Title: Drop dead

Author: Clifford D. Simak
Original copyright year: unknown, re-published 1962
Genre: science fiction

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Anticopyright 1999. All rights reversed.

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DROP DEAD

Clifford D. Simak

THE CRITTERS were unbelievable. They looked like something from the maudlin
pen of a well-alcoholed cartoonist.

One  herd of  them  clustered in  a semicircle  in front  of the  ship, not
jittery  or  belligerent  -  just looking  at  us.  And  that was  strange.
Ordinarily, when a spaceship  sets down on a virgin planet, it takes a week
at least  for any  life that might  have seen or  heard it to  creep out of
hiding and sneak a look around.

The critters  were almost cow-size, but  nohow as graceful as  a cow. Their
bodies  were  pushed together  as  if every  blessed  one of  them had  run
full-tilt into  a wall. And they were just as lumpy  as you'd expect from a
collision like that. Their hides were splashed with large squares of pastel
color -  the kind of color  one never finds on  any self-respecting animal:
violet, pink,  orange, chartreuse, to  name only a few.  The overall effect
was of a checkerboard done by an old lady who made crazy quilts.

And that, by far, was not the worst of it.

From their heads and  other parts of their anatomy sprouted a weird sort of
vegetation,  so   that  it  appeared  each   animal  was  hiding,  somewhat
ineffectively, behind a skimpy  thicket. To compound the situation and make
it completely insane, fruits and vegetables - or what appeared to be fruits
and vegetables - grew from the vegetation.

So we stood there,  the critters looking at us and us looking back at them,
and finally  one of them walked forward until it was  no more than six feet
from us. It stood  there for a moment, gazing at us soulfully, then dropped
dead at our feet.

The rest of the  herd turned around and trotted awkwardly away, for all the
world as if they  had done what they had come to do  and now could go about
their business.

Julian Oliver, our botanist, put up a hand and rubbed his balding head with
an absentminded motion.

"Another what  is it coming up!" he moaned. "Why  couldn't it, for once, be
something plain and simple?"

"It never  is," I told him.  "Remember that bush out  on Hamal V that spent
half its life  as a kind of glorified tomato and the  other half as grade A
poison ivy?"

"I remember it," Oliver said sadly.

Max  Weber,  our biologist,  walked  over  to the  critter,  reached out  a
cautious foot and prodded it.

"Trouble is,"  he said, "that Hamal  tomato was Julian's baby  and this one
here is mine."

"I wouldn't  say entirely yours,"  Oliver retorted. "What do  you call that
underbrush growing out of it?"

I  came in  fast  to head  off an  argument.  I had  listened to  those two
quarreling for  the past  twelve years, across  several hundred light-years
and on  a couple  dozen planets. I  couldn't stop it  here, I  knew, but at
least I could postpone it until they had something vital to quarrel about.

"Cut it  out," I said. "It's  only a couple of  hours till nightfall and we
have to get the camp set up."

"But this critter," Weber said. "We can't just leave it here."

"Why not?  There are millions more  of them. This one  will stay right here
and even if it doesn't -"

"But it dropped dead!"

"So it was old and feeble."

"It wasn't. It was right in the prime of life."

"We can talk about  it later," said Alfred Kemper, our bacteriologist. "I'm
as interested  as you two, but  what Bob says is right.  We have to get the
camp set up."

"Another  thing," I  added, looking  hard at  all of  them. "No  matter how
innocent this place may  look, we observe planet rules. No eating anything.
No  drinking any  water.  No wandering  off alone.  No carelessness  of any
kind."

"There's nothing  here," said Weber. "Just the  herds of critters. Just the
endless plains. No trees, no hills, no nothing."

He really didn't mean it. He knew as well as I did the reason for observing
planet rules. He only wanted to argue.

"All right,"  I said, "which is  it? Do we set  up camp or do  we spend the
night up in the ship?"

That did it.

We had  the camp set up  before the sun went  down and by dusk  we were all
settled in.  Carl Parsons,  our ecologist, had  the stove together  and the
supper started before the last tent peg was driven.

I dug  out my diet kit  and mixed up my  formula and all of  them kidded me
about it, the way they always did.

It didn't bother me. Their jibs 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 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,  bunting 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  Alderbaran 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," be  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 be  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," 1 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 wrathfufly 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."

"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  bead 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.

