Peter Dickinson - Earth and Air

“Here’s your patient, Doc,” he said, settling the bucket by Cat’s body.

Doc extended a pseudopod, shimmering orange with the firelight and green with its own luminescence, and made it flow up Cat’s spine. His hooter emerged from the water.

“Blunt instrument,” he said.

“Sure it wasn’t a fall?” said David.

“Course I am, you idiot. It takes more than a fall to kill a Cat. You have to know exactly how and where to hit. Somebody did.”

“Somebody?” said Hippo. “I thought there wasn’t anybody on this planet. Skunk said so.”

“How long ago, Doc?” said David. “Sure he’s dead?”

“I’m still looking. H’m.”

David had never much cared for Doc’s bedside manner, but had always trusted him totally, as all the crew had to trust each other. Now he wondered how, that time he was infested with green-fever larvae out round Delta Orion, he could have lain so calmly and let Doc extend his filaments all through his body, locating and destroying the little wrigglers and modifying David’s autoimmune system to produce antibodies against the bacteria they had carried. Doc was a sea anemone. The pseudopod he was using to explore Cat’s body was a specialized section of his digestive organs, and the filament tips were capable of recognizing at a touch the identity of all the microscopic particles which he needed for the endless process of renewing every cell in his body once a week. Almost all Doc’s life was taken up with the process of self-renewal, but he said it was worth the trouble because it made him immortal. It also made him a good doctor, when he could spare the time.

“Tsk, tsk,” he said. “Yes, dead as nails, whatever they are. About twenty minutes ago.”

“That’s not long,” said Hippo. “Can’t you patch him up?”

“I’d have a go if it was you, darling,” said Doc. “It’s not worth the effort for a Cat.”

“But you spent so much time looking after it,” said Hippo, pleadingly.

“It was a lousy hypochondriac.” said Doc. “I’ve got better things to do.”

“Coming, coming,” shrilled the Bandicoot.

“Hippo, get away from that strut,” said David. “Find a tree or something.”

“Trees on this planet are so feeble,” said Hippo. “I’ve used up all that lot.”

Through the remains of dusk David could see that the grove of primitive palms by which they had set up camp had considerably altered in outline. He remembered hearing a certain amount of splintering and crashing as he was walking back to camp.

“You’d better get Doc to have a look at you,” he said. “Doc, poor Hippo’s got an itchy back.”

“Never get through that ugly thick hide,” mumbled Doc “Got better things to do.”

“I know it’s nonsense, but I can’t help thinking I’m pregnant,” said Hippo.

“Get yourself an obstet . . . an obstet . . .” said Doc as he withdrew all but the limb of his pseudopod beneath the surface.

“Doc!” said David. “You aren’t eating Cat!”

“Oh, no!” said Hippo, with all the revulsion, normally suppressed in her case, of herbivores for meat eaters.

“Doc!” shouted David.

The hooter came an inch out of the water.

“Lot of good stuff in there,” said Doc, slurring the syllables until he was barely comprehensible. “No point wasting it. All these months, living on chemical soup.”

“What about the Hippocratic oath!” said David.

“Coming, coming!” shrieked the Bandicoot, rising and jigging like a sandhopper on its spindly legs. Its cry was answered by another from the sky, and a moment later, with the usual blur and buzz of wings, Bird settled at the edge of the ring of darkness. The second Bandicoot dropped from her back and jigged across to join the first.

“Bandy said to skim home,” said Bird in the metallic voice produced by moving one wing-case to make a flow of air and then modifying the flow with the sensitive leading edge of the wing itself.

“What’s up, Man?” she added. “The Bandy told you about the wreck?”

“No. And I didn’t say anything about bringing you home. The last my Bandy told me was about a seam of Sperrylite you thought you’d spotted. What kind of wreck? How old?”

Bird raised a wing-case and let it fall back, producing a sharp explosion like a mining blast. This was her form of swearing.

“I’ll chop him up and feed him to my husband,” she rasped.

She had met her “husband” in the larval stage, when they were both about three inches long, and after a brief, blind courtship had incorporated him in her body, where he now lay, like an extra gland, somewhere near the back of her four-foot thorax. Doc had once paid him a visit, out of curiosity, and said that there was still an intelligence there, of a sort, but that it spent all its time dreaming. He guessed that the dreams were nonrepresentational, but had never been able to interest Skunk or the Bandicoots in finding out. Bird was not merely a flying scout. She had evolved from a migratory species whose guidance system depended on their ability to sense the magnetic field of their planet with great accuracy; so now she was able, skimming on her gauzy wings above the surface of a strange planet, to map the irregularities where different metallic ores showed up. And in deep space she was like an old sailor with a weather eye, able to sense long before it registered on the instruments the coming of one of the particle-storms that could rush like a cyclone out of the apparently blank spaces between the stars.

“Yup, space wreck,” she said. “More than a month old, less than a year. Real mess. Didn’t go in, but my Bandy said he couldn’t feel anybody thinking down there. I was just going to skim in close when he told me to hurry home. I was coming, anyway, but what made him do that?”

“Nothing, except Cat’s dead.”

“Somebody killed him,” said Hippo.

“With a blunt instrument,” said David.

Bird made a contemptuous rustle with her wing-cases, and before the sound had ended Mole came snouting out of the earth beyond the fire, shaking soil from his pelt like a dog shaking off water. As the flurry of pellets pattered down, the third Bandicoot scrambled out of the capsule which Mole trailed behind him on his subterranean journeys and skittered off to join the other two. Now all three were hopping like hailstones on paving, and shrilling at each other in and out of the limits of David’s hearing range.

“What’s up?” growled Mole.

“Cat’s dead and I’m pregnant,” said Hippo.

“I don’t know why I bother,” said Mole. “Soon as this trip’s over I’m paying off and going home.”

He would have trouble finding it, thought David. Home for Mole was somewhere in the Ophiucus area, a planet—or rather an ex-planet—which had become detached from its sun and all of whose life-forms had evolved in a belt between the surface permafrost and the central fires.

“Home?” said Bird. “Yup. Good thinking. Count me in on payday.”

She clicked and tocked in a thoughtful way. Doc put his hooter up, sighed “Ho-o-o-o-ome,” and plopped back under.

Home. Why not? Earth. Clothed, soft-skinned bipeds. David was a rich man, in theory, by now. He could afford to retire, buy four or five young wives and a mother-in-law, and a nice little island . . .

The Whizzers cut the reverie short by slithering into the camp, bringing the last of the Bandicoots. At once all thought and talk were impossible in the frenzy of jigging and shrilling, until Bird turned on the four of them and drove them, with a series of fierce explosions, round to the far side of the ship. Meanwhile Skunk crawled down from the Whizzer he had been riding. The Whizzers were legless reptiles from a planet of crushing gravity. They were about seven feet long and three feet wide, but less than a foot high, and on planets less massive than their own they could carry reasonable weights over almost any surface at speeds of up to sixty miles an hour. They flowed. David seldom got the chance to ride one, because his function was to stay at base and coordinate information with his own stored knowledge; but sometimes, when he needed to see something with his own eyes, a Whizzer had taken him and he had found the ride as much fun as surf boarding. Despite being hermaphrodites, Whizzers paired for life. They were deeply religious.