Nightfall and Other Stories, Page 6

  He could remember the moment he had located himself on the surface of the ship, maintaining a desperate suction grip until the air lock opened. He had entered, moving cautiously between the outgoing feet. There had been an inner lock and that had been passed later. Now he lay here, a life frag­ment himself, inert and unnoticed.

  Cautiously, he engaged reception again at the previous focus. The squat­ting fragment of life was tugging furiously at the wire netting. It still wanted the other’s food, though it was the less hungry of the two.

  Larsen said, “Don’t feed the damn thing. She isn’t hungry; she’s just sore because Tillie had the nerve to eat before she herself was crammed full. The greedy ape! I wish we were back home and I never had to look another animal in the face again.”

  He scowled at the older female chimpanzee frowningly and the chimp mouthed and chattered back to him in full reciprocation.

  Rizzo said, “Okay, okay. Why hang around here, then? Feeding time is over. Let’s get out.”

  They went past the goat pens, the rabbit hutches, the hamster cages.

  Larsen said bitterly, “You volunteer for an exploration voyage. You’re a hero. They send you off with speeches--and make a zoo keeper out of you.”

  “They give you double pay.”

  “All right, so what? I didn’t sign up just for the money. They said at the original briefing that it was even odds we wouldn’t come back, that we’d end up like Saybrook. I signed up because I wanted to do something important.”

  “Just a bloomin’ bloody hero,” said Rizzo.

  “I’m not an animal nurse.”

  Rizzo paused to lift a hamster out of the cage and stroke it. “Hey,” he said, “did you ever think that maybe one of these hamsters has some cute little baby hamsters inside, just getting started?”

  “Wise guy! They’re tested every day.”

  “Sure, sure.” He muzzled the little creature, which vibrated its nose at him. “But just suppose you came down one morning and found them there. New little hamsters looking up at you with soft, green patches of fur where the eyes ought to be.”

  “Shut up, for the love of Mike,” yelled Larsen.

  “Little soft, green patches of shining fur,” said Rizzo, and put the ham­ster down with a sudden loathing sensation.

  He engaged reception again and varied the focus. There wasn’t a special­ized life fragment at home that didn’t have a rough counterpart on ship­board.

  There were the moving runners in various shapes, the moving swimmers, and the moving fliers. Some of the fliers were quite large, with perceptible thoughts; others were small, gauzy-winged creatures. These last transmitted only patterns of sense perception, imperfect patterns at that, and added nothing intelligent of their own.

  There were the non-movers, which, like the non-movers at home, were green and lived on the air, water, and soil. These were a mental blank. They knew only the dim, dim consciousness of light, moisture, and gravity.

  And each fragment, moving and non-moving, had its mockery of life.

  Not yet. Not yet. . . .

  He clamped down hard upon his feelings. Once before, these life frag­ments had come, and the rest at home had tried to help them--too quickly. It had not worked. This time they must wait.

  If only these fragments did not discover him.

  They had not, so far. They had not noticed him lying in the corner of the pilot room. No one had bent down to pick up and discard him. Earlier, it had meant he could not move. Someone might have turned and stared at the stiff wormlike thing, not quite six inches long. First stare, then shout, and then it would all be over.

  But now, perhaps, he had waited long enough. The takeoff was long past. The controls were locked; the pilot room was empty.

  It did not take him long to find the chink in the armor leading to the recess where some of the wiring was. They were dead wires.

  The front end of his body was a rasp that cut in two a wire of just the right diameter. Then, six inches away, he cut it in two again. He pushed the snipped-off section of the wire ahead of him packing it away neatly and invisibly into a corner of recess. Its outer covering was a brown elastic material and its core was gleaming, ruddy metal. He himself could not reproduce the core, of course, but that was not necessary. It was enough that the pellicle that covered him had been carefully bred to resemble a wire’s surface.