They spread for miles,  as far as one could see on the star-lit plains, but
the spaceship  divided them and they  flowed to either side  of it and then
flowed back again, and  beyond the spaceship there was a little sector that
they never touched.

I thought how we could have been safe staying on the ground and huddling in
that sector, but that's one of the things a man never can foresee.

The stampede lasted for  almost an hour. When it was all over, we came down
and surveyed  the damage. The animals in their  cages, lined up between the
ship  and the  camp,  were safe.  All but  one of  the sleeping  tents were
standing. The  lantern still  burned brightly on the  table. But everything
else  was gone. Our  food supply was  trampled in  the ground. Much  of the
equipment was lost and  wrecked. On either side of the camp, the ground was
churned up like a half-plowed field. The whole thing was a mess.

It looked as if we were licked.

The  tent Kemper and  I used for  sleeping still  stood, so our  notes were
safe. The animals  were all right. But that was all we  had - the notes and
animals.

"I  need  three more  weeks,"  said Weber.  "Give  me just  three weeks  to
complete the tests."

"We haven't got three weeks," I answered. "All our food is gone."

"The emergency rations in the ship?'

"That's for going home."

"We can go a little hungry."

He glared  at us - at  each of us in  turn - challenging us  to do a little
starving.

"I can  go three weeks," he  said, "without any food  at all? "We could eat
critter," suggested Parsons. "We could take a chance."

Weber  shook  his head.  "Not  yet.  In three  weeks,  when  the tests  are
finished, then  maybe we will know.  Maybe we won't need  those rations for
going home. Maybe we can stock up on critters and eat our heads off all the
way to Caph."

I  looked around  at the  rest of them,  but I  knew, before I  looked, the
answer I would get.

"All right," I said. "We'll try it."

"It's all  right for you," Fullerton retorted  hastily. "You have your diet
kit."

Parsons  reached out and  grabbed him and  shook him  so hard that  be went
cross-eyed. "We don't talk like that about those diet kits."

Then Parsons let him go.

We set  up double guards, for the stampede  had wrecked our warning system,
but none of us got much sleep. We were too upset.

Personally, I did some worrying about why the critters had stampeded. There
was  nothing on  the  planet that  could scare  them.  There were  no other
animals.  There was  no  thunder or  lightning -  as a  matter of  fact, it
appeared that  the planet might have no  boisterous weather ever. And there
seemed to  be nothing in the critter makeup,  from our observation of them,
that would set them off emotionally.

But there must be a reason and a purpose, I told myself. And there must be,
too, in  their dropping  dead for us.  But was the  purpose intelligence or
instinct? That was what bothered me most. It kept me awake all night long.

At daybreak,  a critter walked in and died for  us happily. We went without
our breakfast and, when  noon came, no one said anything about lunch, so we
skipped that, too.

Late in  the afternoon, I climbed  the ladder to get  some food for supper.
There wasn't  any. Instead,  I found five  of the fattest  punkins you ever
laid your eyes on.  They had chewed holes through the packing boxes and the
food was cleaned out. The sacks were limp and empty. They'd even managed to
get the lid off the coffee can somehow and had eaten every bean.

The five  of them sat contentedly in a corner,  blinking smugly at me. They
didn't make a racket, as they usually did. Maybe they knew they were in the
wrong or  maybe they were just  too full. For once,  perhaps, they'd gotten
all they could eat.

I just stood  there and looked at them and I knew  how they'd gotten on the
ship. I  blamed myself, not them.  If only I'd found  the time to take down
the unloading  rig, they'd never gotten in. But  then I remembered how that
dangling rope  had saved my life and Weber's  and I couldn't decide whether
I'd done right or wrong.

I went  over to  the corner and picked  the punkins up. I  stuffed three of
them in my pockets  and carried the other two. I climbed down from the ship
and walked up to camp. I put the punkins on the table.

"Here they  are," I  said. "They were  in the ship. That's  why we couldn't
find them. They climbed up the rope."

Weber took one look at them. "They look well fed. Did they leave anything?"

"Not a scrap. They cleaned us out entirely."

The punkins  were quite  happy. It was  apparent they were glad  to be back
with us again. After all, they'd eaten everything in reach and there was no
further reason for their staying in the ship.

Parsons picked up a knife and walked over to the critter that had died that
morning.

"Tie on your bibs," he said.

