Clifford Simak - New Folks' Home - And Other Stories

“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,” I 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 wrathfully 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.”