“You have your colonel of Scouts in charge?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you get that medical officer out of there?”
“Yes, sir. Incidentally, sir, he cracked up. He tried to shoot himself, and bungled the job.”
Wilforce said, “Get a transport into position. I may want to take the Forty-second off that planet entirely.”
“Yes, sir.”
Wilforce blanked the screen and turned to see Pick on the other screen, a deep scowl on his face. Pick said, “That tomcat has eaten, all right. He’s filled out like a barrel. He’s in there dozing, and purring like a gasoline engine. There are half a dozen tails spread out around him, and the rear half of something like a cross between a rat and a weasel.”
Wilforce said, “Get that half a rat, or whatever it is, and watch it. See that it doesn’t get away.”
Pick looked blank. “It’s dead. How’s it going to get away?”
“Never mind that. Watch it.”
Pick’s face screwed up in thought. He nodded. “All right. We’ll watch it.”
“Do you expect to need any help from the Forty-second?”
Pick shook his head. “I don’t think we’ll need any help. The simple fact is something made us jumpy. We’re still jumpy. But now we’re used to it.”
Wilforce nodded in understanding. “Suppose for the time being you keep your men under cover, and use the probes to scout and observe.”
“All right” said Pick. “Have you figured out what’s going on here?”
“I’m not absolutely sure,” said Wilforce. “But it seems to me we’ve got one foot in the biggest biological trap ever constructed. Now, I’ve got to see if this is true, and if so, how we can smash the trap.” After this call, Wilforce got Rybalko.
“Sir?” said Rybalko.
“Balky, I want three sub-nuclear triggers checked out. I don’t think we’ll have to use them, but I want them ready. And have the reflectors ready to focus on Bemus III, so that a given word, we can roast the planet.”
“Yes, sir,” said Rybalko.
Wilforce called Davis to take the Forty-second Combat Group off the planet. Then he had his flagship’s communications center get the nearest headquarters of the Planet Certification Authority, which had made the original survey of Bemus III. He asked a single pointed question, and after a considerable delay, he received the answer: “General, there have been no restrictions on travel to Bemus III since the planet was certified for colonization.”
Wilforce got the task force commander, and asked, “What have you found out about that cylinder?”
“Sir, as nearly as we can tell, it’s nothing but an extremely heavy protective housing. Inside it, there’s a missile armed with what we’re pretty sure is a sub-nuclear trigger. Evidently someone wanted to be able on short notice to turn that planet into a brilliant star.”
“How is the missile released from the cylinder?”
“The ends of the cylinder are hinged to swing open like double doors, sir.”
“What causes the missile to be launched?”
“So far, sir, we don’t know.”
“All right. There may be more of these missiles in undetectable housings. If so, we want to know about them. Check the most likely simple orbits, on the assumption that a number of missiles were used in case one failed.”
“Yes, sir.”
Wilforce turned to see Rybalko talking to a tall, tense-looking man Wilforce recognized as Dr. Traeger, his chief medical officer. Traeger was speaking insistently, and Rybalko was frowning. Wilforce walked over.
“What is it, Traeger?”
“General, Evaluation has been trying to decide whether the smaller herbivores on Bemus III are offspring of the big, mammoth-like croppers that Planet Certification thought were becoming extinct.”
“Yes?”
“Well, several of my colleagues and I tried to dissect a medium-sized herbivore, to see how similar the internal structure was to the cropper Planet Certification reported dissecting.”
“What did you find out?”
“General, we had a trying time. The exposed tissues exuded white droplets. These cohered to form a tough membrane through which we could see absolutely nothing. We cut off a number of large blocks of muscle tissue to study this process. Nearly every block was quickly covered with a tough membrane. We examined the blocks at intervals and found that the enclosed tissues became soft and viscous. Layers of large hollow cells built up behind the membrane, and the internal temperature rose sharply. A reorganization of the substance of the tissues began to take place.”
“To form what?”
