The Eleventh Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack

by F. L. Wallace

  On his way back to the spaceship, Executive Hafner paused. “Any ideas about it?”

  Dano Marin shrugged. “How could I have? The planet is as new to me as it is to you.”

  “Sure. But you’re the biologist.”

  As the only scientist in a crew of rough-and-ready colonists and builders, Marin was going to be called on to answer a lot of questions that weren’t in his field.

  “Nocturnal insects, most likely,” he suggested. That was pretty weak, though he knew that in ancient times locusts had stripped fields in a matter of hours. Could they do the same with the clothing of humans and not awaken them? “I’ll look into the matter. As soon as I find anything, I’ll let you know.”

  “Good.” Hafner nodded and went into the spaceship.

  * * * *

  Dano Marin walked to the grove in which the colonists had been sleeping. It had been a mistake to let them bed down there, but at the time the request had been made, there had seemed no reason not to grant it. After eighteen months in crowded ships everyone naturally wanted fresh air and the rustle of leaves overhead.

  Marin looked out through the grove. It was empty now; the colonists, both men and women, had disappeared inside the ship, dressing, probably.

  The trees were not tall and the leaves were dark bottle-green. Occasional huge white flowers caught sunlight that made them seem larger than they were. It wasn’t Earth and therefore the trees couldn’t be magnolias. But they reminded Marin of magnolia trees and thereafter he always thought of them as that.

  The problem of the missing clothing was ironic. Biological Survey never made a mistake—yet obviously they had. They listed the planet as the most suitable for Man of any so far discovered. Few insects, no dangerous animals, a most equitable climate. They had named it Glade because that was the word which fitted best. The whole land mass seemed to be one vast and pleasant meadow.

  Evidently there were things about the planet that Biological Survey had missed.

  Marin dropped to his knees and began to look for clues. If insects had been responsible, there ought to be a few dead ones, crushed, perhaps, as the colonists rolled over in their sleep. There were no insects, either live or dead.

  He stood up in disappointment and walked slowly through the grove. It might be the trees. At night they could exude a vapor which was capable of dissolving the material from which the clothing had been made. Far-fetched, but not impossible. He crumbled a leaf in his hand and rubbed it against his sleeve. A pungent smell, but nothing happened. That didn’t disprove the theory, of course.

  He looked out through the trees at the blue sun. It was bigger than Sol, but farther away. At Glade, it was about equal to the Sun on Earth.

  He almost missed the bright eyes that regarded him from the underbrush. Almost, but didn’t—the domain of biology begins at the edge of the atmosphere; it includes the brush and the small creatures that live in it.

  He swooped down on it. The creature fled squealing. He ran it down in the grass outside the grove. It collapsed into quaking flesh as he picked it up. He talked to it gently and the terror subsided.

  It nibbled contentedly on his jacket as he carried it back to the ship.

  * * * *

  Executive Hafner stared unhappily into the cage. It was an undistinguished animal, small and something like an undeveloped rodent. Its fur was sparse and stringy, unglamorous; it would never be an item in the fur export trade.

  “Can we exterminate it?” asked Hafner. “Locally, that is.”

  “Hardly. It’s ecologically basic.”

  The executive looked blank. Dano Marin added the explanation: “You know how Biological Control works. As soon as a planet has been discovered that looks suitable, they send out a survey ship loaded with equipment. The ship flies low over a good part of the planet and the instruments in the ship record the neural currents of the animals below. The instruments can distinguish the characteristic neural patterns of anything that has a brain, including insects.

  “Anyway, they have a pretty good idea of the kinds of animals on the planet and their relative distribution. Naturally, the survey party takes a few specimens. They have to in order to correlate the pattern with the actual animal, otherwise the neural pattern would be merely a meaningless squiggle on a microfilm.

  “The survey shows that this animal is one of only four species of mammals on the planet. It is also the most numerous.”

  Hafner grunted. “So if we kill them off here, others will swarm in from surrounding areas?”

  “That’s about it. There are probably millions of them on this peninsula. Of course, if you want to put a barrier across the narrow connection to the mainland, you might be able to wipe them out locally.”

  The executive scowled. A barrier was possible, but it would involve more work than he cared to expend.

  “What do they eat?” he asked truculently.

  “A little bit of everything, apparently. Insects, fruits, berries, nuts, succulents, and grain.” Dano Marin smiled. “I guess it could be called an omnivore—now that our clothing is handy, it eats that, too.”

  Hafner didn’t smile. “I thought our clothing was supposed to be verminproof.”

  Marin shrugged. “It is, on twenty-seven planets. On the twenty-eighth, we meet up with a little fella that has better digestive fluids, that’s all.”

  Hafner looked pained. “Are they likely to bother the crops we plant?”

  “Offhand, I would say they aren’t. But then I would have said the same about our clothing.”

  Hafner made up his mind. “All right. You worry about the crops. Find some way to keep them out of the fields. Meanwhile, everyone sleeps in the ship until we can build dormitories.”

  Individual dwelling units would have been more appropriate in the colony at this stage, thought Marin. But it wasn’t for him to decide. The executive was a man who regarded a schedule as something to be exceeded.

