Clifford Simak - New Folks' Home - And Other Stories

I don’t know why I wasted time on him. He stared back at me stubbornly, but still with that awful light of hope and triumph on his face.

“I’ll keep my mouth shut,” I told him curtly. “I won’t say a word.”

“Thanks, Sutter,” he answered. “I appreciate it a lot.”

I knew from the way he said it that he could murder me with gusto.

We trudged back to camp.

The camp was all slicked up.

The dissecting mess had been cleared away and the table had been scrubbed so hard that it gleamed. Parsons was cooking supper and singing one of his obscene ditties. The other three sat around in their camp chairs and they had broken out some liquor and were human once again.

“All buttoned up?” I asked, but Oliver shook his head.

They poured a drink for Fullerton and he accepted it, a bit ungraciously, but he did take it. That was some improvement on the usual Double Eye.

They didn’t offer me any. They knew I couldn’t drink it.

“What have we got?” I asked.

“It could be something good,” said Oliver. “It’s a walking menu. It’s an all-purpose animal, for sure. It lays eggs, gives milk, makes honey. It has six different kinds of red meat, two of fowl, one of fish and a couple of others we can’t identify.”

“Lays eggs,” I said. “Gives milk. Then it reproduces.”

“Certainly,” said Weber. “What did you think?”

“There aren’t any young.”

Weber grunted. “Could be they have nursery areas. Certain places instinctively set aside in which to rear their young.”

“Or they might have instinctive birth control,” suggested Oliver. “That would fit in with the perfectly balanced ecology Kemper talks about.”

Weber snorted. “Ridiculous!”

“Not so ridiculous,” Kemper retorted. “Not half so ridiculous as some other things we found. Not one-tenth as ridiculous as no brain or nervous system. Not any more ridiculous than my bacteria.”

“Your bacteria!” Weber said. He drank down half a glass of liquor in a single gulp to make his disdain emphatic.

“The critters swarm with them,” Kemper went on. “You find them everywhere throughout the entire animal. Not just in the bloodstream, not in restricted areas, but in the entire organism. And all of them the same. Normally it takes a hundred different kinds of bacteria to make a metabolism work, but here there’s only one. And that one, by definition, must be general purpose—it must do all the work that the hundred other species do.”

He grinned at Weber. “I wouldn’t doubt but right there are your brains and nervous systems—the bacteria doubling in brass for both systems.”

Parsons came over from the stove and stood with his fists planted on his hips, a steak fork grasped in one hand and sticking out at a tangent from his body.

“If you ask me,” he announced, “there ain’t no such animal. The critters are all wrong. They can’t be made that way.”

“But they are,” said Kemper.

“It doesn’t make sense! One kind of life. One kind of grass for it to eat. I’ll bet that if we could make a census, we’d find the critter population is at exact capacity—just so many of them to the acre, figured down precisely to the last mouthful of grass. Just enough for them to eat and no more. Just enough so the grass won’t be overgrazed. Or undergrazed, for that matter.”

“What’s wrong with that?” I asked, just to needle him.

I thought for a minute he’d take the steak fork to me.

“What’s wrong with it?” he thundered. “Nature’s never static, never standing still. But here it’s standing still. Where’s the competition? Where’s the evolution?”

“That’s not the point,” said Kemper quietly. “The fact is that that’s the way it is. The point is why? How did it happen? How was it planned? Why was it planned?”

“Nothing’s planned,” Weber told him sourly. “You know better than to talk like that.”

Parsons went back to his cooking. Fullerton had wandered off somewhere. Maybe he was discouraged from hearing about the eggs and milk.

For a time, the four of us just sat.

Finally Weber said: “The first night we were here, I came out to relieve Bob at guard and I said to him …”

He looked at me. “You remember, Bob?”

“Sure. You said symbiosis.”

“And now?” asked Kemper.

“I don’t know. It simply couldn’t happen. But if it did—if it could —this critter would be the most beautifully logical example of symbiosis you could dream up. Symbiosis carried to its logical conclusion. Like, long ago, all the life-forms said let’s quit this feuding, let’s get together, let’s cooperate. All the plants and animals and fish and bacteria got together—”

“It’s far-fetched, of course,” said Kemper. “But, by and large, it’s not anything unheard of, merely carried further, that’s all. Symbiosis is a recognized way of life and there’s nothing—”

Parsons let out a bellow for them to come and get it, and I went to my tent and broke out my diet kit and mixed up a mess of goo. It was a relief to eat in private, without the others making cracks about the stuff I had to choke down.

I found a thin sheaf of working notes on the small wooden crate I’d set up for a desk. I thumbed through them while I ate. They were fairly sketchy and sometimes hard to read, being smeared with blood and other gook from the dissecting table. But I was used to that. I worked with notes like that all the blessed time. So I was able to decipher them.

The whole picture wasn’t there, of course, but there was enough to bear out what they’d told me and a good deal more as well.

For examples, the color squares that gave the critters their crazy-quiltish look were separate kinds of meat or fish or fowl or unknown food, whatever it might be. Almost as if each square was the present-day survivor of each ancient symbiont—if, in fact, there was any basis to this talk of symbiosis.

The egg-laying apparatus was described in some biologic detail, but there seemed to be no evidence of recent egg production. The same was true of the lactation system.

There were, the notes said in Oliver’s crabbed writing, five kinds of fruit and three kinds of vegetables to be derived from the plants growing from the critters.

I shoved the notes to one side and sat back on my chair, gloating just a little.

Here was diversified farming with a vengeance! You had meat and dairy herds, fish pond, aviary, poultry yard, orchard and garden rolled into one, all in the body of a single animal that was a complete farm in itself!

I went through the notes hurriedly again and found what I was looking for. The food product seemed high in relation to the gross weight of the animal. Very little would be lost in dressing out.

That is the kind of thing an ag economist has to consider. But that isn’t all of it, by any means. What if a man couldn’t eat the critter? Suppose the critters couldn’t be moved off the planet because they died if you took them from their range?

I recalled how they’d just walked up and died; that in itself was another headache to be filed for future worry.

What if they could only eat the grass that grew on this one planet? And if so, could the grass be grown elsewhere? What kind of tolerance would the critter show to different kinds of climate? What was the rate of reproduction? If it was slow, as was indicated, could it be stepped up? What was the rate of growth?

I got up and walked out of the tent and stood for a while, outside. The little breeze that had been blowing had died down at sunset and the place was quiet. Quiet because there was nothing but the critters to make any noise and we had yet to hear them make a single sound. The stars blazed overhead and there were so many of them that they lighted up the countryside as if there were a moon.