Traeger drew a deep breath, looked directly at Wilforce and said unhappily, “To form the outlines of a small carnivore.”
“An embryo?”
“No, not an embryo. I don’t know how to explain it except to say that it reminded me of the precipitate that forms when a photographic plate is exposed. No doubt the mechanism is completely different, but that is what it looked like.”
“This happened in blocks of muscle tissue?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How would the animal find enough of the right chemical substances to form its teeth, bone structure, brain, and so on?”
Traeger shook his head. “General, I don’t think it would find enough. But the report on Planet Certification’s original dissection mentions a chain of complex nerve cells of unknown function, paralleling the main skeletal framework. At intervals, there were large ganglia, again with no known function. If we had cut through the entire limb, instead of merely taking blocks of muscle tissue, some of the blocks would have included these large ganglia as well as bone. Then the development might have been complete. As it was, the outlines became less distinct in the last blocks we examined. But the important point is that it happened at all.”
Wilforce said, “Did the Planet Certification report mention anything like this?”
“No, sir. Nothing. It may be that the larger and older animals take longer to regenerate. Planet Certification also used the latest methods of tissue preservation, which weren’t available to us.”
“What happened to the animal you cut the muscle tissue from?”
“Well, by this time we’d seen what I’ve just mentioned, and were getting a little uneasy. We were doing the dissection in an improvised lab on one of Evaluation’s scout ships. The idea was incredible, but incredible or not, we didn’t care to find ourselves suddenly at close quarters with one of those carnivores that had shown up down on Bemus III. We switched to another ship, so we could watch what happened next by communicator. We needn’t have hurried. Some ten hours later, there were convulsive movements beneath the membrane that formed under the fur and over the cut parts of the animal. The membrane ripped open, and a medium-sized carnivore, its fur wet and clinging, climbed out, crouched, and ate the membrane.”
Wilforce nodded slowly. “And in the chunks of muscle tissue, you said small incomplete carnivores had formed? Not herbivores, but carnivores?”
Traeger said, “We could see the beginning of claws and teeth, and the shape of the head. They were carnivores. I know how it seems, but there it is. The whole thing’s impossible.”
“Never mind that,” said Wilforce. “If it happened, it’s possible. Nature isn’t bound to one single procedure. What did this large carnivore do after it ate the membrane?”
“It looked around, ate the remains of the blocks of muscle tissue, then curled up and went to sleep. After a short sleep, it woke up, sniffed the fur the membrane had formed under, tipped the communicator stand over, and that was the last we saw.”
Traeger shrugged helplessly.
“All right. Now we have to find out more. What we might do now is pack the landing boat’s air lock with a variety of meat, flour, paper, and other organic materials and foodstuffs, put in a time-opener for the inner air-lock door, and another communicator behind heavy mesh, and see what happens when that carnivore gets at the food.”
Traeger said, “I was thinking of something like that. I’ll let you know as soon as we find out anything more.”
Good.”
Traeger turned to go out, and Wilforce noticed Rybalko standing nearby with a deep frown on his face. Rybalko looked at Traeger’s retreating back as an officer might look at a subordinate who reported, “Sir, there’s a stream in front of us, it’s wide and deep and it’s flowing uphill at a good clip.”
Rybalko turned to Wilforce and said, “Sir, I don’t quite know about Traeger. I don’t exactly believe that.”
Wilforce said, “Don’t be too sure. Back on Earth, if I remember correctly there are things called ‘oysters’—small water animals protected by two hard shells—that grow in large number in ‘oyster beds’ and are used for human food. There are also creatures called ‘starfish.’
“Now,” said Wilforce, “the starfish likes to eat oysters, just as people do. When the starfish finds an oyster, it grips the oyster’s shell with sucking stalks on the underside of its limbs, and eventually forces the oyster’s shell open. Then it squirts in a digestive fluid, and eats the oyster. Naturally, people don’t care to find these starfish prowling through the oyster beds. At one time, whenever they could, they used to chop the starfish to pieces.”