Occasionally I feel regret that it was Darby and not myself who won the coveted job of going to Earth, but I reconcile myself with the awareness that there was no other way to gain Darby’s sympathies. I’ve learned things about ends and means. Soon, we’ll all be rich enough to travel to Earth, if we want to.
But I’m not so sure I do want to go. There was a genuine Voltuscian antiquity, you know, and I’ve become as interested in that as I am in that of Greece and Rome. I see an opportunity to do some pure archaeology in a virgin field of research.
So perhaps I’ll stay here after all. I’m thinking of writing a book on Voltuscian artifacts—the real ones, I mean, all crude things of no commercial value whatever. And tomorrow I’m going to show Dolbak how to make Mexican pottery of the Chichimec period. It’s attractive stuff. I think there ought to be a good market for it.
Collecting Team
June of 1956: the new college graduate, in his first official month as a full-time professional writer, turns out no less than eighteen stories plus two small nonfiction pieces—an average of just about one a day, considering that I always took Saturdays and Sundays off—and sells them all, to John Campbell’s Astounding, to Bob Lowndes’ Science Fiction Stories, to William L. Hamling’s Imagination, to Howard Browne’s Amazing Stories and Fantastic, to all sorts of markets, up and down the science-fiction field and outside it as well. It is a harbinger: for years to come I will work with lunatic prolificity and not see anything at all unusual about writing two or three stories a week or even more. And, with a new apartment to furnish and rent to pay, I’ll take whatever work I can get, any kind of writing assignment—and will deliver promptly and to the proper length.
Another young writer who was living the same sort of life in New York City just then was Harlan Ellison; but he was having better luck with the mystery and crime magazines than he was at science fiction, in particular with a couple of titles called Trapped and Guilty. The editor of those magazines, an amiable codger named W. W. Scott, was particularly taken not only by Harlan’s writing talent but by the formidable energy with which he conducted his lively onslaught on the New York publishing world. Since Scottie, as Harlan called him—he called himself “Bill”—needed more stories for the crime magazines than even the manic Ellison could produce, Harlan brought me in as a fellow contributor: my ledger for June, 1956 shows two short crime stories sold to the Scott magazines, “Clinging Vine” and “Get Out and Stay Out,” the first of dozens over the next few years.
Then came the delicious news that Scottie was going to be editing a science-fiction magazine, too—Super-Science Fiction. (The title had already been used, for a magazine once edited by the likes of Frederik Pohl and Damon Knight, but nobody worried about that.) Scottie needed copy in a hurry for the first issue, dated December, 1956: Harlan wrote one called “Why Did Wallace Crack?” which came out as “Psycho at Mid-Point,” and I turned in “Collecting Team,” which Scottie retitled “Catch ‘Em All Alive.”
It’s had quite a life, for a story turned out at white heat to meet an instant deadline. I don’t have an accurate count of the number of times it’s been reprinted—mainly in classroom anthologies with names like Contexts and Elements of Literature—but the number must be well up toward twenty, and hardly a year goes by without some new request to use it. I was simply trying to pay the rent when I wrote it; but this one has gone on paying for things for me for half a century. I wish I knew its secret.
~
From fifty thousand miles up, the situation looked promising. It was a middle-sized, brown-and-green, inviting-looking planet, with no sign of cities or any other such complications. Just a pleasant sort of place, the very sort we were looking for to redeem what had been a pretty futile expedition.
I turned to Clyde Holdreth, who was staring reflectively at the thermocouple.
“Well? What do you think?”
“Looks fine to me. Temperature’s about seventy down there—nice and warm, and plenty of air. I think it’s worth a try.”
Lee Davison came strolling out from the storage hold, smelling of animals, as usual. He was holding one of the blue monkeys we picked up on Alpheraz, and the little beast was crawling up his arm. “Have we found something, gentlemen?”
“We’ve found a planet,” I said. “How’s the storage space in the hold?”
