The Past Through Tomorrow (113 page)

He watched her slice off excess tissue. “Mary,” he mused, “what keeps that silly thing alive?”

“You’ve got the question inverted,” she answered, not looking up; “the proper form is: why should it die? Why shouldn’t it go on forever?”

“I wish to the Devil it would die!” came the voice of Dr. Hardy from behind them. “Then we could observe and find out why.”

“You’ll never find out why from Mrs. ‘Awkins, boss,” Mary answered, hands and eyes still busy. “The key to the matter is in the gonads—she hasn’t any.”

“Hummph! What do you know about it?”

“A woman’s intuition. What do
you
know about it?”

“Nothing, absolutely nothing!—which puts me ahead of you and your intuition.”

“Maybe. At least,” Mary added slyly, “I knew you before you were house-broken.”

“A typical female argument. Mary, that lump of muscle cackled and laid eggs before either one of us was born, yet it doesn’t know anything.” He scowled at it. “Lazarus, I’d gladly trade it for one pair of carp, male and female.”

“Why carp?” asked Lazarus.

“Because carp don’t seem to die. They get killed, or eaten, or starve to death, or succumb to infection, but so far as we know they don’t die.”

“Why not?”

“That’s what I was trying to find out when we were rushed off on this damned safari. They have unusual intestinal flora and it may have something to do with that. But I think it has to do with the fact that they never stop growing.”

Mary said something inaudibly. Hardy said, “What are you muttering about? Another intuition?”

“I said, ‘Amebas don’t die.’ You said yourself that every ameba now alive has been alive for, oh, fifty million years or so. Yet they don’t grow indefinitely larger and they certainly can’t have intestinal flora.”

“No guts,” said Lazarus and blinked.

“What a terrible pun, Lazarus. But what I said is true. They don’t die. They just twin and keep on living.”

“Guts or no guts,” Hardy said impatiently, “there may be a structural parallel. But I’m frustrated for lack of experimental subjects. Which reminds me: Lazarus, I’m glad you dropped in. I want you to do me a favor.”

“Speak up. I might be feeling mellow.”

“You’re an interesting case yourself, you know. You didn’t follow our genetic pattern; you anticipated it. I don’t want your body to go into the converter; I want to examine it.”

Lazarus snorted. “‘Sail right with me, bud. But you’d better tell your successor what to look for—you may not live that long. And I’ll bet you anything that you like that nobody’ll find it by poking around in my cadaver!”

The planet they had hoped for was there when they looked for it, green, lush, and young, and looking as much like Earth as another planet could. Not only was it Earthlike but the rest of the system duplicated roughly the pattern of the Solar System—small terrestrial planets near this sun, large Jovian planets farther out. Cosmologists had never been able to account for the Solar System; they had alternated between theories of origin which had failed to stand up and “sound” mathematico-physical “proofs” that such a system could never have originated in the first place. Yet here was another enough like it to suggest that its paradoxes were not unique, might even be common.

But more startling and even more stimulating and certainly more disturbing was another fact brought out by telescopic observation as they got close to the planet. The planet held life…intelligent life…civilized life.

Their cities could be seen. Their engineering works, strange in form and purpose, were huge enough to be seen from space just as ours can be seen.

Nevertheless, though it might mean that they must again pursue their weary hegira, the dominant race did not appear to have crowded the available living space. There might be room for their little colony on those broad continents. If a colony was welcome—

“To tell the truth,” Captain King fretted, “I hadn’t expected anything like this. Primitive aborigines perhaps, and we certainly could expect dangerous animals, but I suppose I unconsciously assumed that man was the only really civilized race. We’re going to have to be very cautious.”

King made up a scouting party headed by Lazarus; he had come to have confidence in Lazarus’ practical sense and will to survive. King wanted to head the party himself, but his concept of his duty as a ship’s captain forced him to forego it. But Slayton Ford could go; Lazarus chose him and Ralph Schultz and his lieutenants. The rest of the party were specialists-biochemist, geologist, ecologist, stereographer, several sorts of psychologists and sociologists to study the natives including one authority in McKelvy’s structural theory of communication whose task would be to find some way to talk with the natives.

