New Folks' Home: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 6)

by Clifford D. Simak

  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.

  And then, belatedly, I got it—the inference, the hope, the half-crazy fantasy behind this thing that Fullerton had found, or imagined he’d found.

  “You’re downright loopy,” I said flatly.

  He stared back at me and his eyes were shining like a kid’s at Christmas.

  He said: “It had to happen sometime, Sutter, somewhere.”

  I climbed up the bank and stood beside him. I looked at the net I still held in my hands and threw it back into the creek and watched it sink.

  “Be sensible,” I warned him. “You have no evidence. Immortality wouldn’t work that way. It couldn’t. That way, it would be nothing but a dead end. Don’t mention it to anyone. They’d ride you without mercy all the way back home.”

  I don’t know why I wasted time on him. He stared back at me stubbornly, but still with that awful light of hope and triumph on his face.

  “I’ll keep my mouth shut,” I told him curtly. “I won’t say a word.”

  “Thanks, Sutter,” he answered. “I appreciate it a lot.”

  I knew from the way he said it that he could murder me with gusto.

  We trudged back to camp.

  The camp was all slicked up.

  The dissecting mess had been cleared away and the table had been scrubbed so hard that it gleamed. Parsons was cooking supper and singing one of his obscene ditties. The other three sat around in their camp chairs and they had broken out some liquor and were human once again.

  “All buttoned up?” I asked, but Oliver shook his head.

  They poured a drink for Fullerton and he accepted it, a bit ungraciously, but he did take it. That was some improvement on the usual Double Eye.

  They didn’t offer me any. They knew I couldn’t drink it.

  “What have we got?” I asked.

  “It could be something good,” said Oliver. “It’s a walking menu. It’s an all-purpose animal, for sure. It lays eggs, gives milk, makes honey. It has six different kinds of red meat, two of fowl, one of fish and a couple of others we can’t identify.”

  “Lays eggs,” I said. “Gives milk. Then it reproduces.”

  “Certainly,” said Weber. “What did you think?”

  “There aren’t any young.”

  Weber grunted. “Could be they have nursery areas. Certain places instinctively set aside in which to rear their young.”

  “Or they might have instinctive birth control,” suggested Oliver. “That would fit in with the perfectly balanced ecology Kemper talks about.”

  Weber snorted. “Ridiculous!”

  “Not so ridiculous,” Kemper retorted. “Not half so ridiculous as some other things we found. Not one-tenth as ridiculous as no brain or nervous system. Not any more ridiculous than my bacteria.”

  “Your bacteria!” Weber said. He drank down half a glass of liquor in a single gulp to make his disdain emphatic.

  “The critters swarm with them,” Kemper went on. “You find them everywhere throughout the entire animal. Not just in the bloodstream, not in restricted areas, but in the entire organism. And all of them the same. Normally it takes a hundred different kinds of bacteria to make a metabolism work, but here there’s only one. And that one, by definition, must be general purpose—it must do all the work that the hundred other species do.”

  He grinned at Weber. “I wouldn’t doubt but right there are your brains and nervous systems—the bacteria doubling in brass for both systems.”

  Parsons came over from the stove and stood with his fists planted on his hips, a steak fork grasped in one hand and sticking out at a tangent from his body.

  “If you ask me,” he announced, “there ain’t no such animal. The critters are all wrong. They can’t be made that way.”

  “But they are,” said Kemper.

  “It doesn’t make sense! One kind of life. One kind of grass for it to eat. I’ll bet that if we could make a census, we’d find the critter population is at exact capacity—just so many of them to the acre, figured down precisely to the last mouthful of grass. Just enough for them to eat and no more. Just enough so the grass won’t be overgrazed. Or undergrazed, for that matter.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” I asked, just to needle him.

  I thought for a minute he’d take the steak fork to me.

  “What’s wrong with it?” he thundered. “Nature’s never static, never standing still. But here it’s standing still. Where’s the competition? Where’s the evolution?”

  “That’s not the point,” said Kemper quietly. “The fact is that that’s the way it is. The point is why? How did it happen? How was it planned? Why was it planned?”

  “Nothing’s planned,” Weber told him sourly. “You know better than to talk like that.”

  Parsons went back to his cooking. Fullerton had wandered off somewhere. Maybe he was discouraged from hearing about the eggs and milk.