“Don’t worry about that. We’ve got room for a whole zoo-full more, before we get filled up. It hasn’t been a very fruitful trip.”
“No,” I agreed. “It hasn’t. Well? Shall we go down and see what’s to be seen?”
“Might as well,” Holdreth said. “We can’t go back to Earth with just a couple of blue monkeys and some anteaters, you know.”
“I’m in favor of a landing too,” said Davison. “You?”
I nodded. “I’ll set up the charts, and you get your animals comfortable for deceleration.”
Davison disappeared back into the storage hold, while Holdreth scribbled furiously in the logbook, writing down the coordinates of the planet below, its general description, and so forth. Aside from being a collecting team for the zoological department of the Bureau of Interstellar Affairs, we also double as a survey ship, and the planet down below was listed as unexplored on our charts.
I glanced out at the mottled brown-and-green ball spinning slowly in the viewport, and felt the warning twinge of gloom that came to me every time we made a landing on a new and strange world. Repressing it, I started to figure out a landing orbit. From behind me came the furious chatter of the blue monkeys as Davison strapped them into their acceleration cradles, and under that the deep, unmusical honking of the Rigelian anteaters noisily bleating their displeasure.
The planet was inhabited, all right. We hadn’t had the ship on the ground more than a minute before the local fauna began to congregate. We stood at the viewport and looked out in wonder.
“This is one of those things you dream about,” Davison said, stroking his little beard nervously. “Look at them! There must be a thousand different species out there.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Holdreth.
I computed how much storage space we had left and how many of the thronging creatures outside we would be able to bring back with us. “How are we going to decide what to take and what to leave behind?”
“Does it matter?” Holdreth said gaily. “This is what you call an embarrassment of riches, I guess. We just grab the dozen most bizarre creatures and blast-off—and save the rest for another trip. It’s too bad we wasted all that time wandering around near Rigel.”
“We did get the anteaters,” Davison pointed out. They were his finds, and he was proud of them.
I smiled sourly. “Yeah. We got the anteaters there.” The anteaters honked at that moment, loud and clear. “You know, that’s one set of beasts I think I could do without.”
“Bad attitude,” Holdreth said. “Unprofessional.”
“Whoever said I was a zoologist, anyway? I’m just a spaceship pilot, remember. And if I don’t like the way those anteaters talk—and smell—I see no reason why I—”
“Say, look at that one,” Davison said suddenly.
I glanced out the viewport and saw a new beast emerging from the thick-packed vegetation in the background. I’ve seen some fairly strange creatures since I was assigned to the zoological department, but this one took the grand prize.
It was about the size of a giraffe, moving on long, wobbly legs and with a tiny head up at the end of a preposterous neck. Only it had six legs and a bunch of writhing snakelike tentacles as well, and its eyes, great violet globes, stood out nakedly on the ends of two thick stalks. It must have been twenty feet high. It moved with exaggerated grace through the swarm of beasts surrounding our ship, pushed its way smoothly towards the vessel, and peered gravely in at the viewport. One purple eye stared directly at me, the other at Davison. Oddly, it seemed to me as if it were trying to tell us something.
“Big one, isn’t it?” Daviso
n said finally.
“I’ll bet you’d like to bring one back, too.”
“Maybe we can fit a young one aboard,” Davison said. “If we can find a young one.” He turned to Holdreth. “How’s that air analysis coming? I’d like to get out there and start collecting. God, that’s a crazy-looking beast!”
The animal outside had apparently finished its inspection of us, for it pulled its head away and, gathering its legs under itself, squatted near the ship. A small doglike creature with stiff spines running along its back began to bark at the big creature, which took no notice. The other animals, which came in all shapes and sizes, continued to mill around the ship, evidently very curious about the newcomer to their world. I could see Davison’s eyes thirsty with the desire to take the whole kit and caboodle back to Earth with him. I knew what was running through his mind. He was dreaming of the umpteen thousand species of extraterrestrial wildlife roaming around out there, and to each one he was attaching a neat little tag: Something-or-other davisoni.