He carved  out big steaks and  threw them on the table  and then he lit his
stove. I  retreated to my tent as soon as he  started cooking, for never in
my life have I smelled anything as good as those critter steaks.

I  broke out  the kit and  mixed me up  some goo  and sat there  eating it,
feeling sorry for myself.

Kemper came in after a while and sat down on his cot.

"Do you want to hear?" he asked me.

"Go ahead," I invited him resignedly.

"It's wonderful. It's got everything you've ever eaten backed clear off the
table. We  had three  different kinds of  red meat and  a slab  of fish and
something  that resembled  lobster, only  better. And  there's one  kind of
fruit growing out of that bush in the middle of the back..."

"And tomorrow you drop dead."

"I don't  think so,"  Kemper said. "The  animals have been  thriving on it.
There's nothing wrong with them."

It seemed  that Kemper  was right. Between  the animals and men,  it took a
critter   a   day.  The   critters   didn't   seem  to   mind.  They   were
johnny-on-the-spot. They walked in promptly, one at a time, and keeled over
every morning.

The way  the men  and animals ate  was positively indecent.  Parsons cooked
great platters  of different kinds of meat and  fish and fowl and what-not.
He prepared huge bowls  of vegetables. He heaped other bowls with fruit. He
racked up  combs of honey and  the men licked the  platters clean. They sat
around  with belts  unloosened and  patted their  bulging bellies  and were
disgustingly contented.

I waited  for them to  break out in a  rash or to start  turning green with
purple spots or grow scales or something of the sort. But nothing happened.
They thrived, just as the animals were thriving. They felt better than they
ever had.

Then, one morning, Fullerton turned up sick. He lay on his cot flushed with
fever.  It  looked like  Centaurian  virus, although  we'd been  inoculated
against that.  In fact,  we'd been inoculated and  immunized against almost
everything. Each time, before we blasted off on another survey, they jabbed
us full of booster shots.

I  didn't think  much of  it. I was  fairly well  convinced, for a  time at
least, that all that was wrong with him was overeating.

Oliver, who  knew a little about  medicine, but not much,  got the medicine
chest out of the ship and pumped Fullerton full of some new antibiotic that
came highly recommended for almost everything.

We went on with our work, expecting he'd be on his feet in a day or two.

But he wasn't. If anything, he got worse.

Oliver went  through the medicine chest,  reading all the labels carefully,
but didn't  find anything that seemed to be  the proper medication. He read
the first-aid booklet. It didn't tell him anything except how to set broken
legs or apply artificial respiration and simple things like that.

Kemper had been doing  a lot of worrying, so he had Oliver take a sample of
Fullerton's blood  and then prepared a  slide. When he looked  at the blood
through the  microscope, he  found that it  swarmed with bacteria  from the
critters.  Oliver took  some more  blood samples  and Kemper  prepared more
slides, just to double-check, and there was no doubt about it.

By this time, all  of us were standing around the table watching Kemper and
waiting for  the verdict. I know the same thing must  have been in the mind
of each of us.

It was Oliver who put it into words. "Who is next?" he asked.

Parsons stepped up and Oliver took the sample.

We waited anxiously.

Finally Kemper straightened.

"You  have  them,  too," he  said  to  Parsons. "Not  as  high  a count  as
Fullerton."

Man after  man stepped up. All  of us had the bacteria,  but in my case the
count was low.

"It's the critter," Parsons said. "Bob hasn't been eating any."

"But cooking kills -" Oliver started to say.

"You can't be sure.  These bacteria would have to be highly adaptable. They
do  the  work of  thousands  of  other microorganisms.  They're  a sort  of
bandy-man, a  jack-of-all-trades. They  can acclimatize. They  can meet new
situations. They haven't weakened the strain by becoming specialized."

"Besides," said Parsons, "we  don't cook all of it. We don't cook the fruit
and most of you guys raise hell if a steak is more than singed."

"What I  can't figure out is why it should  be Fullerton," Weber said. "Why
should his count be  higher? He started on the critter the same time as the
rest of us."

I remembered that day down by the creek.

"He  got a  head start on  the rest of  you," I  explained. "He ran  out of
toothpicks and took to chewing grass stems. I caught him at it."

I know it wasn't very comforting. It meant that in another week or two, all
of them would have as high a count as Fullerton. But there was no sense not
telling them.  It would have been  criminal not to. There  was no place for
wishful thinking in a situation like that.