  For a time, the four of us just sat.

  Finally Weber said: “The first night we were here, I came out to relieve Bob at guard and I said to him …”

  He looked at me. “You remember, Bob?”

  “Sure. You said symbiosis.”

  “And now?” asked Kemper.

  “I don’t know. It simply couldn’t happen. But if it did—if it could—this critter would be the most beautifully logical example of sym
biosis you could dream up. Symbiosis carried to its logical conclusion. Like, long ago, all the life-forms said let’s quit this feuding, let’s get together, let’s cooperate. All the plants and animals and fish and bacteria got together—”

  “It’s far-fetched, of course,” said Kemper. “But, by and large, it’s not anything unheard of, merely carried further, that’s all. Symbiosis is a recognized way of life and there’s nothing—”

  Parsons let out a bellow for them to come and get it, and I went to my tent and broke out my diet kit and mixed up a mess of goo. It was a relief to eat in private, without the others making cracks about the stuff I had to choke down.

  I found a thin sheaf of working notes on the small wooden crate I’d set up for a desk. I thumbed through them while I ate. They were fairly sketchy and sometimes hard to read, being smeared with blood and other gook from the dissecting table. But I was used to that. I worked with notes like that all the blessed time. So I was able to decipher them.

  The whole picture wasn’t there, of course, but there was enough to bear out what they’d told me and a good deal more as well.

  For examples, the color squares that gave the critters their crazy-quiltish look were separate kinds of meat or fish or fowl or unknown food, whatever it might be. Almost as if each square was the present-day survivor of each ancient symbiont—if, in fact, there was any basis to this talk of symbiosis.

  The egg-laying apparatus was described in some biologic detail, but there seemed to be no evidence of recent egg production. The same was true of the lactation system.

  There were, the notes said in Oliver’s crabbed writing, five kinds of fruit and three kinds of vegetables to be derived from the plants growing from the critters.

  I shoved the notes to one side and sat back on my chair, gloating just a little.

  Here was diversified farming with a vengeance! You had meat and dairy herds, fish pond, aviary, poultry yard, orchard and garden rolled into one, all in the body of a single animal that was a complete farm in itself!

  I went through the notes hurriedly again and found what I was looking for. The food product seemed high in relation to the gross weight of the animal. Very little would be lost in dressing out.

  That is the kind of thing an ag economist has to consider. But that isn’t all of it, by any means. What if a man couldn’t eat the critter? Suppose the critters couldn’t be moved off the planet because they died if you took them from their range?

  I recalled how they’d just walked up and died; that in itself was another headache to be filed for future worry.

  What if they could only eat the grass that grew on this one planet? And if so, could the grass be grown elsewhere? What kind of tolerance would the critter show to different kinds of climate? What was the rate of reproduction? If it was slow, as was indicated, could it be stepped up? What was the rate of growth?

  I got up and walked out of the tent and stood for a while, outside. The little breeze that had been blowing had died down at sunset and the place was quiet. Quiet because there was nothing but the critters to make any noise and we had yet to hear them make a single sound. The stars blazed overhead and there were so many of them that they lighted up the countryside as if there were a moon.

  I walked over to where the rest of the men were sitting.

  “It looks like we’ll be here for a while,” I said. “Tomorrow we might as well get the ship unloaded.”

  No one answered me, but in the silence I could sense the half-hidden satisfaction and the triumph. At last we’d hit the jackpot! We’d be going home with something that would make those other teams look pallid. We’d be the ones who got the notices and bonuses.

  Oliver finally broke the silence. “Some of our animals aren’t in good shape. I went down this afternoon to have a look at them. A couple of the pigs and several of the rats.”

  He looked at me accusingly.

  I flared up at him. “Don’t look at me! I’m not their keeper. I just take care of them until you’re ready to use them.”

  Kemper butted in to head off an argument. “Before we do any feeding, we’ll need another critter.”

  “I’ll lay you a bet,” said Weber.

  Kemper didn’t take him up.

  It was just as well he didn’t, for a critter came in, right after breakfast, and died with a savoir faire that was positively marvelous. They went to work on it immediately.

