Clifford Simak - New Folks' Home - And Other Stories

“And tomorrow you drop dead.”

“I don’t think so,” Kemper said. “The animals have been thriving on it. There’s nothing wrong with them.”

It seemed that Kemper was right. Between the animals and men, it took a critter a day. The critters didn’t seem to mind. They were johnny-on-the-spot. They walked in promptly, one at a time, and keeled over every morning.

The way the men and animals ate was positively indecent. Parsons cooked great platters of different kinds of meat and fish and fowl and what-not. He prepared huge bowls of vegetables. He heaped other bowls with fruit. He racked up combs of honey and the men licked the platters clean. They sat around with belts unloosened and patted their bulging bellies and were disgustingly contented.

I waited for them to break out in a rash or to start turning green with purple spots or grow scales or something of the sort. But nothing happened. They thrived, just as the animals were thriving. They felt better than they ever had.

Then, one morning, Fullerton turned up sick. He lay on his cot flushed with fever. It looked like Centaurian virus, although we’d been inoculated against that. In fact, we’d been inoculated and immunized against almost everything. Each time, before we blasted off on another survey, they jabbed us full of booster shots.

I didn’t think much of it. I was fairly well convinced, for a time at least, that all that was wrong with him was overeating.

Oliver, who knew a little about medicine, but not much, got the medicine chest out of the ship and pumped Fullerton full of some new antibiotic that came highly recommended for almost everything.

We went on with our work, expecting he’d be on his feet in a day or two.

But he wasn’t. If anything, he got worse.

Oliver went through the medicine chest, reading all the labels carefully, but didn’t find anything that seemed to be the proper medication. He read the first-aid booklet. It didn’t tell him anything except how to set broken legs or apply artificial respiration and simple things like that.

Kemper had been doing a lot of worrying, so he had Oliver take a sample of Fullerton’s blood and then prepared a slide. When he looked at the blood through the microscope, he found that it swarmed with bacteria from the critters. Oliver took some more blood samples and Kemper prepared more slides, just to doublecheck, and there was no doubt about it.

By this time, all of us were standing around the table watching Kemper and waiting for the verdict. I know the same thing must have been in the mind of each of us.

It was Oliver who put it into words. “Who is next?” he asked.

Parsons stepped up and Oliver took the sample.

We waited anxiously.

Finally Kemper straightened.

“You have them, too,” he said to Parsons. “Not as high a count as Fullerton.”

Man after man stepped up. All of us had the bacteria, but in my case the count was low.

“It’s the critter,” Parsons said. “Bob hasn’t been eating any.”

“But cooking kills—” Oliver started to say.

“You can’t be sure. These bacteria would have to be highly adaptable. They do the work of thousands of other micro-organisms. They’re a sort of handy-man, a jack-of-all-trades. They can acclimatize. They can meet new situations. They haven’t weakened the strain by becoming specialized.”

“Besides,” said Parsons, “we don’t cook all of it. We don’t cook the fruit and most of you guys raise hell if a steak is more than singed.”

“What I can’t figure out is why it should be Fullerton,” Weber said. “Why should his count be higher? He started on the critter the same time as the rest of us.”

I remembered that day down by the creek.

“He got a head start on the rest of you,” I explained. “He ran out of toothpicks and took to chewing grass stems. I caught him at it.”

I know it wasn’t very comforting. It meant that in another week or two, all of them would have as high a count as Fullerton. But there was no sense not telling them. It would have been criminal not to. There was no place for wishful thinking in a situation like that.

“We can’t stop eating critter,” said Weber. “It’s all the food we have. There’s nothing we can do.”

“I have a hunch,” Kemper replied, “it’s too late anyhow.”

“If we started home right now,” I said, “there’s my diet kit …”

They didn’t let me finish making my offer. They slapped me on the back and pounded one another and laughed like mad.

It wasn’t that funny. They just needed something they could laugh at.

“It wouldn’t do any good,” said Kemper. “We’ve already had it. Anyhow, your diet kit wouldn’t last us all the way back home.”

“We could have a try at it,” I argued.

“It may be just a transitory thing,” Parsons said. “Just a bit of fever. A little upset from a change of diet.”

We all hoped that, of course.

But Fullerton got no better.

Weber took blood samples of the animals and they bad a bacterial count almost as high as Fullerton’s—much higher than when he’d taken it before.

Weber blamed himself. “I should have kept closer check. I should have taken tests every day or so.”

“What difference would it have made?” demanded Parsons. “Even if you had, even if you’d found a lot of bacteria in the blood, we’d still have eaten critter. There was no other choice.”

“Maybe it’s not the bacteria,” said Oliver. ‘We may be jumping at conclusions. It may be something else that Fullerton picked up.”

Weber brightened up a bit. “That’s right. The animals still seem to be okay.”

They were bright and chipper, in the best of health.

We waited. Fullerton got neither worse nor better.

Then, one night, he disappeared.

Oliver, who had been sitting with him, had dozed off for a moment. Parsons, on guard, had heard nothing.

We hunted for him for three full days. He couldn’t have gone far, we figured. He had wandered off in a delirium and he didn’t have the strength to cover any distance.

But we didn’t find him.

We did find one queer thing, however. It was a ball of some strange substance, white and fresh-appearing. It was about four feet in diameter. It lay at the bottom of a little gully, hidden out of sight, as if someone or something might have brought it there and hidden it away.

We did some cautious poking at it and we rolled it back and forth a little and wondered what it was, but we were hunting Fullerton and we didn’t have the time to do much investigating. Later on, we agreed, we would come back and get it and find out what it was.

Then the animals came down with the fever, one after another—all except the controls, which had been eating regular food until the stampede had destroyed the supply. After that, of course, all of them ate critter.

By the end of two days, most of the animals were down.

Weber worked with them, scarcely taking time to rest. We all helped as best we could.

Blood samples showed a greater concentration of bacteria. Weber started a dissection, but never finished it. Once he got the animal open, he took a quick look at it and scraped the whole thing off the table into a pail. I saw him, but I don’t think any of the others did. We were pretty busy.

I asked him about it later in the day, when we were alone for a moment. He briskly brushed me off.

I went to bed early that night because I had the second guard. It seemed I had no more than shut my eyes when I was brought upright by a racket that raised goose pimples on every inch of me.

I tumbled out of bed and scrabbled around to find my shoes and get them on. By that time, Kemper had dashed out of the tent.

There was trouble with the animals. They were fighting to break out, chewing the bars of their cages and throwing themselves against them in a blind and terrible frenzy. And all the time they were squealing and screaming. To listen to them set your teeth on edge.