Дэймон Найт - Orbit 10

“We will immediately contact the local authorities,” Adrian Durchbruch began as he bounded around on his feet on the springy ground, “and we will find whether-”

“Oh, shut up, Adrian,” Riddle said pleasantly. “This lady here knows where it can be found. If that were not so, I would have landed in some other place where a lady would know all about it. Time spent checking with authorities is always time lost. Where is the dorg, lady?”

“It went up in the high pasture this morning,” said the lady that was there. “It has been feeling so bad that we were worried about it. And you are the only one that knows what’s the matter with it. You, mad-eyes, I’m talking to you. You know what is bothering it, don’t you?”

“Gah, I’m afraid I do,” the cartoonist Dordogne grumbled sadly. “I’ve been afraid to say it or draw it, though. If it is true, then it will push me clear over the ledge, and everyone says I haven’t far to go. Don’t let it happen! I don’t want to be that crazy.”

“My husband followed him up there a while ago,” the lady said, “and he took his big Jim Bowie knife with him, in case we guessed right about it. They can’t hardly do it by themselves, you know. They’re not built for it. Oh, here they come now, and the little one is with them.”

The man, and the big dorg (moving painfully), and the little dorg were coming down the slope.

“But the big dorg is male!” Annalouise Krug cried out in unbelief.

“Yes, they have such a hard time of it,” the lady said. “There isn’t any other way to get anything started, though.”

The man and the big male dorg and the little female dorg came down to them.

“It wasn’t much trouble,” the man said. “He went to sleep.”

“The Tardemah, the deep sleep,” Riddle said reverently. “I should have guessed it.”

“Then I cut him open and took her out of his side,” the man said. “They will both be all right now.”

“By Caesarean section,” Annalouise mumbled. “Why didn’t we all guess it?” There was a loud snapping noise. “What was that?” Adrian demanded, bouncing around.

“My mind just snapped,” Dordogne said woozily. “I won’t bother to keep up appearances any longer. Now I will be crazy with a clear conscience.”

The little dorg was near grown within one month and was impregnated. In another month she produced a litter of ten. In another five weeks another, and in another five weeks still an­other. And the young ones produced at two months, and again in five weeks, and again in another five weeks. Quite soon there were a million of them, and then one hundred million, shipped all over the world now. These were big cow-sized animals of ex­cellent meat, and they ate only the rocks and waste hills where nothing had ever grown, turning it into fertile soil incidentally.

Soon there were a billion dorgs in the world ready for butcher­ing, and the numbers of them could be tapered off as soon as it seemed wise, and there was enough meat for everybody in the world.

“I have only one worry,” the trilobal psychologist James Rid­dle said as he met with Adrian Durchbruch and Annalouise Krug in a self-congratulatory session. J. P. Dordogne the mad cartoonist was in a sanitarium now and was really mad. “I keep remembering a part of those cave paintings at Lascaux.”

“What were they, James?” Annalouise Krug asked. Annalouise was not so much in the fashion as she had once been. Well-fed nations somehow set their ideals on more svelte types.

“They were the crossed-out animals, the chiseled-over animals, the funny-looking animals. They are funny-looking to us only because we have never seen them in the flesh. They are the ani­mals that did not survive. We don’t know why they did not. They were drawn originally with the same boldness as the rest of them.”

“We don’t know what the odds are,” Adrian said worriedly, forgetting to bounce. “We have no way at all to calculate them. It is so hard to take a census of things that aren’t. We will keep our fingers crossed and all fetishes working full time. Without primordial fetish there wouldn’t have been any animals or people at all.”

It went on smoothly for a year and a day after the dorgs had struck their proper world balance. There was plenty of meat for everyone in the world, there were plenty of dorgs, and they had to be segregated to prevent their being too many.

Then the index of dorg fertility fell. The numbers of them were raised up past the safe level again only by unsegregating all flocks. The index fell again and continued to fall. It disappeared.

The last dorgs were born. There was breathless waiting to see if some of them might not be fertile. They weren’t. It was all over with, and the world wailing raised higher than it had ever been.

“What we need is fresh insights, youthful impetus, not the woe­ful stutterings of aged minds,” Annalouise Krug was saying. “Aren’t there any other animals that can live on rocks?”

“No,” Adrian Durchbruch said sadly.

“Where does the species male come from in the first place?” she asked.

“It appears for the first time on a Monday morning in a comic strip or on a cave murus,” James Riddle said. “I believe it is something about the syndication that new formats in cartoons al­ways appear on Monday mornings.”

“Before that, I mean. Where does the male come from?” Anna­louise said.

“I don’t know,” Riddle groused.

“Well, somebody had better remember something right now,” Annalouise stated with a curious menace. “Riddle, what good does an extra lobe do you if you can’t remember something special? Come up with something, I say.”

“I can’t. There is nothing else to come up with,” Riddle said. But Annalouise picked the psychologist up and shook him till he near fell apart.

“Now remember something else,” she ordered.

“I can’t, Annalouise, there is nothing else to remember.”

“You have no idea how hard I will shake you if you don’t come up with something.” She gave him an idea of just how hard she could shake him.

“Now!” she ordered.

“Oh, yes, since my life is on the line, I will remember something else,” Riddle moaned, with not much wind left in him. “There are others of those cave paintings that are most curious. Some of them are painted and carved over and over and over again, always in the same region. Most of them are of the common animals of today. Did it come that close, do you think, with even the common ones of them? One at least (and this gives me some hope) was a common animal of today that had been crossed out as having failed. But someone was not content to let it remain crossed out. It was redrawn with great emphasis. And then redrawn and ex­panded again and again, always in the same region.”

“Let’s go to Dordogne right now with plenty of drawing materials,” Adrian snapped.

“But Dordogne is crazy,” Annalouise cried. “Always in what same region, Adrian?”

“We’re crazy, too, to think of it,” Adrian hooted, “but let’s go to him right now.”

“What region, James?” Annalouise insisted. “Always drawn over and over again in what same region?”

“The belly. Let’s go to Dordogne.”

They had Dordogne on his feet and drawing dorgs so pregnant that their bellies drug the ground. He was dazed, though, and sniffing.

“When you’ve drawn one pregnant dorg you’ve drawn them all,” he whimpered.

But they kept him at it. He collapsed, but they jerked him back to the task again. Who knows which may be the quickening stroke? “On your feet, Dordogne,” they yelled, “do it one more time!”