But even before he finished, he could see the look in Dr. Pilar's eyes.
* * * * *
Broderick MacNeil was a sick man. The medical officers of the Space
Service did not agree with him _in toto_, but MacNeil was in a position
to know more about his own state of health than the doctors, because it
was, after all, he himself who was sick.
Rarely, of course, did he draw the attention of the medical officers to
his ever-fluctuating assortment of aches, pains, signs, symptoms,
malaises, and malfunctions. After all, it wouldn't do for him to be
released from the Service on a Medical Discharge. No, he would suffer in
silence for the sake of his chosen career--which, apparently, was to be
a permanent Spaceman 2nd Class.
Broderick MacNeil had never seen his medical record, and therefore did
not know that, aside from mention of the normal slight defects which
every human body possesses, the only note on the records was one which
said: "Slight tendency toward hypochondria, compensated for by tendency
to immerse self in job at hand. According to psych tests, he can
competently handle positions up to Enlisted Space Officer 3rd Class, but
positions of ESO/2 and above should be carefully considered. (See Psych
Rept. Intelligence Sectn.)"
But, if MacNeil did not know what the medics thought of him, neither did
the medics know what he thought of them. Nor did they know that MacNeil
carried a secret supply of his own personal palliatives, purgatives and
poly-purpose pills. He kept them carefully concealed in a small section
of his space locker, and had labeled them all as various vitamin
mixtures, which made them seem perfectly legal, and which was not _too_
dishonest, since many of them _were_ vitamins.
On the morning after the fire, he heaved his well-muscled bulk out of
bed and scratched his scalp through the close-cropped brown hair that
covered his squarish skull. He did not feel well, and that was a fact.
Of course, he had been up half the night fighting the blaze, and that
hadn't helped any. He fancied he had a bit of a headache, and his nerves
seemed a little jangled. His insides were probably in their usual balky
state. He sighed, wished he were in better health, and glanced around at
the other members of the company as they rose grumpily from their beds.
He sighed again, opened his locker, took out his depilator, and ran it
quickly over his face. Then, from his assortment of bottles, he began
picking over his morning dosage. Vitamins, of course; got to keep plenty
of vitamins in the system, or it goes all to pot on you. A, B_1, B_2,
B_12, C, ... and on down the alphabet and past it to A-G. All-purpose
mineral capsules, presumably containing every element useful to the
human body and possibly a couple that weren't. Two APC capsules.
(Aspirin-Phenacetin-Caffeine. He liked the way those words sounded; very
medicinal.) A milk-of-magnesia tablet, just in case. A couple of
patent-mixture pills that were supposed to increase the bile flow.
(MacNeil wasn't quite sure what bile was, but he _was_ quite sure that
its increased flow would work wonders within.) A largish tablet of
sodium bicarbonate to combat excess gastric acidity--obviously a
_horrible_ condition, whatever it was. He topped it all off with a
football-shaped capsule containing Liquid Glandolene--"_Guards the
system against glandular imbalance!_"--and felt himself ready to face
the day. At least, until breakfast.
He slipped several bottles into his belt-pak after he had put on his
field uniform, so that he could get at them at mealtimes, and trudged
out toward the mess hall to the meager breakfast that awaited him.
* * * * *
"Specifically," said Colonel Fennister, "what we want to know is: What
are our chances of staying alive until the relief ship comes?"
He and most of the other officers were still groggy-eyed, having had too
much to do to even get an hour's sleep the night before. Only the
phlegmatic Major Grodski looked normal; his eyes were always about half
closed.
Captains Jones and Bellwether, in charge of A and B Companies
respectively, and their lieutenants, Mawkey and Yutang, all looked grim
and irritable.
The civilian components of the policy group looked not one whit better.
Dr. Pilar had been worriedly rubbing at his face, so that his normally
neat beard had begun to take on the appearance of a ruptured mohair
sofa; Dr. Petrelli, the lean, waspish chemist, was nervously trimming
his fingernails with his teeth: and the M.D., Dr. Smathers, had a
hangdog expression on his pudgy face and had begun drumming his fingers
in a staccato tattoo on his round belly.
Dr. Pilar tapped a stack of papers that lay before him on the long table
at which they were all seated. "I have Major Grodski's report on the
remaining food. There is not enough for all of us to live, even on the
most extended rations. Only the strongest will survive."