"We can't  stop eating  critter," said Weber.  "It's all the  food we have.
There's nothing we can do."

"I have a hunch," Kemper replied, "it's too late anyhow."

"If we started home right now," I said, "there's my diet kit..."

They didn't let me  finish making my offer. They slapped me on the back and
pounded one another and laughed like mad.

It wasn't funny. They just needed something they could laugh at.

"It wouldn't do any good," said Kemper. 'We've already had it. Anyhow, your
diet kit wouldn't last us all the way back home."

'We could have a try at it," I argued.

"It may be just  a transitory thing," Parsons said. "Just a bit of fever. A
little upset from a change of diet."

We all hoped that, of course.

But Fullerton got no better.

Weber  took blood  samples of the  animals and  they bad a  bacterial count
almost as high as Fullerton's - much higher than when he'd taken it before.

Weber blamed himself. "I should have kept closer check. I should have taken
tests every day or so."

"What difference  would it have made?" demanded  Parsons. "Even if you had,
even if  you'd found a lot of bacteria in the  blood, we'd still have eaten
critter. There was no other choice."

"Maybe  it's  not  the  bacteria,"  said  Oliver.  'We may  be  jumping  at
conclusions. It may be something else that Fullerton picked up."

Weber  brightened up  a bit. "That's  right. The  animals still seem  to be
okay."

They were bright and chipper, in the best of health.

We waited. Fullerton got neither worse nor better.

Then, one night, he disappeared.

Oliver, who had been sitting with him, had dozed off for a moment. Parsons,
on guard, had heard nothing.

We  hunted for  him  for three  full days.  He couldn't  have gone  far, we
figured. He had wandered  off in a delirium and he didn't have the strength
to cover any distance.

But we didn't find him.

We  did find  one  queer thing,  however. It  was  a ball  of  some strange
substance, white  and fresh-appearing. It was  about four feet in diameter.
It lay at the  bottom of a little gully, hidden out of sight, as if someone
or something might have brought it there and hidden it away.

We did some cautious  poking at it and we rolled it back and forth a little
and wondered what it  was, but we were hunting Fullerton and we didn't have
the time to do  much investigating. Later on, we agreed, we would come back
and get it and find out what it was.

Then the  animals came down with the fever, one  after another - all except
the controls,  which had  been eating regular  food until the  stampede had
destroyed the supply.

After that, of course, all of them ate critter.

By the end of two days, most of the animals were down.

Weber worked with them, scarcely taking time to rest. We all helped as best
we could.

Blood samples  showed a greater concentration  of bacteria. Weber started a
dissection, but  never finished it. Once he got the  animal open, he took a
quick look at  it and scraped the whole thing off the  table into a pail. I
saw him, but I don't think any of the others did. We were pretty busy.

I asked him about  it later in the day, when we were alone for a moment. He
briskly brushed me off.

I went to bed  early that night because I had the second guard. It seemed I
had no more  than shut my eyes when I was brought  upright by a racket that
raised goose pimples on every inch of me.

I tumbled out of bed and scrabbled around to find my shoes and get them on.
By that time, Kemper had dashed out of the tent.

There  was trouble  with  the animals.  They  were fighting  to break  out,
chewing the  bars of their cages and throwing  themselves against them in a
blind  and  terrible frenzy.  And  all  the time  they  were squealing  and
screaming. To listen to them set your teeth on edge.

Weber dashed around with a hypodermic. After what seemed hours, we had them
full of sedative. A few of them broke loose and got away, but the rest were
sleeping peacefully.

I got a gun and took over guard duty while the other men went back to bed.

I  stayed down near  the cages, walking  back and  forth because I  was too
tense to  do much sitting down.  It seemed to me  that between the animals'
frenzy to  escape and Fullerton's disappearance,  there was a parallel that
was too similar for comfort.

I tried to review all that had happened on the planet and I got bogged down
time  after time  as I  tried to  make the  picture dovetail. The  trail of
thought I followed kept  turning back to Kemper's worry about the critters'
lack of a defense mechanism.

Maybe,  I  told myself,  they  had a  defense  mechanism, after  all -  the
slickest, smoothest, trickiest one Man ever had encountered.

As soon as the  camp awoke, I went to our tent to stretch out for a moment,
perhaps to catch a catnap. Worn out, I slept for hours.