  He returned and grasped the cut sections of the wire before and behind. He tightened against them as his little suction disks came into play. Not even a seam showed.

  They could not find him now. They could look right at him and see only a continuous stretch of wire.

  Unless they looked very closely indeed and noted that, in a certain spot on this wire, there were two tiny patches of soft and shining green fur.

  “It is remarkable,” said Dr. Weiss, “that little green hairs can do so much.”

  Captain Loring poured the brandy carefully. In a sense, this was a celebra­tion. They would be ready for the jump through hyper-space in two hours, and after that, two days would see them back on Earth.

  “You are convinced, then, the green fur is the sense organ?” he asked.

  “It is,” said Weiss. Brandy made him come out in splotches, but he was aware of the need of celebration--quite aware. “The experiments were con­ducted under difficulties, but they were quite significant.”

  The captain smiled stiffly. “ ‘Under difficulties’ is one way of phrasing it. I would never have taken the chances you did to run them.”

  “Nonsense. We’re all heroes aboard this ship, all volunteers, all great men with trumpet, fife, and fanfarade. You took the chance of coming here.”

  “You were the first to go outside the barrier.”

  “No particular risk involved,” Weiss said. “I burned the ground before me as I went, to say nothing of the portable barrier that surrounded me. Nonsense, Captain. Let’s all take our medals when we come back; let’s take them without attempt at gradation. Besides, I’m a male.”

  “But you’re filled with bacteria to here.” The captain’s hand made a quick, cutting gesture three inches above his head. “Which makes you as vulnerable as a female would be.”

  They paused for drinking purposes.

  “Refill?” asked the captain.

  “No, thanks. I’ve exceeded my quota already.”

  “Then one last for the spaceroad.” He lifted his glass in the general direction of Saybrook’s Planet, no longer visible, its sun only a bright star in the visiplate. “To the little green hairs that gave Saybrook his first lead.”

  Weiss nodded. “A lucky thing. We’ll quarantine the planet, of course.”

  The captain said, “That doesn’t seem drastic enough. Someone might always land by accident someday and not have Saybrook’s insight, or his guts. Suppose he did not blow up his ship, as Saybrook did. Suppose he got back to some inhabited place.”

  The captain was somber. “Do you suppose they might ever develop inter­stellar travel on their own?”

  “I doubt it. No proof, of course. It’s just that they have such a completely different orientation. Their entire organization of life has made tools unnec­essary. As far as we know, even a stone ax doesn’t exist on the planet.”

  “I hope you’re right. Oh, and, Weiss, would you spend some time with Drake?”

  “The Galactic Press fellow?”

  “Yes. Once we get back, the story of Saybrook’s Planet will be released for the public and I don’t think it would be wise to oversensationalize it. I’ve asked Drake to let you consult with him on the story. You’re a biologist and enough of an authority to carry weight with him. Would you oblige?”

  “A pleasure.”

  The captain closed his eyes wearily and shook his head.

  “Headache, Captain?”

  “No. Just thinking of poor Saybrook.”

  He was weary of the ship. Awhile back there had been a queer, momen­tar
y sensation, as though he had been turned inside out. It was alarming and he had searched the minds of the keen-thinkers for an explanation. Appar­ently the ship had leaped across vast stretches of empty space by cutting across something they knew as “hyper-space.” The keen-thinkers were inge­nious.

  But--he was weary of the ship. It was such a futile phenomenon. These life fragments were skillful in their constructions, yet it was only a measure of their unhappiness, after all. They strove to find in the control of inani­mate matter what they could not find in themselves. In their unconscious yearning for completeness, they built machines and scoured space, seeking, seeking . . .

  These creatures, he knew, could never, in the very nature of things, find that for which they were seeking. At least not until such time as he gave it to them. He quivered a little at the thought.

  Completeness!

  These fragments had no concept of it, even. “Completeness” was a poor word.