“The air’s fine,” Holdreth announced abruptly, looking up from his test-tubes. “Get your butterfly nets and let’s see what we can catch.”
There was something I didn’t like about the place. It was just too good to be true, and I learned long ago that nothing ever is. There’s always a catch someplace.
Only this seemed to be on the level. The planet was a bonanza for zoologists, and Davison and Holdreth were having the time of their lives, hipdeep in obliging specimens.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Davison said for at least the fiftieth time, as he scooped up a small purplish squirrel-like creature and examined it curiously. The squirrel stared back, examining Davison just as curiously.
“Let’s take some of these,” Davison said. “I like them.”
“Carry ’em on in, then,” I said, shrugging. I didn’t care which specimens they chose, so long as they filled up the storage hold quickly and let me blast off on schedule. I watched as Davison grabbed a pair of the squirrels and brought them into the ship.
Holdreth came over to me. He was carrying a sort of a dog with insect-faceted eyes and gleaming furless skin. “How’s this one, Gus?”
“Fine,” I said bleakly. “Wonderful.”
He put the animal down—it didn’t scamper away, just sat there smiling at us—and looked at me. He ran a hand through his fast-vanishing hair. “Listen, Gus, you’ve been gloomy all day. What’s eating you?”
“I don’t like this place,” I said.
“Why? Just on general principles?”
“It’s too easy, Clyde. Much too easy. These animals just flock around here waiting to be picked up.”
Holdreth chuckled. “And you’re used to a struggle, aren’t you? You’re just angry at us because we have it so simple here!”
“When I think of the trouble we went through just to get a pair of miserable vile-smelling anteaters, and—”
“Come off it, Gus. We’ll load up in a hurry, if you like. But this place is a zoological gold mine!”
I shook my head. “I don’t like it, Clyde. Not at all.”
Holdreth laughed again and picked up his faceted-eyed dog. “Say, know where I can find another of these, Gus?”
“Right over there.” I said, pointing. “By that tree. With its tongue hanging out. It’s just waiting to be carried away.”
Holdreth looked and smiled. “What do you know about that!” He snared his specimen and carried both of them inside.
I walked away to survey the grounds. The planet was too flatly incredible for me to accept on face value, without at least a look-see, despite the blithe way my two companions were snapping up specimens.
For one thing, animals just don’t exist this way—in big miscellaneous quantities, living all together happily. I hadn’t noticed more than a few of each kind, and there must have been five hundred different species, each one stranger-looking than the next. Nature doesn’t work that way.
For another, they all seemed to be on friendly terms with one another, though they acknowledged the unofficial leadership of the giraffe-like creature. Nature doesn’t work that way, either. I hadn’t seen one quarrel between the animals yet. That argued that they were all herbivores, which didn’t make sense ecologically.
I shrugged my shoulders and walked on.
Half an hour later, I knew a little more about the geography of our bonanza. We were on either an immense island or a peninsula of some sort, because I could see a huge body of water bordering the land some ten miles off. Our vicinity was fairly flat, except for a good-sized hill from which I could see the terrain.
There was a thick, heavily-wooded jungle not too far from the ship. The forest spread out all the way towards the water in one direction, but ended abruptly in the other. We had brought the ship down right at the edge of the clearing. Apparently most of the animals we saw lived in the jungle.
On the other side of our clearing was a low, broad plain that seemed to trail away into a desert in the distance; I could see an uninviting stretch of barren sand that contrasted strangely with the fertile jungle to my left. There was a small lake to the side. It was, I saw, the sort of country likely to attract a varied fauna, since there seemed to be every sort of habitat within a small area.
