Hal Clement - Cycle of Fire

“I should think they would miss some.”

“They do, as nearly as we can tell. Every now and then a member of our race turns up, or sometimes even a small group of them, whose parent must have survived the whole cold season as a wild animal; at least, we have no record of him.”

“Don’t you know how many children a given person will have?”

“It is quite impossible to tell, depending on things such as his individual weight.”

“But that doesn’t seem to vary much.”

“During normal life, no, but at the time of dying one may have gone for very long periods without food, or on the other hand have eaten very heavily and very recently — all according to the opportunities. Also it is impossible to tell whether any of the young children have been eaten by wild animals before they are caught, in the case of Dar Lang Ahn’s people, since they do not take proper care of them as we do.”

“I see.” So did Dar. Good though his memory was it contained little of his brief existence before being “caught,” but what little there was fitted in with what the Teacher said. He wondered why his own Teachers did not take precautions like those — and then realized that they had no chance; either the “hot” people would have to cooperate, which they seemed unwilling to do, or his own race would have to keep a group of the others under control during the hot period, as this creature did with his villagers during the cold. This seemed difficult, to put it mildly; the other race had got far enough ahead technically to have pretty complete control of the situation. Dar began to suspect strongly that this Teacher had not been frank; there were reasons other than his personal disapproval of science behind his objections to the introduction of human knowledge.

That thought grew in his mind as the conversation went on, and gave birth to others. It was Dar Lang Ahn, after the robot had started back to the flier, who made the suggestion that some of the other Teachers in their volcanically warmed retreats be contacted and questioned; and even Kruger, who knew him better than any other human being ever would, did not realize just what he was trying to find out.

AGAIN AND again Abyormen swung around its almost cometary orbit, and closer and closer Theer drew to its blazing primary. Abyormen, very slowly, grew hotter. To its natives this was a matter of little moment; the temperature had not yet reached the value which would activate the bacteria whose life processes would load the atmosphere with oxides of nitrogen. Until that happened Dar’s people cared little whether the oceans of their planet were freezing or boiling.

The temperature did not bother the human scientists, either. Most of them had from the beginning been wearing complex protective garments which virtually air-conditioned them. Nevertheless they knew that more protection would be needed soon. Experiments with the native life, using not only bacteria but animals and plants large enough to be observed directly, had told them what to expect.

Kruger was more than satisfied with the situation. His friend had evidently become completely absorbed in the business of acquiring knowledge from the human visitors. Kruger could not always keep up with him, but the boy no longer cared much about that. If anything was certain, it was that Dar Lang Ahn had already collected far too much information to relay it all to his Teachers before the end of his normal life span. There would be no alternative to his remaining in the shelter under the ice cap when it was sealed, which meant that he would automatically become a Teacher himself.

Once or twice the boy’s conscience bothered him a trifle; he wondered whether it would not have been fairer to point out to Dar what all this time spent with the human visitors must necessarily entail. Each time he thought of this, however, he managed to convince himself that the native was old enough to know what he was doing.

It might have helped had he brought the matter up, just the same.

While the human scientists could, of course, work even in the hot season of Abyormen, action would be much more awkward. Therefore they were trying to get their basic information before the change occurred. Dar watched everything that went on, as far as possible; Kruger was much less enthusiastic after seeing one of the biological tests.

This occurred after the chain-reaction effect of heat on the local bacteria had been discovered. A soil sample from the planet had been used to cover the floor of an airtight cage, and several small animals of the sort Dar and Kruger had encountered in the crater had been introduced. Several native plants were growing there as well; the biologists had tried to reproduce the planet’s environment in miniature. This done, they proceeded to raise the temperature — gradually, to minimize the chance of thermal shock’s complicating the situation.

The cage was well enough insulated to prevent steam from condensing on the walls, so it was still possible to see what went on within. Some water, of course, was still liquid, since the boiling of the rest had raised the pressure considerably; and quite suddenly a meter began to climb from the zero position.

It was simply a galvanometer, but it was mounted in series with a resistor consisting of a tiny, open vial of water inside the cage. The resistance of the liquid was dropping, and no one present doubted the cause. In a few seconds this became evident even to the naked eye, as the atmosphere within the cage took on a faint but unmistakable reddish-brown tint. The bacteria were at work; oxides of nitrogen were forming, acidifying any water that might still be present in liquid form — and doing something much more drastic to the life in the cage.

The animals had stopped moving, except for an uneasy turning of their heads. Each had drawn a little way from his neighbor, and stopped nibbling on the plants. For several seconds subjects and experimenters alike remained motionless while the suspense mounted.

Then the largest of the little creatures abruptly collapsed, and within the next thirty seconds the others had followed suit. Kruger stole a sidelong glance at Dar, but his little friend did not notice. He had both eyes fixed on the cage. The boy looked back at the animals, and suddenly felt sick. The tiny creatures were losing shape, melting into featureless puddles of protoplasm. The pools remained separate, even where two of the creatures had collapsed quite close together. A faint stirring motion became visible in the mounds of still-living jelly, and as he saw this Kruger’s stomach failed him. He raced for the outdoors.

Dar did not seem affected; he remained for the next half hour, which was about the time it took the last of the pools to organize itself into about fifty tiny wormlike things which bore no resemblance whatever to the animal from whose body material they had been formed. These were crawling about the cage, apparently perfectly able to take care of themselves.

The plants had changed also, though not by the same process. The leaves of the larger ones dropped away and the trunks shriveled slightly. At first the watchers had supposed that the growths were simply being killed by the heat, but this hypothesis was eliminated by the appearance of hundreds of tiny knoblike excrescences on the withered trunks. These swelled slowly, apparently at the expense of the parent plant, and finally fell free in a rain of spheres which lasted several minutes.

Smaller, grasslike plants had simply withered, but other things were rapidly sprouting in their places. Less than an hour was required to transform the cage from a respectable representation of the landscape outside the flier to something utterly alien to all of the watchers — Dar Lang Ahn included.