It didn’t bother me. Their jibes 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 than 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, hunting 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 and his hands were knotting into fists, then straightening out again.
“Sutter,” he said unhappily, “I don’t know why you do this—this mocking of yours. Somewhere in this universe there is immortality. Somewhere, somehow, it has been accomplished. And the human race must find it. We have the space for it now—all the space there is—millions of planets and eventually other galaxies. We don’t have to keep making room for new generations, the way we would if we were stuck on a single world or a single solar system. Immortality, I tell you, is the next step for humanity!”
“Forget it,” I said curtly, but once a Double Eye gets going, you can’t shut him up.
“Look at this planet,” he said. “An almost perfect Earth-type planet. Main-sequence sun. Good soil, good climate, plenty of water—an ideal place for a colony. How many years, do you think, before Man will settle here?”
“A thousand. Five thousand. Maybe more.”
“That’s right. And there are countless other planets like it, planets crying to be settled. But we won’t settle them, because we keep dying off. And that’s not all of it …”
Patiently, I listened to all the rest—the terrible waste of dying—and I knew every bit of it by heart. Before Fullerton, we’d been saddled by one Double Eye fanatic and, before him, yet another. It was regulation. Every planet-checking team, no matter what its purpose or its destination, was required to carry as supercargo an agent of Immortality Institute.
But this kid seemed just a little worse than the usual run of them. It was his first trip out and he was all steamed up with idealism. In all of them, though, burned the same intense dedication to the proposition that Man must live forever and an equally unyielding belief that immortality could and would be found. For had not a lost spaceship found the answer centuries before—an unnamed spaceship on an unknown planet in a long-forgotten year!
It was a myth, of course. It had all the hallmarks of one and all the fierce loyalty that a myth can muster. It was kept alive by Immortality Institute, operating under a government grant and billions of bequests and gifts from hopeful rich and poor—all of whom, of course, had died or would die in spite of their generosity.
“What are you looking for?” I asked Fullerton, just a little wearily, for I was bored with it. “A plant? An animal? A people?”
And he replied, solemn as a judge: “That’s something I can’t tell you.”
As if I gave a damn!
But I went on needling him. Maybe it was just something to while away my time. That and the fact that I disliked the fellow. Fanatics annoy me. They won’t get off your ear.
“Would you know it if you found it?”
He didn’t answer that one, but he turned haunted eyes on me.
I cut out the needling. Any more of it and I’d have had him bawling.
We sat around a while longer, but we did no talking.
He fished a toothpick out of his pocket and put it in his mouth and rolled it around, chewing at it moodily. I would have liked to reach out and slug him, for he chewed toothpicks all the time and it was an irritating habit that set me unreasonably on edge. I guess I was jumpy, too.
Finally he spit out the mangled toothpick and slouched off to bed.
I sat alone, looking up at the ship, and the lantern light was just bright enough for me to make out the legend lettered on it: Caph VII—Ag Survey 286, which was enough to identify us anywhere in the Galaxy.
For everyone knew Caph VII, the agricultural experimental planet, just as they would have known Aldebaran XII, the medical research planet, or Capella IX, the university planet, or any of the other special departmental planets.
Caph VII is a massive operation and the hundreds of survey teams like us were just a part of it. But we were the spearheads who went out to new worlds, some of them uncharted, some just barely charted, looking for plants and animals that might be developed on the experimental tracts.
Not that our team had found a great deal. We had discovered some grasses that did well on one of the Eltanian worlds, but by and large we hadn’t done anything
that could be called distinguished. Our luck just seemed to run bad—like that Hamal poison ivy business. We worked as hard as any of the rest of them, but a lot of good that did.
Sometimes it was tough to take—when all the other teams brought in stuff that got them written up and earned them bonuses, while we came creeping in with a few piddling grasses or maybe not a thing at all.
It’s a tough life and don’t let anyone tell you different. Some of the planets turn out to be a fairly rugged business. At times, the boys come back pretty much the worse for wear and there are times when they don’t come back at all.
But right now it looked as though we’d hit it lucky—a peaceful planet, good climate, easy terrain, no hostile inhabitants and no dangerous fauna.
Weber took his time relieving me at guard, but finally he showed up.
I could see he still was goggle-eyed about the critter. He walked around it several times, looking it over.
“That’s the most fantastic case of symbiosis I have ever seen,” he said. “If it weren’t lying over there, I’d say it was impossible. Usually you associate symbiosis with the lower, more simple forms of life.”
“You mean that brush growing out of it?”
He nodded.
“And the bees?”
He gagged over the bees.
“How are you so sure it’s symbiosis?”
He almost wrung his hands. “I don’t know,” he admitted.
I gave him the rifle and went to the tent I shared with Kemper. The bacteriologist was awake when I came in.
“That you, Bob?”
“It’s me. Everything’s all right.”
“I’ve been lying here and thinking,” he said. “This is a screwy place.”
“The critters?”
“No, not the critters. The planet itself. Never saw one like it. It’s positively naked. No trees. No flowers. Nothing. It’s just a sea of grass.”
“Why not?” I asked. “Where does it say you can’t find a pasture planet?”
“It’s too simple,” he protested. “Too simplified. Too neat and packaged. Almost as if someone had said ‘let’s make a simple planet, let’s cut out all the frills, let’s skip all the biological experiments and get right down to basics. Just one form of life and the grass for it to eat.’”
“You’re way out on a limb,” I told him. “How do you know all this? There may be other life-forms. There may be complexities we can’t suspect. Sure, all we’ve seen are the critters, but maybe that’s because there are so many of them.”
“To hell with you,” he said and turned over on his cot.
Now there’s a guy I liked. We’d been tent partners ever since he’d joined the team better than ten years before and we got along fine.
Often I had wished the rest could get along as well. But it was too much to expect.
The fighting started right after breakfast, when Oliver and Weber insisted on using the camp table for dissecting. Parsons, who doubled as cook, jumped straight down their throats. Why he did it, I don’t know. He knew before he said a word that he was licked, hands down. The same thing had happened many times before and he knew, no matter what he did or said, they would use the table.
But he put up a good battle. “You guys go and find some other place to do your butchering! Who wants to eat on a table that’s all slopped up?”
“But, Carl, where can we do it? We’ll use only one end of the table.”
Which was a laugh, because in half an hour they’d be sprawled all over it.
“Spread out a canvas,” Parsons snapped back.
“You can’t dissect on a canvas. You got to have—”
“Another thing. How long do you figure it will take? In a day or two, that critter is going to get ripe.”
It went on like that for quite a while, but by the time I started up the ladder to get the animals, Oliver and Weber had flung the critter on the table and were at work on it.
Unshipping the animals is something not exactly in my line of duty, but over the years I’d taken on the job of getting them unloaded, so they’d be there and waiting when Weber or some of the others needed them to run off a batch of tests.
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,” I 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?”
“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.
New Folks' Home: And Other Stories Page 28