And the fauna! Although I’m a zoologist only by osmosis, picking up both my interest and my knowledge second-hand from Holdreth and Davison, I couldn’t help but be astonished by the wealth of strange animals. They came in all different shapes and sizes, colors and odors, and the only thing they all had in common was their friendliness. During the course of my afternoon’s wanderings a hundred animals must have come marching boldly right up to me, given me the once-over, and walked away. This included half a dozen kinds that I hadn’t seen before, plus one of the eye-stalked, intelligent-looking giraffes and a furless dog. Again, I had the feeling that the giraffe seemed to be trying to communicate.
I didn’t like it, I didn’t like it at all.
I returned to our clearing, and saw Holdreth and Davison still buzzing madly around, trying to cram as many animals as they could into our hold.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“Hold’s all full,” Davison said. “We’re busy making our alternate selections now.” I saw him carrying out Holdreth’s two furless dogs and picking up instead a pair of eight-legged penguinish things that uncomplainingly allowed themselves to be carried in. Holdreth was frowning unhappily.
“What do you want those for, Lee? Those dog-like ones seem much more interesting, don’t you think?”
“No,” Davison said. “I’d rather bring along these two. They’re curious beasts, aren’t they? Look at the muscular network that connects the—”
“Hold it, fellows,” I said. I peered at the animal in Davison’s hands and glanced up. “This is a curious beast,” I said. “It’s got eight legs.”
“You becoming a zoologist?” Holdreth asked, amused.
“No—but I am getting puzzled. Why should this one have eight legs, some of the others here six, and some of the others only four?”
They looked at me blankly, with the scorn of professionals.
“I mean, there ought to be some sort of logic to evolution here, shouldn’t there? On Earth we’ve developed a four-legged pattern of animal life; on Venus, they usually run to six legs. But have you ever seen an evolutionary hodgepodge like this place before?”
“There are stranger setups,” Holdreth said. “The symbiotes on Sirius Three, the burrowers of Mizar—but you’re right, Gus. This is a peculiar evolutionary dispersal. I think we ought to stay and investigate it fully.”
Instantly I knew from the bright expression on Davison’s face that I had blundered, had made things worse than ever. I decided to take a new tack.
“I don’t agree,” I said. “I think we ought to leave with what we’ve got, and come back with a larger expedition later.”
Davison chuckled. “Come on, Gus, don’t be silly! This is a chance of a life
time for us—why should we call in the whole zoological department on it?”
I didn’t want to tell them I was afraid of staying longer. I crossed my arms. “Lee, I’m the pilot of this ship, and you’ll have to listen to me. The schedule calls for a brief stopover here, and we have to leave. Don’t tell me I’m being silly.”
“But you are, man! You’re standing blindly in the path of scientific investigation, of—”
“Listen to me, Lee. Our food is calculated on a pretty narrow margin, to allow you fellows more room for storage. And this is strictly a collecting team. There’s no provision for extended stays on any one planet. Unless you want to wind up eating your own specimens, I suggest you allow us to get out of here.”
They were silent for a moment. Then Holdreth said, “I guess we can’t argue with that, Lee. Let’s listen to Gus and go back now. There’s plenty of time to investigate this place later when we can take longer.”
“But—oh, all right,” Davison said reluctantly. He picked up the eight-legged penguins. “Let me stash these things in the hold, and we can leave.” He looked strangely at me, as if I had done something criminal.
As he started into the ship, I called to him.
“What is it, Gus?”
“Look here, Lee. I don’t want to pull you away from here. It’s simply a matter of food,” I lied, masking my nebulous suspicions.
“I know how it is, Gus.” He turned and entered the ship.
I stood there thinking about nothing at all for a moment, then went inside myself to begin setting up the blastoff orbit.
I got as far as calculating the fuel expenditure when I noticed something. Feedwires were dangling crazily down from the control cabinet. Somebody had wrecked our drive mechanism, but thoroughly.
For a long moment, I stared stiffly at the sabotaged drive. Then I turned and headed into the storage hold.
To Be Continued Page 16