No weapons—

King flatly refused to arm them. “Your scouting party is expendable,” he told Lazarus bluntly; “for we cannot risk offending them by any sort of fighting for any reason, even in self-defense. You are ambassadors, not soldiers. Don’t forget it.”

Lazarus returned to his stateroom, came back and gravely delivered to King one blaster. He neglected to mention the one still strapped to his leg under his kilt.

As King was about to tell them to man the boat and carry out their orders they were interrupted by Janice Schmidt, chief nurse to the Families’ congenital defectives. She pushed her way past and demanded the Captain’s attention.

Only a nurse could have obtained it at that moment; she had professional stubbornness to match his and half a century more practice at being balky. He glared at her. “What’s the meaning of this interruption?”

“Captain, I must speak with you about one of my children.”

“Nurse, you are decidedly out of order. Get out. See me in my office-after taking it up with the Chief Surgeon.”

She put her hands on her hips. “You’ll see me now. This is the landing party, isn’t it? I’ve got something you have to hear before they leave.”

King started to speak, changed his mind, merely said, “Make it brief.”

She did so. Hans Weatheral, a youth of some ninety years and still adolescent in appearance through a hyper-active thymus gland, was one of her charges. He had inferior but not moronic mentality, a chronic apathy, and a neuro-muscular deficiency which made him too weak to feed himself—and an acute sensitivity to telepathy.

He had told Janice that he knew all about the planet around which they orbited. His friends on the planet had told him about it…and they were expecting him.

The departure of the landing boat was delayed while King and Lazarus investigated. Hans was matter of fact about his information and what little they could check of what he said was correct. But he was not too helpful about his “friends.”

“Oh, just people,” he said, shrugging at their stupidity. “Much like back home. Nice people. Go to work, go to school, go to church. Have kids and enjoy themselves. You’ll like them.”

But he was quite clear about one point: his friends were expecting him; therefore he must go along.

Against his wishes and his better judgment Lazarus saw added to his party Hans Weatheral, Janice Schmidt, and a stretcher for Hans.

When the party returned three days later Lazarus made a long private report to King while the specialist reports were being analyzed and combined. “It’s amazingly like Earth, Skipper, enough to make you homesick. But it’s also different enough to give you the willies—like looking at your own face in the mirror and having it turn out to have three eyes and no nose. Unsettling.”

“But how about the natives?”

“Let me tell it. We made a quick swing of the day side, for a bare eyes look. Nothing you haven’t seen through the ‘scopes. Then I put her down where Hans told me to, in a clearing near the center of one of their cities. I wouldn’t have picked the place myself; I would have preferred to land in the bush and reconnoitre. But you told me to play Hans’ hunches.”

“You were free to use your judgment,” King reminded him.

“Yes, yes. Anyhow we did it. By the time the techs had sampled the air and checked for hazards there was quite a crowd around us. They—well, you’ve seen the stereographs.”

“Yes. Incredibly android.”

“Android, hell! They’re
men
. Not humans, but men just the same.” Lazarus looked puzzled. “I don’t like it.”

King did not argue. The pictures had shown bipeds seven to eight feet tall, bilaterally symmetric, possessed of internal skeletal framework, distinct heads, lens-and-camera eyes. Those eyes were their most human and appealing features; they were large, limpid, and tragic, like those of a Saint Bernard dog.

It was well to concentrate on the eyes; their other features were not as tolerable. King looked away from the loose, toothless mouths, the bifurcated upper lips. He decided that it might take a long, long time to learn to be fond of these creatures. “Go ahead,” he told Lazarus.

“We opened up and I stepped out alone, with my hands empty and trying to look friendly and peaceable. Three of them stepped forward—eagerly, I would say. But they lost interest in me at once; they seemed to be waiting for somebody else to come out. So I gave orders to carry Hans out.

“Skipper, you wouldn’t believe it. They fawned over Hans like a long lost brother. No, that doesn’t describe it. More like a king returning home in triumph. They were polite enough with the rest of us, in an offhand way, but they fairly slobbered over Hans.” Lazarus hesitated. “Skipper? Do you believe in reincarnation?”

