Clifford Simak - I Am Crying All Inside - And Other Stories

“Maybe we’ll have fur-trappers and fur-trading posts up on Mars,” Woods suggested. “Big fur shipments to Earth and Martian wraps selling at fabulous prices.”

“They’d kill them off in a hurry if it ever came to that,” declared Gilmer. “A foot a day would be top speed for that baby, if it can move at all. Oxygen would be scarce on Mars. Energy would be something mighty hard to come by and this boy couldn’t afford to waste it by running around. He’d just have to sit tight and not let anything distract him from the mere business of just living.”

“It doesn’t seem to have eyes or ears or anything you’d expect an animal to have,” Woods said, straining his eyes the better to see the furry ball through the glass.

“He probably has sense-perceptions we would never recognize,” declared Gilmer. “You must remember, Jack, that he is a product of an entirely different environment—perhaps he rose from an entirely different order of life than we know here on Earth. There’s no reason why we must believe that parallel evolution would occur on any two worlds so remotely separated as Earth and Mars.

“From what little we know of Mars,” he went on, rolling the black cigar between his lips, “it’s just about the kind of animal we’d expect to find there. Mars has little water—by Earth standards, practically none at all. A dehydrated world. There’s oxygen there, but the air is so thin we’d call it a vacuum on Earth. A Martian animal would have to get along on very little water, very little oxygen.

“Well, when he got it, he’d want to keep it. The spherical shape gives him a minimum surface-per-volume ratio, makes it easier for him to conserve water and oxygen. He probably is mostly lungs. The fur protects him from the cold. Mars must be devilish cold at times. Cold enough at night to freeze carbon dioxide. That’s what they had him packed in on the ship.”

“No kidding,” said Woods.

“Sure,” said Gilmer. “Inside the wooden box was a steel receptacle and that fellow was inside of that. They had pumped out quite a bit of the air, made it a partial vacuum, and packed frozen carbon dioxide around the receptacle. Outside of that, between the box and the ice, was paper and felt to slow up melting. They must have been forced to repack him and change air several times during the trip back.

“Apparently he hadn’t had much attention the last few days before they got here, for the oxygen was getting pretty thin, even for him, and the ice was almost gone. I don’t imagine he felt any too good. Probably was just a bit sick. Too much carbon dioxide and the temperature uncomfortably warm.”

Woods gestured at the glass cage.

“I suppose you got him all fixed up now,” he said. “Air conditioned and everything.”

Gilmer chuckled.

“Must seem just like home to him,” he replied. “In there the atmosphere is thinned down to about one-thousandth Earth standard, with considerable ozone. Don’t know whether he needs that, but a good deal of the oxygen on Mars must be in the form of ozone. Surface conditions there are suitable for its production. The temperature is 20 degrees below zero Centigrade. I had to guess at that, because I have no way of knowing from what part of Mars this animal of ours was taken. That would make a difference.”

He wrangled the cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other.

“A little private Mars all his own,” he stated.

“You found no records at all on the ship?” asked Woods. “Nothing telling anything at all about him?”

Gilmer shook his head and clamped a vicious jaw on the cigar.

“We found the log book,” he said, “but it had been deliberately destroyed. Someone soaked it in acid. No chance of getting anything out of it.”

The reporter perched on a desk top and drummed his fingers idly on the wood.

“Now just why in hell would they want to do that?” he asked.

“Why in hell did they do a lot of things they did?” Gilmer snarled. “Why did somebody, probably Delvaney, kill Paine and Watson? Why did Delvaney, after he did that, kill himself? What happened to Smith? Why did Cooper die insane, screaming and shrieking as if something had him by the throat? Who scrawled that single word on the box and tried to write more, but couldn’t? What stopped him writing more?”

Woods nodded his head toward the glass cage.

“I wonder how much our little friend had to do with it,” he speculated.

“You’re crazier than a space-bug,” Gilmer snapped. “What in blue hell could he have had to do with it? He’s just an animal and probably of a pretty low order of intelligence. The way things are on Mars he’d be kept too damn busy just keeping alive to build much brain. Of course, I haven’t had much chance to study it yet. Dr. Winters, of Washington, and Dr. Lathrop, of London, will be here next week. We’ll try to find out something then.”

Woods walked to the window in the laboratory and looked out.

The building stood on top of a hill, with a green lawn sweeping down to a park-like area with fenced off paddock, moat-protected cliff-cages and monkey-islands—the Metropolitan Zoo.

Gilmer took a fresh and fearsome grip on his cigar.

“It proves there’s life on Mars,” he contradicted. “It doesn’t prove a damn thing else.”

“You should use a little imagination,” chided Woods.

“If I did,” snarled Gilmer, “I’d be a newspaperman. I wouldn’t be fit for any other job.”

Along toward noon, down in the zoo, Pop Anderson, head-keeper of the lionhouse, shook his head dolefully and scratched his chin.

“Them cats have been actin’ mighty uneasy,” he declared. “Like there was something on their minds. They don’t hardly sleep at all. Just prowl around.”

Eddie Riggs, reporter for the Express, clucked sympathetically.

“Maybe they aren’t getting the right vitamins, Pop,” he suggested.

Pop disagreed.

“It ain’t that,” he said. “They’re gettin’ the same feed we always give ’em. Plenty raw meat. But they’re restless as all git-out. A cat is a lazy critter. Sleeps hours at a stretch and always takin’ naps. But they don’t do that no more. Cranky. Fightin’ among themselves. I had to give Nero a good whoppin’ the other day when he tried to beat up Percy. And when I did he made a pass at me—me, who’s took care of him since he was a cub.”

From across the water-moat Nero snarled menacingly at Pop.

“He still’s got it in for me,” Pop said. “If he don’t quiet down, I’ll give him a raw-hidin’ he’ll remember. There ain’t no lion can get gay with me.”

He glanced apprehensively at the lion-run.

“I sure hope they calm down,” he said. “This is Saturday and there’ll be a big crowd this afternoon. Always makes them nervous, a crowd does, and the way they are now there’ll be no holdin’ ’em.”

“Anything else you heard of going on?” Riggs asked.

Pop scratched his chin.

“Susan died this morning,” he declared.

Susan was a giraffe.

“Didn’t know Susan was sick,” said Riggs.

“She wasn’t,” Pop told him. “Just keeled over.”

Riggs turned his eyes back to the lion caves. Nero, a big blackmaned brute, was balancing himself on the edge of the water ditch, almost as if he were about to leap into the water. Percy and another lion were tusseling, not too good-naturedly.

“Looks like Nero might be thinking of coming over here after you,” the reporter suggested.

“Shucks,” snorted Pop. “He wouldn’t do that. Not Nero. Nor no other lion. Why, them cats hate water worse’n poison.”

From the elephant paddock, a mile or more away, came the sudden angry trumpeting of the pachyderms. Then a shrill squeal of elephantine rage.