Colonel Fennister scowled. "You mean to imply that we'll be fighting
over the food like animals before this is over? The discipline of the
Space Service--"
His voice was angry, but Dr. Pilar cut him off. "It may come to
fighting, colonel, but, even if perfect discipline is maintained, what I
say will still be true. Some will die early, leaving more food for the
remaining men. It has been a long time since anything like this has
happened on Earth, but it is not unknown in the Space Service annals."
The colonel pursed his lips and kept his silence. He knew that what the
biologist said was true.
"The trouble is," said Petrelli snappishly, "that we are starving in the
midst of plenty. We are like men marooned in the middle of an ocean with
no water; the water is there, but it's undrinkable."
"That's what I wanted to get at," said Colonel Fennister. "Is there any
chance at all that we'll find an edible plant or animal on this planet?"
The three scientists said nothing, as if each were waiting for one of
the others to speak.
* * * * *
All life thus far found in the galaxy had had a carbon-hydrogen-oxygen
base. Nobody'd yet found any silicon based life, although a good many
organisms used the element. No one yet had found a planet with a halogen
atmosphere, and, although there might be weird forms of life at the
bottom of the soupy atmospheres of the methane-ammonia giants, no brave
soul had ever gone down to see--at least, not on purpose, and no
information had ever come back.
But such esoteric combinations are not at all necessary for the
postulation of wildly variant life forms. Earth itself was prolific in
its variations; Earthlike planets were equally inventive. Carbon,
hydrogen, and oxygen, plus varying proportions of phosphorus, potassium,
iodine, nitrogen, sulfur, calcium, iron, magnesium, manganese, and
strontium, plus a smattering of trace elements, seem to be able to cook
up all kinds of life under the strangest imaginable conditions.
Alphegar IV was no different than any other Earth-type planet in that
respect. It had a plant-dominated ecology; the land areas were covered
with gigantic trees that could best be described as crosses between a
California sequoia and a cycad, although such a description would have
made a botanist sneer and throw up his hands. There were enough smaller
animals to keep the oxygen-carbon-dioxide cycle nicely balanced, but the
animals had not evolved anything larger than a rat, for some reason. Of
course, the sea had evolved some pretty huge monsters, but the camp of
the expedition was located a long way from the sea, so there was no
worry from that quarter.
At the time, however, the members of the expedition didn't know any of
that information for sure. The probe teams had made spot checks and
taken random samples, but it was up to the First Analytical Expedition
to make sure of everything.
And this much they had discovered: The plants of Alphegar IV had a nasty
habit of killing test animals.
* * * * *
"Of course," said Dr. Pilar, "we haven't tested every plant yet. We may
come across something."
"What is it that kills the animals?" asked young Captain Bellwether.
"Poison," said Major Grodski.
Pilar ignored him. "Different things. Most of them we haven't been able
to check thoroughly. We found some vines that were heavily laced with
cyanide, and there were recognizable alkaloids in several of the shrubs,
but most of them are not that direct. Like Earth plants, they vary from
family to family; the deadly nightshade is related to both the tobacco
plant and the tomato."
He paused a moment, scratching thoughtfully at his beard.
"Tell you what; let's go over to the lab, and I'll show you what we've
found so far."
Colonel Fennister nodded. He was a military man, and he wasn't too sure
that the scientists' explanations would be very clear, but if there was
information to be had, he might as well make the most of it.
* * * * *
SM/2 Broderick MacNeil kept a firm grip on his blast rifle and looked
around at the surrounding jungle, meanwhile thanking whatever gods there
were that he hadn't been put on the fence-mending detail. Not that he
objected violently to work, but he preferred to be out here in the
forest just now. Breakfast hadn't been exactly filling, and he was
hungry.
Besides, this was his pet detail, and he liked it. He had been going out
with the technicians ever since the base had been finished, a couple of
weeks before, and he was used to the work. The biotechnicians came out
to gather specimens, and it was his job, along with four others, to
guard them--make sure that no wild animal got them while they were going
about their duties. It was a simple job, and one well suited to
MacNeil's capacities.
He kept an eye on the technicians. They were working on a bush of some
kind that had little thorny-looking nuts on it, clipping bits off here
and there. He wasn't at all sure what they did with all those little
pieces and bits, but that was none of his business, anyway. Let the
brains take care of that stuff; his job was to make sure they weren't
interrupted in whatever it was they were doing. After watching the three
technicians in total incomprehension for a minute or so, he turned his
attention to the surrounding forest. But he was looking for a plant, not
an animal.
