went back to sleep.”
Wilforce nodded, and said, “Now what I want to know is, how does it all fit together? Kill a Bemus animal and it turns into one or more savage carnivores. Feed the carnivore and it becomes an herbivore. I wonder if it forms sort of a scale, with the mammoth-like cropper on top, and some other creature on the bottom.”
Traeger said, “I should think the lower limit for this creature would be the minimum size capable of efficiently carrying the biological control mechanism that reorganizes the tissues.”
Wilforce said, “I imagine Pick can help us on that. He already has one about the size of a shrew. I’ll call him.”
Pick was on the screen a few minutes later. Wilforce said, “Pick, do you still have that shrew?”
“We’ve got the thing. We aren’t happy with it.”
“I want you to kill it.”
“It will be a pleasure. But what if it dies, and later on half-a-dozen carnivorous grasshoppers pop out?”
“That’s exactly what we want to find out. We want to know just how small the thing will get.”
“We’ll find out for you.”
The screen blanked, and Rybalko came over to say, “Sir, the Forty-second has searched its transport. A number of men think they saw small furtive animals, but there’s nothing definite.”
Wilforce said, “Have them lay another transport alongside, bridge the air locks, and cross over one at a time. They’ll have to strip before leaving one ship, and receive a new issue of clothing as they enter the other. Then we can pump the transport’s air back into its tanks, send some men back through in spacesuits to search, and eventually find out if there are any animals on board.”
In the next few days, spacesuited searchers found a number of small mouse-and shrew-like animals on the transport. Now that everyone had an idea what to look for, one thing rapidly led to another.
From Traeger, Evaluation got the first solid details of the life cycle of the carnivore. With this clue to go on, they went back over a number of previous observations, and found that what they had dismissed as irrational made sense after all. Wilforce now got a flood of information that would have cleared everything up if he had gotten it sooner—but Evaluation had been afraid to give it to him because Evaluation knew it didn’t make sense.
Pick called to say that the shrew was thoroughly dead, it failed to show any signs of reviving, and it was getting unpleasant to keep the thing around. Pick, therefore, buried the shrew, and Evaluation, now ready to believe anything, kept a wary eye on the grave.
Meanwhile, a sound engineer, going over a film of the animals in the corridor of Pick’s ship, discovered that the furtive “mouse,” when attacked, gave terrified squeals—in a pitch too high for the human ear to hear. He suggested that these just inaudible noises, repeated over and over, accounted for the uneasiness of Pick and his men, and might also be used to test for the presence of the animals.
As Wilforce and Rybalko were going over this information, the task force commander called to say that he had found two more of the huge cylinders. One contained another sub-nuclear trigger. The other contained the bulk of the control mechanism, designed to ignore an object that went down to the planet, but to send a signal that would trip off the triggers if anything tried to come up from the planet.
Wilforce said, “Why didn’t it work?”
“Because two metal strips had to slide over one another under light pressure. Apparently, they had been there so long the atoms of the metal had interpenetrated. The strips didn’t move. We’ve dismantled the whole thing, just in case.”
“Was the mechanism purely automatic?”
“Yes, sir. But there was a manual control, too. This cylinder also had an arrangement for internal heating, plus a cot, and a desk with a little statuette.”
“A statuette?”
“Apparently some kind of reminder, sir. It showed a carnivore, its sides all swollen out, with what looked like an empty pair of boots and a hat nearby.”
Wilforce said, “Keep looking. There may be more of those triggers, and there should be a separate warning system around somewhere.”
When this call was finished, Wilforce sat back for a moment, then had his communications center get in touch with the chief of colonization. A strongly built, firm-jawed man promptly appeared on the screen. He said, “I’ve been studying staff reports on Bemus III since Larssen sent out his alarm. Is it as bad as it seems?”