New Folks' Home: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 6) (32 page)

“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 symbiosis 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.

And long after we had turned out the lights and gone to bed, I’d lie on my cot and think about all that Kemper said and I thought in circles, too. I wondered why all the critters that came in and died were in the prime of life. Was the dying a privilege that was accorded only to the fit? Or were all the critters in the prime of life? Was there really some cause to believe they might be immortal?

I asked a lot of questions, but there weren’t any answers.

We continued with our work. Weber killed some of his animals and examined them and there were no signs of ill effect from the critter diet. There were traces of critter bacteria in their blood, but no sickness, reaction or antibody formation. Kemper kept on with his bacterial work. Oliver started a whole series of experiments with the grass. Parsons just gave up.

The punkins didn’t come back and Parsons and Fullerton went out and hunted for them, but without success.

I worked on my report and the pieces fell together better than I had hoped they would.

It began to look as though we had the situation well nailed down.

We were all feeling pretty good. We could almost taste that bonus.

But I think that, in the back of our minds, all of us were wondering if we could get away scot free. I know I had mental fingers crossed. It just didn’t seem quite possible that something wouldn’t happen.

And, of course, it did.

We were sitting around after supper, with the lantern lighted, when we heard the sound. I realized afterward that we had been hearing it for some time before we paid attention to it. It started so soft and so far away that it crept upon us without alarming us. At first, it sounded like a sighing, as if a gentle wind were blowing through a little tree, and then it changed into a rumble, but a far-off rumble that had no menace in it. I was just getting ready to say something about thunder and wondering if our stretch of weather was about to break when Kemper jumped up and yelled.

I don’t know what he yelled. Maybe it wasn’t a word at all. But the way he yelled brought us to our feet and sent us at a dead run for the safety of the ship. Even before we got there, in the few seconds it took to reach the ladder, the character of the sound had changed and there was no mistaking what it was—the drumming of hoofs heading straight for camp.

They were almost on top of us when we reached the ladder and there wasn’t time or room for all of us to use it. I was the last in line and I saw I’d never make it and a dozen possible escape plans flickered through my mind. But I knew they wouldn’t work fast enough. Then I saw the rope, hanging where I’d left it after the unloading job, and I made a jump for it. I’m no rope-climbing expert, but I shinnied up it with plenty of speed. And right behind me came Weber, who was no rope-climber, either, but who was doing rather well.

I thought of how lucky it had been that I hadn’t found the time to take down the rig and how Weber had ridden me unmercifully about not doing it. I wanted to shout down and point it out to him, but I didn’t have the breath.

We reached the port and tumbled into it. Below us, the stampeding critters went grinding through the camp. There seemed to be millions of them. One of the terrifying things about it was how silently they ran. They made no outcry of any kind; all you could hear was the sound of their hoofs pounding on the ground. It seemed almost as if they ran in some blind fury that was too deep for outcry.