Authors: Clifford D. Simak
“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?”
“Look at that butcher shop!” Parsons yelled wrathfully from the stove. “You guys will have to eat standing up!”
“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.
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.”