  In their ignorance they would even fight it. There had been the ship that had come before. The first ship had contained many of the keen-thinking fragments. There had been two varieties, life producers and the sterile ones. (How different this second ship was. The keen-thinkers were all sterile, while the other fragments, the fuzzy-thinkers and the no-thinkers, were all producers of life. It was strange.)

  How gladly that first ship had been welcomed by all the planet! He could remember the first intense shock at the realization that the visitors were fragments and not complete. The shock had give way to pity, and the pity to action. It was not certain how they would fit into the community, but there had been no hesitation. All life was sacred and somehow room would have been made for them--for all of them, from the large keen-thinkers to the little multipliers in the darkness.

  But there had been a miscalculation. They had not correctly analyzed the course of the fragments’ ways of thinking. The keen-thinkers became aware of what had been done and resented it. They were frightened, of course; they did not understand.

  They had developed the barrier first, and then, later, had destroyed them­selves, exploding their ships to atoms.

  Poor, foolish fragments.

  This time, at least, it would be different. They would be saved, despite themselves.

  John Drake would not have admitted it in so many words, but he was very proud of his skill on the photo-typer. He had a travel-kit model, which was a six-by-eight, featureless dark plastic slab, with cylindrical bulges on either end to hold the roll of thin paper. It fitted into a brown leather case, equipped with a beltlike contraption that held it closely about the waist and at one hip. The whole thing weighed less than a pound.

  Drake could operate it with either hand. His fingers would flick quickly and easily, placing their light pressure at exact spots on the blank surface, and, soundlessly, words would be written.

  He looked thoughtfully at the beginning of his story, then up at Dr. Weiss. “What do you think, Doc?”

  “It starts well.”

  Drake nodded. “I thought I might as well start with Saybrook himself. They haven’t released his story back home yet. I wish I could have seen Saybrook’s original report. How did he ever get it through, by the way?”

  “As near as I could tell, he spent one last night sending it through the sub-ether. When he was finished, he shorted the motors, and converted the entire ship into a thin cloud of vapor a millionth of a second later. The crew and himself along with it.”

  “What a man! You were in this from the beginning, Doc?”

  “Not from the beginning,” corrected Weiss gently. “Only since the re­ceipt of Saybrook’s report.”

  He could not help thinking back. He had read that report, realizing even then how wonderful the planet must have seemed when Saybrook’s colonizing expedition first reached it. It was practically a duplicate of Earth, with an abounding plant life and a purely vegetarian animal life.

  There had been only the little patches of green fur (how often had he used that phrase in his speaking and thinking!) which seemed strange. No living individual on the planet had eyes. Instead, there was this fur. Even the plants, each blade or leaf or blossom, possessed the two patches of richer green.

  Then Saybrook had noticed, startled and bewildered, that there was no conflict for food on the planet. All plants grew pulpy appendages which were eaten by the animals. These were regrown in a matter of hours. No other parts of the plants were touched. It was as though the plants fed the animals as part of the order of nature. And the plants themselves did not grow in overpowering profusion. They might almost have been cultivated, they were spread across the available soil so discriminately.

  How much time, Weiss wondered, had Saybrook had to observe the strange law and order on the planet?--the fact that insects kept their num­bers reasonable, though no birds ate them; that the rodent-like things did not swarm, though no carnivores existed to keep them in check.

  And then there had come the incident of the white rats.

  That prodded Weiss. He said, “Oh, one correction, Drake. Hamsters were not the first animals involved. It was the white rats.”

  “White rats,” said Drake, making the correction in his notes.

  “Every colonizing ship,” said Weiss, “takes a group of white rats for the purpose of testing any alien foods. Rats, of course, are very similar to human beings from a nutritional viewpoint. Naturally, only female white rats are taken.”

  Naturally. If only one sex was present, there was no danger of unchecked multiplication in case the planet proved favorable. Remember the rabbits in Australia.

  “Incidentally, why not use males?” asked Drake.

