“They climb trees, hide under fallen logs, or somehow get out of sight. Most of them, that is. We did see some of them work their way up a giant tree at night after what we think was an insect nest of some kind. They broke off the limb the nest was on, then came down again.”
“Eat the insects? Or find honey on the nest?”
“No, sir, they just threw it down. But it landed out of sight, and it may be that later on they got it. The way we figure it, sir, is that the nest belonged to some pest that couldn’t see at night, and they were getting rid of it. The humanoids seem to have some night vision. Only a few seem to have the courage to move around much, but we noticed a number waiting to brain anyone that did.”
“Cannibalistic?”
“Not that we saw last night, sir. The idea seems to be, to wait till somebody else has a delicacy, then kill him and eat the delicacy. The place seems to abound in food. We saw them eat chunks of thick bark right off the trees. But the foods they really like seem to be rare.”
“What happens to any humanoids that are sick, or injured?”
The scout lieutenant shook his head. “All the ones we saw were healthy. I imagine any sick or injured ones get killed off pretty fast. The strange part is, with all this fighting amongst themselves, they unite the instant they spot anything different. There are scavenger birds that come down at night, and live on the dead from the previous day. One came down a little early last night, before it was really dark, and a bunch of humanoids tore it to shreds. Whenever they saw us, they attacked us, even though one superconda—even if it had been just a big snake—could have slaughtered dozens of them before being finished. And yet, we were glad to get out into the swamp. There are so many of those humanoids, they are so fast and so violent, and their reactions seem to be on such an instinctive basis, with no time wasted on thought, that to tell the truth they scared the living daylights out of us, and some of those supercondas have the outer camouflage casing around the snout pretty well beat up. It’s an awful place down there.”
Towers imagined a jungle alive with creatures like the ones he and Logan had fought with that morning. “Yes,” he said, “it must be.”
“In order to get some good out of the trip, we each jammed a couple of humanoids into the forward sample pouches on the supercondas. But we’d better do the rest of our scouting remotely, by planting hidden TV and radio pickups down there. We can use the ‘condas to do that at night.”
“Good. Now, did you say, you’d brought up some humanoid prisoners?”
“Yes, sir. A dozen, all told.”
“Fine. Go down the hall to the Guard Detail office, and arrange to unload the humanoids under guard, half at the blockhouse, and half at the detention barracks, as soon as you can.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll do that right now.” The lieutenant saluted, and went out.
Towers and Logan glanced at each other.
Logan said, “I don’t care much for the sound of this. We’re up against a kind of situation I don’t think we ever ran into before. These humanoids aren’t stupid, actually, but they’re completely oriented toward combat. They all gang up on any different life form that raises its head. When they don’t have any alien life form to fight, they fight each other. It’s an ingrained instinctive-traditional reaction backed up by the sheer mechanics of the situation. They’ve got to fight, because with unrestricted reproduction there just can’t be enough food for all. But as long as they do fight all the time, every man’s hand against every other man’s, they can never develop any organization or technological skills worth mentioning. They’ll just go by a process of natural selection getting tougher, faster, and trickier, till they reach the limit, and the slaughter will just go on by itself with no more sense or reason than a chemical reaction. But how do we end it? There must be plenty of surplus birth rate down there, and we have a huge mass of these humanoids to contend with.”
Towers watched the odd-shaped bug he’d seen earlier buzz across the room, and hover outside the door of a small storage closet in the corner of the room. The bug hovered by the crack at the top of the door, its buzz rising to a whine, and dying away again. Towers stared at it in puzzlement, then with an effort dragged his mind back to the problem at hand.
“Maybe,” he said, “these tests will give us some idea.”
The first series of tests, carried out at the specially fitted blockhouse, took all afternoon, and were designed to find which of a great variety of available insects and arachnids the humanoids might be most susceptible to. The tests showed conclusively that the humanoids were untroubled by—among others—gnats, flies, ticks, and several sizes and varieties of mosquitoes, all of which lost interest after a taste of humanoid blood. The humanoids seemed vaguely aware of attacking yellow jackets, hornets, giant bumblebees, and tarantulas, which they squashed absent-mindedly when they chanced to notice them. The only thing that seemed to cause the humanoids any real trouble was a selected strain of scorpion, which succeeded in raising a dark pink bump about half the size of a man’s little fingernail, which disappeared in an hour.
Towers and Logan, considerably depressed, went through the motions of eating a hasty supper, paused briefly at their office, then watched tests designed to determine the limits of the humanoid’s tolerance for various foods. These tests revealed that the humanoids could eat all bark, root, branch, leaf, grass, moss, fungus, and lichen samples given to them, together with leather, rubber, cotton, wool, synthetic fiber, chalk, every kind of normal food, spice, and flavoring in the camp, plus soap, grease, wallboard, a variety of plastics, and engine oil. The humanoids drew the line at gasoline, which made them sneeze, but gnawed and sucked on nails, tin cans, rocks and the concrete walls of the blockhouse.
The medic now reported that he had examined the specimens given him for dissection, had dulled a large number of knives in the process, but had succeeded in finding out that the humanoids had an exceptionally powerful digestive system, including a small gizzard, a “selection chamber” where food was apparently split into digestible and occasional indigestible portions, and a “bypass” by which the rare nondigestible or poisonous portions were routed around the ordinary digestive system through several valves and disposed of with no wasted effort. The medic also mentioned that he had passed along portions of the humanoids’ tissues for chemical analysis, and gotten back a report that the tissues contained an unusually large amount of silicon. The medic hazarded the guess that just as certain silicon coatings were tougher than ordinary organic coatings, so the body tissue of the humanoids was tougher than ordinary tissue.
In a state bordering on shock, Towers and Logan went back to their office. Nothing much had changed here, save that the piles of Centran reports were gradually slumping more steeply, and the odd-looking bug was perched over the door of the storage closet, giving an occasional buzz from time to time. The guard detail reported no sign of the missing humanoid, and Lieutenant Cartwright, looking exhausted, reported that he had cleaned up and repaired Towers’ and Logan’s rooms, had eaten no breakfast or lunch, but had eaten some supper, and he was ready for the next stage of his punishment, which he knew he well deserved.
Towers told him to report back the next morning, then sent him to bed, and looked over a report from one of his men on possible ways to slow down the attacks on the Centran camps. He approved for immediate action the measures it suggested, then after a half hour of futile wrestling with the problem, he turned out the lights, and he and Logan went off to try to catch up on sleep.
Towers was in the middle of a nightmare, with half-a-dozen escaped humanoids lurking all over the barracks as he stood paralyzed in a hallway, listening for telltale signs, when there was a crash that shook the room and jolted him awake. Towers was out of bed, gun in hand, crouched in a corner of the room, with his heart hammering and the blood pounding in his ears, before he was fully awake. He heard a door come open somewhere, there was a thunderous crash, the sound of running feet, another roar, the sound of splintering wood, a yell and a hideous worrying sound.
A lifetime of devotion to duty moved Towers across the room, and out the door into the dim-lit hallway before he had time to really consider the matter.