Kemper woke me.

"Get up, Bob!" he said. "For the love of God, get up!"

It was  late afternoon and the last rays of  the sun were streaming through
the tent flap. Kemper's  face was haggard. It was as if he'd suddenly grown
old since I'd seen him less than twelve hours before.

"They're  encysting,"   he  gasped.   "They're  turning  into   cocoons  or
chrysalises or..."

I sat up quickly. "That one we found out there in the field!"

He nodded.

"Fullerton?' I askecl

"We'll go out and see, all five of us, leaving the camp and animals alone."

We had some trouble finding it because the land was so flat and featureless
that there were no landmarks.

But finally we located  it, just as dusk was setting in. The ball had split
in two - not in a clean break, in a jagged one. It looked like an egg after
a  chicken has  been hatched.  And the  halves lay  there in  the gathering
darkness, in  the silence  underneath the sudden  glitter of the  stars - a
last farewell and a new beginning and a terrible alien fact.

I tried to say  something, but my brain was so numb that I was not entirely
sure just  what I should say.  Anyhow, the words died  in the dryness of my
mouth and the thickness of my tongue before I could get them out.

For it was not  only the two halves of the cocoon - it was the marks within
that hollow,  the impression of what had  been there, blurred and distorted
by the marks of what it had become.

We fled back to camp.

Someone, I think it was Oliver, got the lantern lighted. We stood uneasily,
unable  to look  at one  another, knowing  that the  time was past  for all
dissembling, that  there was no use  of glossing over or  denying what we'd
seen in the dim light in the gully.

"Bob is the only  one who has a chance," Kemper finally said, speaking more
concisely than seemed possible. "I think be should leave right now. Someone
must get back to Caph. Someone has to tell them."

He looked across the circle of lantern light at me.

'Well," he said sharply, "get going! What's the matter with you?'

"You were right," I  said, not much more than whispering. "Remember how you
wondered about a defense mechanism?"

"They have  it," Weber agreed. "The  best you can find.  There's no beating
them. They  don't fight you. They  absorb you. They make  you into them. No
wonder there are just  the critters here. No wonder the planet's ecology is
simple. They have you  pegged and measured from the instant you set foot on
the planet.  Take one  drink of water.  Chew a single grass  stem. Take one
bite of critter. Do any one of these things and they have you cold."

Oliver came  out of the dark and  walked across the lantern-lighted circle.
He stopped in front of me.

"Here are your diet kit and notes," he said.

"But I can't run out on you!"

"Forget us!" Parsons barked at me. "We aren't human any more. In a few more
days..."

He grabbed the lantern and strode down the cages and held the lantern high,
so that we could see.

"Look," he said.

There were no animals.  There were just the cocoons and the little critters
and the cocoons that had split in half.

I saw Kemper looking  at me and there was, of all things, compassion on his
face.

"You  don't want  to stay,"  he told  me. "If you  do, in  a day or  two, a
critter will come in and drop dead for you. And you'll go crazy all the way
back home - wondering which one of us it was."

He turned away then.  They all turned away from me and suddenly it seemed I
was all alone.

Weber had  found an  axe somewhere and  he started walking down  the row of
cages, knocking off the bars to let the little critters out.

I  walked slowly  over to  the ship and  stood at  the foot of  the ladder,
holding the notes and the diet kit tight against my chest.

When I got  there, I turned around and looked back at  them and it seemed I
couldn't leave them.

I thought  of all we'd been  through together and when  I tried to think of
specific things,  the only  thing I could  think about was  how they always
kidded me about the diet kit.

And I  thought of  the times I  had to leave  and go off  somewhere and eat
alone so  that I couldn't smell the food. I thought  of almost ten years of
eating that damn goo and that I could never eat like a normal human because
of my ulcerated stomach.

Maybe they were  the lucky ones, I told myself. If a  man got turned into a
critter,  he'd probably  come out with  a whole  stomach and never  have to
worry about how much or what he ate. The critters never ate anything except
the grass, but maybe,  I thought, that grass tasted just as good to them as
a steak or a pumpkin pie would taste to me.

So I stood there  for a while and I thought about it.  Then I took the diet
kit and  flung it out into  the darkness as far  as I could throw  it and 1
dropped the notes to the ground.

I walked back into the camp and the first man I saw was Parsons.

"What have you got for supper?" I asked him.