  Parsons and I started unloading the supplies. We put in a busy day. We moved all the food except the emergency rations we left in the ship. We slung down a refrigerating unit Weber had been yelling for, to keep the critter products fresh. We unloaded a lot of equipment and some silly odds and ends that I knew we’d have no use for, but that some of the others wanted broken out. We put up tents and we lugged and pushed and hauled all day. Late in the afternoon, we had it all stacked up and under canvas and were completely bushed.

  Kemper went back to his bacteria. Weber spent hours with the animals. Oliver dug up a bunch of grass and gave the grass the works. Parsons went out on field trips, mumbling and fretting.

  Of all of us, Parsons had the job that was most infuriating. Ordinarily the ecology of even the simplest of planets is a complicated business and there’s a lot of work to do. But here was almost nothing. There was no competition for survival. There was no dog eat dog. There were just critters cropping grass.

  I started to pull my report together, knowing that it would have to be revised and rewritten again and again. But I was anxious to get going. I fairly itched to see the pieces fall together—although I knew from the very start some of them wouldn’t fit. They almost never do.

  Things went well. Too well, it sometimes seemed to me.

  There were incidents, of course, like when the punkins somehow chewed their way out of their cage and disappeared.

  Weber was almost beside himself.

  “They’ll come back,” said Kemper. “With that appetite of theirs, they won’t stay away for long.”

  And he was right about that part of it. The punkins were the hungriest creatures in the Galaxy. You could never feed them enough to satisfy them. And they’d eat anything. It made no difference to them, just so there was a lot of it.

  And it was that very factor in their metabolism that made them invaluable as research animals.

  The other animals thrived on the critter diet. The carnivorous ones ate the critter-meat and the vegetarians chomped on critter-fruit and critter-vegetables. They all grew sleek and sassy. They seemed in better health than the control animals, which continued their regular diet. Even the pigs and rats that had been sick got well again and as fat and happy as any of the others.

  Kemper told us, “This critter stuff is more than just a food. It’s a medicine. I can see the signs: ‘Eat Critter and Keep Well!’”

  Weber grunted at him. He was never one for joking and I think he was a worried man. A thorough man, he’d found too many things that violated all the tenets he’d accepted as the truth. No brain or nervous system. The ability to die at will. The lingering hint of wholesale symbiosis. And the bacteria.

  The bacteria, I think, must have seemed to him the worst of all.

  There was, it now appeared, only one type involved. Kemper had hunted frantically and had discovered no others. Oliver found it in the grass. Parsons found it in the soil and water. The air, strangely enough, seemed to be free of it.

  But Weber wasn’t the only one who worried. Kemper worried, too. He unloaded most of it just before our bedtime, sitting on the edge of his cot and trying to talk the worry out of himself while I worked on my reports.

  And he’d picked the craziest point imaginable to pin his worry on.

  “You can explain it all,” he said, “if you are only willing to concede on certain points. You can explain the critters if you’re willing to believe in a symbiotic arrangement carried out on a planetary
basis. You can believe in the utter simplicity of the ecology if you’re willing to assume that, given space and time enough, anything can happen within the bounds of logic.

  “You can visualize how the bacteria might take the place of brains and nervous systems if you’re ready to say this is a bacterial world and not a critter world. And you can even envision the bacteria—all of them, every single one of them—as forming one gigantic linked intelligence. And if you accept that theory, then the voluntary deaths become understandable, because there’s no actual death involved—it’s just like you or me trimming off a hangnail. And if this is true, then Fullerton has found immortality, although it’s not the kind he was looking for and it won’t do him or us a single bit of good.

  “But the thing that worries me,” he went on, his face all knotted up with worry, “is the seeming lack of anything resembling a defense mechanism. Even assuming that the critters are no more than fronting for a bacterial world, the mechanism should be there as a simple matter of precaution. Every living thing we know of has some sort of way to defend itself or to escape potential enemies. It either fights or runs and hides to preserve its life.”

  He was right, of course. Not only did the critters have no defense, they even saved one the trouble of going out to kill them.

  “Maybe we are wrong,” Kemper concluded. “Maybe life, after all, is not as valuable as we think it is. Maybe it’s not a thing to cling to. Maybe it’s not worth fighting for. Maybe the critters, in their dying, are closer to the truth than we.”

  It would go on like that, night after night, with Kemper talking around in circles and never getting anywhere. I think most of the time he wasn’t talking to me, but talking to himself, trying by the very process of putting it in words to work out some final answer.