  “Females are hardier,” said Weiss, “which is lucky, since that gave the situation away. It turned out suddenly that all the rats were bearing young.”

  “Right. Now that’s where I’m up to, so here’s my chance to get some things straight. For my own information, Doc, how did Saybrook find out they were in a family way?”

  “Accidentally, of course. In the course of nutritional investigations, rats are dissected for evidence of internal damage. Their condition was bound to be discovered. A few more were dissected; same results. Eventually, all that lived gave birth to young--with no male rats aboard!”

  “And the point is that all the young were born with little green patches of fur instead of eyes.”

  “That is correct. Saybrook said so and we corroborate him. After the rats, the pet cat of one of the children was obviously affected. When it finally

  kittened, the kittens were not born with closed eyes but with little patches of green fur. There was no tomcat aboard.

  “Eventually Saybrook had the women tested. He didn’t tell them what for. He didn’t want to frighten them. Every single one of them was in the early stages of pregnancy, leaving out of consideration those few who had been pregnant at the time of embarkation. Saybrook never waited for any child to be born, of course. He knew they would have no eyes, only shining patches of green fur.

  “He even prepared bacterial cultures (Saybrook was a thorough man) and found each bacillus to show microscopic green spots.”

  Drake was eager. “That goes way beyond our briefing--or, at least, the briefing I got. But granted that life on Saybrook’s Planet is organized into a unified whole, how is it done?”

  “How? How are your cells organized into a unified whole? Take an indi­vidual cell out of your body, even a brain cell, and what is it by itself? Nothing. A little blob of protoplasm with no more capacity for anything human than an amoeba. Less capacity, in fact, since it couldn’t live by itself. But put the cells together and you have something that could invent a spaceship or write a symphony.”

  “I get the idea,” said Drake.

  Weiss went on, “All life on Saybrook’s Planet is a single organism. In a sense, all life on Earth is too, but it’s a fighting dependence, a dog-eat-dog dependence. The bacteria fix nitrogen; the plants fix carbon; animals e
at plants and each other; bacterial decay hits everything. It comes full circle. Each grabs as much as it can, and is, in turn, grabbed.

  “On Saybrook’s Planet, each organism has its place, as each cell in our body does. Bacteria and plants produce food, on the excess of which animals feed, providing in turn carbon dioxide and nitrogenous wastes. Nothing is produced more or less than is needed. The scheme of life is intelligently altered to suit the local environment. No group of life forms multiplies more or less than is needed, just as the cells in our body stop multiplying when there are enough of them for a given purpose. When they don’t stop multi­plying, we call it cancer. And that’s what life on Earth really is, the kind of organic organization we have, compared to that on Saybrook’s Planet. One big cancer. Every species, every individual doing its best to thrive at the expense of every other species and individual.”

  “You sound as if you approve of Saybrook’s Planet, Doc.”

  “I do, in a way. It makes sense out of the business of living. I can see their viewpoint toward us. Suppose one of the cells of your body could be con­scious of the efficiency of the human body as compared with that of the cell itself, and could realize that this was only the result of the union of many cells into a higher whole. And then suppose it became conscious of the existence of free-living cells, with bare life and nothing more. It might feel a very strong desire to drag the poor thing into an organization. It might feel sorry for it, feel perhaps a sort of missionary spirit. The things on Saybrook’s Planet--or the thing; one should use the singular--feels just that, perhaps.”

  “And went ahead by bringing about virgin births, eh, Doc? I’ve got to go easy on that angle of it. Post-office regulations, you know.”

  “There’s nothing ribald about it, Drake. For centuries we’ve been able to make the eggs of sea urchins, bees, frogs, et cetera develop without the intervention of male fertilization. The touch of a needle was sometimes enough, or just immersion in the proper salt solution. The thing on Saybrook’s Planet can cause fertilization by the controlled use of radiant energy. That’s why an appropriate energy barrier stops it; interference, you see, or static.