“Not exactly. I’m open-minded about it. I’ve read the report of the Frawling Committee, of course.”

“I’ve never had any use for the notion myself. But how else could you account for the reception they gave Hans?”

“I don’t account for it. Get on with your report. Do you think it is going to be possible for us to colonize here?”

“Oh,” said Lazarus, “they left no doubt on that point. You see, Hans really can talk to them, telepathically. Hans tells us that their gods have authorized us to live here and the natives have already made plans to receive us.”

“Eh?”

“That’s right. They want us.”

“Well! That’s a relief.”

“Is it?”

King studied Lazarus’ glum features. “You’ve made a report favorable on every point. Why the sour look?”

“I don’t know. I’d just rather we found a planet of our own. Skipper, anything this easy has a hitch in it.”

THE JOCKAIRA
(or Zhacheira, as some prefer) turned an entire city over to the colonists.

Such astounding cooperation, plus the sudden discovery by almost every member of the Howard Families that he was sick for the feel of dirt under foot and free air in his lungs, greatly speeded the removal from ship to ground. It had been anticipated that at least an Earth year would be needed for such transition and that somnolents would be waked only as fast as they could be accommodated dirtside. But the limiting factor now was the scanty ability of the ship’s boats to transfer a hundred thousand people as they were roused.

The Jockaira city was not designed to fit the needs of human beings. The Jockaira were not human beings, their physical requirements were somewhat different, and their cultural needs as expressed in engineering were vastly different. But a city, any city, is a machine to accomplish certain practical ends: shelter, food supply, sanitation, communication; the internal logic of these prime requirements, as applied by different creatures to different environments, will produce an unlimited number of answers. But, as applied by any race of warm-blooded, oxygen-breathing androidal creatures to a particular environment, the results, although strange, are necessarily such that Terran humans can use them. In some ways the Jockaira city looked as wild as a pararealist painting, but humans have lived in igloos, grass shacks, and even in the cybernautomated burrow under Antarctica; these humans could and did move into the Jockaira city—and of course at once set about reshaping it to suit them better.

It was not difficult even though there was much to be done. There were buildings already standing-shelters with roofs on them, the artificial cave basic to all human shelter requirements. It did not matter what the Jockaira had used such a structure for; humans could use it for almost anything: sleeping, recreation, eating, storage, production. There were actual “caves” as well, for the Jockaira dig in more than we do. But humans easily turn troglodyte on occasion, in New York as readily as in Antarctica.

There was fresh potable water piped in for drinking and for limited washing. A major lack lay in plumbing; the city had no over-all drainage system. The “Jocks” did not water-bathe and their personal sanitation requirements differed from ours and were taken care of differently. A major effort had to be made to jury-rig equivalents of shipboard refreshers and adapt them to hook in with Jockaira disposal arrangements. Minimum necessity ruled; baths would remain a rationed luxury until water supply and disposal could be increased at least tenfold. But baths are not a necessity.

But such efforts at modification were minor compared with the crash program to set up hydroponic farming, since most of the somnolents could not be waked until a food supply was assured. The do-it-now crowd wanted to tear out every bit of hydroponic equipment in the
New Frontiers
at once, ship it down dirtside, set it up and get going, while depending on stored supplies during the change-over; a more cautious minority wanted to move only a pilot plant while continuing to grow food in the ship; they pointed out that unsuspected fungus or virus on the strange planet could result in disaster…starvation.

The minority, strongly led by Ford and Barstow and supported by Captain King, prevailed; one of the ship’s hydroponic farms was drained and put out of service. Its machinery was broken down into parts small enough to load into ship’s boats.

But even this never reached dirtside. The planet’s native farm products turned out to be suitable for human food and the Jockaira seemed almost pantingly anxious to give them away. Instead, efforts were turned to establishing Earth crops in native soil in order to supplement Jockaira foodstuffs with sorts the humans were used to. The Jockaira moved in and almost took over that effort; they were superb “natural” farmers (they had no need for synthetics on their undepleted planet) and seemed delighted to attempt to raise anything their guests wanted.