  “The omnivore—” began Marin.

  Hafner nodded impatiently. “Work on it,” he said, and walked away.

  The biologist sighed. The omnivore really was a queer little creature, but it was by no means the most important thing on Glade. For instance, why were there so few species of land animals on the planet? No reptiles, numerous birds, and only four kinds of mammals.

  Every comparable planet teemed with a wild variety of life. Glade, in spite of seemingly ideal conditions, hadn’t developed. Why?

  He had asked Biological Controls for this assignment because it had seemed an interesting problem. Now, apparently, he was being pressed into service as an exterminator.

  He reached in the cage and picked up the omnivore. Mammals on Glade were not unexpected. Parallel development took care of that. Given roughly the same kind of environment, similar animals would usually evolve.

  In the Late Carboniferous forest on Earth, there had been creatures like the omnivore, the primitive mammal from which all others had evolved. On Glade, that kind of evolution just hadn’t taken place. What had kept nature from exploiting its evolutionary potentialities? There was the real problem, not how to wipe them out.

  Marin stuck a needle in the omnivore. It squealed and then relaxed. He drew out the blood and set it back in the cage. He could learn a lot about the animal from trying to kill it.

  * * * *

  The quartermaster was shouting, though his normal voice carried quite well.

  “How do you know it’s mice?” the biologist asked him.

  “Look,” said the quartermaster angrily.

  Marin looked. The evidence did indicate mice.

  Before he could speak, the quartermaster snapped, “Don’t tell me they’re only mice-like creatures. I know that. The question is: how can I get rid of them?”

  “Have you tried poison?”

  “Tell me what poison to use and I’ll use it.”

  It wasn’t the easiest question to answer. What was poisonous to an animal he had never seen and knew nothing about? According to Biologica
l Survey, the animal didn’t exist.

  It was unexpectedly serious. The colony could live off the land, and was expected to. But another group of colonists was due in three years. The colony was supposed to accumulate a surplus of food to feed the increased numbers. If they couldn’t store the food they grew any better than the concentrates, that surplus was going to be scanty.

  Marin went over the warehouse thoroughly. It was the usual early construction on a colonial world. Not esthetic, it was sturdy enough. Fused dirt floor, reinforced foot-thick walls, a ceiling slab of the same. The whole was bound together with a molecular cement that made it practically airtight. It had no windows; there were two doors. Certainly it should keep out rodents.

  A closer examination revealed an unexpected flaw. The floor was as hard as glass; no animal could gnaw through it, but, like glass, it was also brittle. The crew that had built the warehouse had evidently been in such a hurry to get back to Earth that they hadn’t been as careful as they should have been, for here and there the floor was thin. Somewhere under the heavy equipment piled on it, the floor had cracked. There a burrowing animal had means of entry.

  Short of building another warehouse, it was too late to do anything about that. Mice-like animals were inside and had to be controlled where they were.

  The biologist straightened up. “Catch me a few of them alive and I’ll see what I can do.”

  * * * *

  In the morning, a dozen live specimens were delivered to the lab. They actually did resemble mice.

  Their reactions were puzzling. No two of them were affected by the same poison. A compound that stiffened one in a matter of minutes left the others hale and hearty, and the poison he had developed to control the omnivores was completely ineffective.

  The depredations in the warehouse went on. Black mice, white ones, gray and brown, short-tailed and long-eared, or the reverse, they continued to eat the concentrates and spoil what they didn’t eat.

  Marin conferred with the executive, outlined the problem as he saw it and his ideas on what could be done to combat the nuisance.

  “But we can’t build another warehouse,” argued Hafner. “Not until the atomic generator is set up, at any rate. And then we’ll have other uses for the power.” The executive rested his head in his hands. “I like the other solution better. Build one and see how it works.”

  “I was thinking of three,” said the biologist.

  “One,” Hafner insisted. “We can’t spare the equipment until we know how it works.”

  At that he was probably right. They had equipment, as much as three ships could bring. But the more they brought, the more was expected of the colony. The net effect was that equipment was always in short supply.

  Marin took the authorization to the engineer. On the way, he privately revised his specifications upward. If he couldn’t get as many as he wanted, he might as well get a better one.

  In two days, the machine was ready.

  It was delivered in a small crate to the warehouse. The crate was opened and the machine leaped out and stood there, poised.

  “A cat!” exclaimed the quartermaster, pleased. He stretched out his hand toward the black fuzzy robot.

  “If you’ve touched anything a mouse may have, get your hand away,” warned the biologist. “It reacts to smell as well as sight and sound.”

  Hastily, the quartermaster withdrew his hand. The robot disappeared silently into the maze of stored material.

  In one week, though there were still some mice in the warehouse, they were no longer a danger.

  * * * *

  The executive called Marin into his office, a small sturdy building located in the center of the settlement. The colony was growing, assuming an aspect of permanency. Hafner sat in his chair and looked out over that growth with satisfaction.

  “A good job on the mouse plague,” he said.

