Cycle of Fire

too much information to relay it all to his Teachers before the end of his normal life span. There would be no alternative to his remaining in the shelter under the ice cap when it was sealed, which meant that he would automatically become a Teacher himself.

Once or twice the boy’s conscience bothered him a trifle; he wondered whether it would not have been fairer to point out to Dar what all this time spent with the human visitors must necessarily entail. Each time he thought of this, however, he managed to convince himself that the native was old enough to know what he was doing.

It might have helped had he brought the matter up, just the same.

While the human scientists could, of course, work even in the hot season of Abyormen, action would be much more awkward. Therefore they were trying to get their basic information before the change occurred. Dar watched everything that went on, as far as possible; Kruger was much less enthusiastic after seeing one of the biological tests.

This occurred after the chain-reaction effect of heat on the local bacteria had been discovered. A soil sample from the planet had been used to cover the floor of an airtight cage, and several small animals of the sort Dar and Kruger had encountered in the crater had been introduced. Several native plants were growing there as well; the biologists had tried to reproduce the planet’s environment in miniature. This done, they proceeded to raise the temperature — gradually, to minimize the chance of thermal shock’s complicating the situation.

The cage was well enough insulated to prevent steam from condensing on the walls, so it was still possible to see what went on within. Some water, of course, was still liquid, since the boiling of the rest had raised the pressure considerably; and quite suddenly a meter began to climb from the zero position.

It was simply a galvanometer, but it was mounted in series with a resistor consisting of a tiny, open vial of water inside the cage. The resistance of the liquid was dropping, and no one present doubted the cause. In a few seconds this became evident even to the naked eye, as the atmosphere within the cage took on a faint but unmistakable reddish-brown tint. The bacteria were at work; oxides of nitrogen were forming, acidifying any water that might still be present in liquid form — and doing something much more drastic to the life in the cage.

The animals had stopped moving, except for an uneasy turning of their heads. Each had drawn a little way from his neighbor, and stopped nibbling on the plants. For several seconds subjects and experimenters alike remained motionless while the suspense mounted.

Then the largest of the little creatures abruptly collapsed, and within the next thirty seconds the others had followed suit. Kruger stole a sidelong glance at Dar, but his little friend did not notice. He had both eyes fixed on the cage. The boy looked back at the animals, and suddenly felt sick. The tiny creatures were losing shape, melting into featureless puddles of protoplasm. The pools remained separate, even where two of the creatures had collapsed quite close together. A faint stirring motion became visible in the mounds of still-living jelly, and as he saw this Kruger’s stomach failed him. He raced for the outdoors.

Dar did not seem affected; he remained for the next half hour, which was about the time it took the last of the pools to organize itself into about fifty tiny wormlike things which bore no resemblance whatever to the animal from whose body material they had been formed. These were crawling about the cage, apparently perfectly able to take care of themselves.

The plants had changed also, though not by the same process. The leaves of the larger ones dropped away and the trunks shriveled slightly. At first the watchers had supposed that the growths were simply being killed by the heat, but this hypothesis was eliminated by the appearance of hundreds of tiny knoblike excrescences on the withered trunks. These swelled slowly, apparently at the expense of the parent plant, and finally fell free in a rain of spheres which lasted several minutes.

Smaller, grasslike plants had simply withered, but other things were rapidly sprouting in their places. Less than an hour was required to transform the cage from a respectable representation of the landscape outside the flier to something utterly alien to all of the watchers — Dar Lang Ahn included.

“So that’s the story!” one of the biologists breathed at last. Neither he nor any of his colleagues had been affected by the sight as Kruger had been. Of course, none of them had the same personal feeling about Dar. “I suppose we should have expected quite a lot of offspring from each individual, if this is their only means of reproduction. The population of this planet must be something terrific right: after the season change.”

One of the other biologists shook his head negatively.

“That part is all right,” he said, “but something else isn’t. Right now we’re just before one of the changes, and there are still plenty of animals around — carnivores as well as plant eaters — and the vegetation doesn’t look particularly moth-eaten. I’m afraid I can’t quite believe that there’s no other method of reproduction here.”

“Wouldn’t the need for that depend on the length of time between seasons? If this ratio is the usual one it simply means that about one individual out of fifty lives through the season.”

“Right, and the season now ending lasts about forty Earth years. I refuse to believe that such a large proportion of survivors could be expected in any wild animal over such a period. We know that they eat about as much, compared to their weights, as similar animals on Earth. How about it, Dar? Don’t new animals get started at various times during your life span?”

“Certainly,” replied the native. “Any part of an animal will grow a whole new one, provided it is big enough. The animals we use for food certainly do that, anyway; we always leave some of the creature, for that purpose. Isn’t it that way with your animals?”

“Hmph. There are some creatures on Earth capable of that sort of thing, but they’re fairly primitive forms. I don’t see how anything on this planet could get killed.”

“Well, some animals don’t leave enough of their prey to grow again, of course. Then there are always things like starvation or drowning, though starvation takes a long time to shrink anything down to the point where it can’t live.”

One of the scientists looked thoughtfully at his own right hand, on which two fingers were represented by stumps — the relic of a childhood accident. “I suppose, Dar, that it would be foolish to ask whether your own race shares this ability of regeneration.”

“I do not see why it is foolish. Yes, we have it; though in a civilized community there is, of course, very seldom any need for it. Occasionally a victim of a glider crash or something of that sort will have to replace an arm or leg.”

“Or head?”

“That is a special case. If the injury is one that interrupts the regular life processes the tissues go back to the ‘beginning’ and reorganize to a completely new individual — or to several. As far as the original individual is concerned death has occurred. As I said, this sort of thing happens rarely.”

It rather surprised the biologists, that an explanation to the phenomenon was found. However, several weeks’ work with all the facilities the Alphard had to offer did give a reasonable answer. Richter, head of the biological crew, was glad of the chance to explain it to Commander Burke. That officer had come to question him specifically on such matters; he was worried.

“I’m bothered a trifle about these people, Richter,” Burke opened the conversation. “As you know, every ship commander that goes out from Earth gets a long briefing about the risk of introducing new species in any environment. They tell us about rabbits in Australia and Japanese beetles in North America, until we get sick of the whole business of ecology. It seems to me that we’ve run into something that might possibly be a serious competitor for humanity, if what I’ve been told about Dar Lang Ahn’s people is correct.”

“I suppose you’ve read our summary about regeneration. I admit that these people are rather remarkable in some respects, but I shouldn’t say they constituted any sort of danger.”

“Why not? Don’t they fit right into the picture — a creature entering a new environment, where its natural enemies are absent, and multiplying unchecked? These beings would swamp men out in a few years.”

“I can’t see it. Dar’s people have the same natural enemies as men — any sort of meat-eating animal, as well as their usual diseases. They do have sickness, according to Dar. Anything like that would come with them.”

“But the primary killing agent that affects the race is heat. What’s going to happen if they get established on Earth, or Thanno, or Hekla, or any of a score of other worlds you and I could name? They’d be virtually immortal.”

“Granting that they need heat to die ‘normally,’ I think you’re forgetting something. They also need it to reproduce.”