Clifford Simak - Dusty Zebra - And Other Stories

“Why,” said Mr. Barnes, “why I …”

“What would you do,” asked Warren, “if you suddenly were to find out you had no more than two months to live?”

“Why,” said Mr. Barnes, “I suppose that I would go on living pretty much the way I always have. With a little closer attention to the condition of my soul, perhaps.”

“That,” said Warren, “is a practical answer. And, I suppose, the most reasonable that anyone can give.”

The chaplain looked at him curiously. “You don’t mean, sir …”

“Sit down, Barnes,” said Warren. “I’ll turn up the stove. I need you now. To tell you the solemn truth, I’ve never held too much with this business of having you fellows with the expedition. But I guess there always will be times when one needs a man like you.”

The chaplain sat down.

“Mr. Barnes,” said Warren, “that was no hypothetical question I asked. Unless God performs some miracle we’ll all be dead in another two months’ time.”

“You are joking, sir.”

“Not at all,” said Warren. “The serum is no good. Morgan waited to check it until it was too late to get word to the ship. That’s why he killed himself.”

He watched the chaplain closely and the chaplain did not flinch.

“I was of a mind,” said Warren, “not to tell you. I’m not telling any of the others—not for a while, at least.”

“It takes a little while,” said Mr. Barnes, “to let a thing like that soak in. I find it so, myself. Maybe you should tell the others, let them have a chance…”

“No,” said Warren.

The chaplain stared at him. “What are you hoping for, Warren? What do you expect to happen?”

“A miracle,” said Warren.

“A miracle?”

“Certainly,” said Warren. “You believe in miracles. You must.”

“I don’t know,” said Mr. Barnes. “There are certain miracles, of course—one might call them allegorical miracles, and sometimes men read into them more than was ever meant.”

“I am more practical than that,” said Warren, harshly. “There is the miracle of the fact that the natives of this place are humanoid like ourselves and they don’t need any booster shots. There is a potential miracle in the fact that only the first humans who landed on the planet ever tried to live on Landro without the aid of booster shots.”

“Since you mention it,” said the chaplain, “there is the miracle of the fact that we are here at all.”

Warren blinked at him. “That’s right,” he said. “Tell me, why do you think we’re here? Divine destiny, perhaps. Or the immutable performance of the mysterious forces that move Man along his way.”

“We are here,” said Barnes, “to carry on the survey work that has been continued thus far by parties here before us.”

“And that will be continued,” said Warren, “by the parties that come after us.”

“You forget,” the chaplain said, “that all of us will die. They will be very wary of sending another expedition to replace one that has been wiped out.”

“And you,” said Warren, “forget the miracle.”

The report had been written by the psychologist who had accompanied the third expedition to Landro. Warren had managed, after considerable digging in the file of quadruplicates, to find a copy of it.

“Hog wash,” he said and struck the papers with his fist.

“I could of told you that,” said Bat Ears, “before you ever read it. Ain’t nothing one of them prissy punks can tell an old-timer like me about these abor … abor … abor …”

“Aborigines,” said Warren.

“That’s the word,” said Bat Ears. “That’s the word I wanted.”

“It says here,” declared Warren, “that the natives of Landro have a keen sense of dignity, very delicately tuned—that’s the very words it uses—and an exact code of honor when dealing among themselves.”

Bat Ears snorted and reached for the bottle. He took a drink and sloshed what was left in the bottom discontentedly.

“You sure,” he asked, “that this is all you got?”

“You should know,” snapped Warren.

Bat Ears wagged his head. “Comforting thing,” he said. “Mighty comforting.”

“It says,” went on Warren, “that they also have a system of what amounts to protocol, on a rather primitive basis.”

“I don’t know about this proto-whatever-you-may-call-it,” said Bat Ears, “but that part about the code of honor gets me. Why, them dirty vultures would steal the pennies off a dead man’s eyes. I always keep a shovel handy and when one of them shows up…”

“The report,” said Warren, “goes into that most exhaustively. Explains it.”

“Ain’t no need of explanation,” insisted Bat Ears. “They just want what you got, so they sneak in and take it.”

“Says it’s like stealing from a rich man,” Warren told him. “Like a kid that sees a field with a million melons in it. Kid can’t see anything wrong with taking one melon out of all that million.”

“We ain’t got no million melons,” said Bat Ears.

“It’s just an analogy,” said Warren. “The stuff we have here must look like a million melons to our little friends.”

“Just the same,” protested Bat Ears, “they better keep out of my cook tent …”

“Shut up,” said Warren savagely. “I get you here to talk with you and all you do is drink up my liquor and caterwaul about your cook tent.”

“All right,” said Bat Ears. “All right. What do you want to know?”

“What are we doing about contacting the natives?”

“Can’t contact them,” said Bat Ears, “if we can’t find them. They were around here, thicker than fleas, before we needed them. Now that we need them, can’t find hide nor hair of one.”

“As if they might know that we needed them,” said Warren.

“How would they know?” asked Bat Ears.

“I can’t tell you,” Warren said. “It was just a thought.”

“If you do find them,” asked Bat Ears, “how you going to make them talk?”

“Bribe them,” said Warren. “Buy them. Offer them anything we have.”

Bat Ears shook his head. “It won’t work. Because they know all they got to do is wait. If they just wait long enough, it’s theirs without the asking. I got a better way.”

“Your way won’t work, either.”

“You’re wasting your time, anyhow,” Bat Ears told him. “They ain’t got no cure. It’s just adap … adap …”

“Adaptation.”

“Sure,” said Bat Ears. “That’s the word I meant.”

He took up the bottle, shook it, measured it with his thumb and then, in a sudden gesture, killed it.

He rose quickly to his feet. “I got to sling some grub together,” he said. “You stay here and get her figured out.”

Warren sat quietly in the tent, listening to his footsteps going across the compound of the camp.

There was no hope, of course. He must have known that all along, he told himself, and yet he had postponed the realization of it. Postponed it with talk of miracles and hope that the natives might have the answer—and the native answer, the native cure, he admitted now, was even more fantastic than the hope of a miracle. For how could one expect the little owl-eyed people would know of medicine when they did not know of clothing, when they still carried rudely-chipped stone knives, when their campfire was a thing very laboriously arrived at by the use of stricken flint?

They would die, all twenty-five of them, and in the days to come the little owl-eyed natives would come boldly marching in, no longer skulking, and pick the camp to its last bare bone.

Collins was the first to go. He died hard, as all men die hard when infected by the peculiar virus of Landro. Before he was dead, Peabody had taken to his bed with the dull headache that heralded the onset of the malady. After that the men went down like tenpins. They screamed and moaned in delirium, they lay as dead for days before they finally died, while the fever ate at them like some ravenous animal that had crept in from the moors.