Clifford Simak - New Folks' Home - And Other Stories

“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 jibes 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 than 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, hunting 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!