  The biologist nodded. “Not bad, except there shouldn’t be any mice here. Biological Survey—”

  “Forget it,” said the exec. “Everybody makes mistakes, even B. S.” He leaned back and looked seriously at the biologist. “I have a job I need done. Just now I’m short of men. If you have no objections.…”

  The exec was always short of men, would be until the planet was overcrowded, and he would try to find someone to do the work his own men should have done. Dano Marin was not directly responsible to Hafner; he was on loan to the expedition from Biological Controls. Still, it was a good idea to cooperate with the executive. He sighed.

  “It’s not as bad as you think,” said Hafner, interpreting the sound correctly. He smiled. “We’ve got the digger together. I want you to run it.”

  Since it tied right in with his investigations, Dano Marin looked relieved and showed it.

  “Except for food, we have to import most of our supplies,” Hafner explained. “It’s a long haul, and we’ve got to make use of everything on the planet we can. We need oil. There are going to be a lot of wheels turning, and every one of them will have to have oil. In time we’ll set up a synthetic plant, but if we can locate a productive field now, it’s to our advantage.”

  “You’re assuming the geology of Glade is similar to Earth?”

  Hafner waggled his hand. “Why not? It’s a nicer twin of Earth.”

  Why not? Because you couldn’t always tell from the surface, thought Marin. It seemed like Earth, but was it? Here was a good chance to find out the history of Glade.

  Hafner stood up. “Any time you’re ready, a technician will check you out on the digger. Let me know before you go.”

  * * * *

  Actually, the digger wasn’t a digger. It didn’t move or otherwise displace a gram of dirt or rock. It was a means of looking down below the surface, to any practical depth. A large crawler, it was big enough for a man to live in without discomfort for a week.

  It carried an outsize ultrasonic generator and a device for directing the beam into the planet. That was the sending apparatus. The receiving end began with a large sonic lens which picked up sound beams reflected from any desired depth, converted it into electrical energy and thence into an image which was flashed onto a screen.

  At the depth of ten miles, the image was fuzzy, though good enough to distinguish the main features of the strata. At three miles, it was better. It could pick up the sound reflection of a buried coin and convert it into a picture on which the date could be seen.

  It was to a geologist as a microscope is to a biologist. Being a biologist, Dano Marin could appreciate the analogy.

  He started at the tip of the peninsula and zigzagged across, heading toward the isthmus. Methodically, he covered the territory, sleeping at night in the digger. On the morning of the third day, he discovered oil traces, and by that afternoon he had located the main field.

  He should probably have turned back at once, but now that he had found oil, he investigated more deliberately. Starting at the top, he let the image range downward below the top strata.

  It was the reverse of what it should have been. In the top few feet, there were plentiful fossil remains, mostly of the four species of mammals. The squirrel-like creature and the far larger grazing animal were the forest dwellers. Of the plains animals, there were only two, in size fitting neatly between the extremes of the forest dwellers.

  After the first few feet, which corresponded to approximately twenty thousand years, he found virtually no fossils. Not until he reached a depth which he could correlate to the Late Carboniferous age on Earth did fossils reappear. Then they were of animals appropriate to the epoch. At that depth and below, the history of Glade was quite similar to Earth’s.

  Puzzled, he checked again in a dozen widely scattered localities. The results were always the same—fossil history for the first twenty thousand years, then none for roughly a hundred million. Beyond that, it was easy to trace the thread of biological development.

  In that period of approximately one hundred million years, something unique had happened to Glade. What was
it?

  On the fifth day his investigations were interrupted by the sound of the keyed-on radio.

  “Marin.”

  “Yes?” He flipped on the sending switch.

  “How soon can you get back?”

  He looked at the photo-map. “Three hours. Two if I hurry.”

  “Make it two. Never mind the oil.”

  “I’ve found oil. But what’s the matter?”

  “You can see it better than I can describe it. We’ll discuss it when you get back.”

  * * * *

  Reluctantly, Marin retracted the instruments into the digger. He turned it around and, with not too much regard for the terrain, let it roar. The treads tossed dirt high in the air. Animals fled squealing from in front of him. If the grove was small enough, he went around it, otherwise he went through and left matchsticks behind.

  He skidded the crawler ponderously to halt near the edge of the settlement. The center of activity was the warehouse. Pickups wheeled in and out, transferring supplies to a cleared area outside. He found Hafner in a corner of the warehouse, talking to the engineer.

  Hafner turned around when he came up. “Your mice have grown, Marin.”

  Marin looked down. The robot cat lay on the floor. He knelt and examined it. The steel skeleton hadn’t broken; it had been bent, badly. The tough plastic skin had been torn off and, inside, the delicate mechanism had been chewed into an unrecognizable mass.

  Around the cat were rats, twenty or thirty of them, huge by any standards. The cat had fought; the dead animals were headless or disemboweled, unbelievably battered. But the robot had been outnumbered.

  Biological Survey had said there weren’t any rats on Glade. They had also said that about mice. What was the key to their error?

  The biologist stood up. “What are you going to do about it?”

  “Build another warehouse, two-foot-thick fused dirt floors, monolithic construction. Transfer all perishables to it.”

  Marin nodded. That would do it. It would take time, of course, and power, all they could draw out of the recently set up atomic generator. All other construction would have to be suspended. No wonder Hafner was disturbed.