And he finally saw what he was looking for.
The technicians paid him no attention. They rarely did. They had their
job, and he had his. Of course, he didn't want to be caught breaking
regulations, but he knew how to avoid that catastrophe. He walked
casually toward the tree, as though he were only slightly interested in
it.
He didn't know what the name of the tree was. He'd asked a technician
once, and the tech had said that the tree didn't have any name yet.
Personally, MacNeil thought it was silly for a thing not to have a name.
Hell, _everything_ had a name.
But, if they didn't want to tell him what it was, that was all right
with him, too. He called it a banana-pear tree.
Because that's what the fruit reminded him of.
The fruit that hung from the tree were six or eight inches long, fat in
the middle, and tapering at both ends. The skin was a pale chartreuse in
color, with heliotrope spots.
[Illustration]
MacNeil remembered the first time he'd seen one, the time he'd asked the
tech what its name was. The tech had been picking some of them and
putting them into plastic bags, and the faint spark of MacNeil's dim
curiosity had been brought to feebly flickering life.
"Hey, Doc," he'd said, "whatcha gonna do with them things?"
"Take 'em to the lab," said the technician, engrossed in his work.
MacNeil had digested that carefully. "Yeah?" he'd said at last. "What
for?"
The technician had sighed and popped another fruit into a bag. He had
attempted to explain things to Broderick MacNeil before and given it up
as a bad job. "We just feed 'em to the monkeys, Mac, that's all."
"Oh," said Broderick MacNeil.
Well, that made sense, anyhow. Monkeys got to eat _something_, don't
they? Sure. And he had gazed at the fruit in interest.
Fresh fruit was something MacNeil missed. He'd heard that fresh fruit
was necessary for health, and on Earth he'd always made sure that he had
plenty of it. He didn't want to get sick. But they didn't ship fresh
fruit on an interstellar expedition, and MacNeil had felt vaguely
apprehensive about the lack.
Now, however, his problems were solved. He knew that it was strictly
against regulations to eat native fruit until the brass said so, but
that didn't worry him too much. He'd heard somewhere that a man can eat
anything a monkey can, so he wasn't worried about it. So he'd tried one.
It tasted fine, something like a pear and something like a banana, and
different from either. It was just fine.
Since then, he'd managed to eat a couple every day, so's to get his
fresh fruit. It kept him healthy. Today, though, he needed more than
just health; he was hungry, and the banana-pears looked singularly
tempting.
When he reached the tree, he turned casually around to see if any of the
others were watching. They weren't, but he kept his eye on them while he
picked several of the fruit. Then he turned carefully around, and, with
his back to the others, masking his movements with his own body, he
began to munch contentedly on the crisp flesh of the banana-pears.
* * * * *
"Now, take this one, for instance," said Dr. Pilar. He was holding up a
native fruit. It bulged in the middle, and had a chartreuse rind with
heliotrope spots on it. "It's a very good example of exactly what we're
up against. Ever since we discovered this particular fruit, we've been
interested in it because the analyses show that it should be an
excellent source of basic food elements. Presumably, it even tastes
good; our monkeys seemed to like it."
"What's the matter with it, then?" asked Major Grodski, eying the fruit
with sleepy curiosity.
Dr. Pilar gave the thing a wry look and put it back in the specimen bag.
"Except for the fact that it has killed every one of our test
specimens, we don't know what's wrong with it."
Colonel Fennister looked around the laboratory at the cages full of
chittering animals--monkeys, white mice, rats, guinea pigs, hamsters,
and the others. Then he looked back at the scientist. "Don't you know
what killed them?"
Pilar didn't answer; instead, he glanced at Dr. Smathers, the physician.
Smathers steepled his fingers over his abdomen and rubbed his fingertips
together. "We're not sure. Thus far, it looks as though death was caused
by oxygen starvation in the tissues."
"Some kind of anemia?" hazarded the colonel.
Smathers frowned. "The end results are similar, but there is no drop in
the hemoglobin--in fact, it seems to rise a little. We're still
investigating that. We haven't got all the answers yet, by any means,
but since we don't quite know what to look for, we're rather hampered."