'It's as if we've been struck down for—is it hubris, arrogant pride?
'Well, is it?' Chatvieux said, looking up at last. 'I don't feel exactly swollen with pride at the moment. Do you?'
'I'm not exactly proud of my piloting,' la Ventura admitted. 'But that isn't quite what I meant. I was thinking about why we came heff in the first place. It takes arrogant pride to think that you can scatte men, or at least things like men, all over the face of the Galaxy. It takes even more pride to do the job—to pack up all the equipment and move from planet to planet and actually make men suitable for every place you touch.'
'I suppose it does,' Chatvieux said. 'But we're only one of several hundred seed-ships in this limb of the Galaxy, so I doubt that the gods nicked us out as special sinners.' He smiled drily. 'If they had, maybe they'd have left us our ultraphone, so the Colonization Council could hear about our cropper. Besides, Paul, we try to produce men adapted to Earthlike planets, nothing more. We've sense enough—
humility enough, if you like—to know that we can't adapt men to Jupiter or to Tau Ceti.'
'Anyhow, we're here,' la Ventura said grimly. 'And we aren't going to get off.
Phil tells me that we don't even have our germ-cell bank any more, so we can't seed this place in the usual way. We've been thrown onto a dead world and dared to adapt to it. What are the pana- tropes going to do— provide built-in waterwings?'
'No,' Chatvieux said calmly. 'You and I and the rest of us are going to die, Paul.
Panatropic techniques don't work on the body, only on the inheritance-carrying factors. We can't give you built-in water-wings, any more than we can give you a new set of brains. I think we'll be able to populate this world with men, but we won't live to see it.'
The pilot thought about it, a lump of cold collecting gradually in his stomach.
'How long do you give us?' he said at last.
'Who knows? A month, perhaps.'
The bulkhead leading to the wrecked section of the ship was pushed :k, admitting salty, muggy air, heavy with carbon dioxide. Philip trasvogel, the communications officer, came in, tracking mud. Like la Ventura, he was now a man without a function, but it did not appear to bother him. He unbuckled from around his waist a canvas belt into which plastic vials were stuffed like cartridges.
'More samples, Doc,' he said. 'All alike—water, very wet. I have some quicksand in one boot, too. Find anything?' 'A good deal, Phil. Thanks. Are the others around?' Strasvogel poked his head out and hallooed. Other voices rang out over 'he mudflats. Minutes later, the rest of the survivors were crowding Wo the panatrope deck: Saltonstall, Chatvieux's senior assistant; Eunice agner, the only remaining ecologist; Eleftherios Venezuelos, the del- gate from the Colonization Council; and Joan Heath, a midshipman whose duties, like la Ventura's and Strasvogel's, were now without meaning. but whose bright head and tall, deceptively indolent body shone to the pilot's eyes brighter than Tau Ceti brighter, since the crash, even than the home sun.
Five men and two women—to colonize a planet on which standing room meant treading water.
They came in quietly and found seats or resting places on the deck, on the edges of tables, in corners.
Venezuelos said: 'What's the verdict, Dr. Chatvieux?'
'This place isn't dead,' Chatvieux said. 'There's life in the sea and in the fresh water, both. On the animal side of the ledger, evolution seems to have stopped with the Crustacea; the most advanced form I'Ve found is a tiny crayfish, from one of the local rivulets. The ponds and puddles are well-stocked with protozoa and small metazoans, right up to a wonderfully variegated rotifer population—including a castle- building rotifer like Earth's Floscularidae. The plants run from simple algae to the thalluslike species.'
'The sea is about the same,' Eunice said, 'I've found some of the larger simple metazoans—jellyfish and so on—and some crayfish almost as big as lobsters. But it's normal to find salt-water species running larger than freshwater.'
'In short,' Chatvieux said, 'We'll survive here—if we fight.' 'Wait a minute,' la Ventura said. 'You've just finished telling me that we wouldn't survive. And you were talking about us, not about the species, because we don't have our germ-cell banks any more. What's—'
'I'll get to that again in a moment,' Chatvieux said. 'Saltonstall, what would you think of taking to the sea? We came out of it once; maybe we could come out of it again.'
'No good,' Saltonstall said immediately. 'I like the idea, but I don't think this planet ever heard of Swinburne, or Homer, either. Looking at it as a colonization problem, as if we weren't involved ourselves, I wouldn't give you a credit for epi oinopa ponton. The evolutionary pressure there is too high, the competition from other species is prohibitive; seeding the sea should be the last thing we attempt. The colonists wouldn't have a chance to learn a thing before they were destroyed.'
'Why?' la Ventura said. The death in his stomach was becoming hard to placate.
'Eunice, do your sea-going Coelenterates include anything like the Portuguese man-of-war?'
The ecologist nodded.
'There's your answer, Paul,' Saltonstall said. 'The sea is out. It's got to be fresh water, where the competing creatures are less formidable and there are more places to hide.'
'We can't compete with a jellyfish?' la Ventura asked, swallowing.
'No, Paul,' Chatvieux said. 'The panatropes make adaptations, not gods. They take human germ-cells—in this case, our own, since o bank was wiped out in the crash—and modify them toward crea who can live in any reasonable environment.
The result will be man and intelligent. It usually shows the donor's personality pattern, too since the modifications are usually made mostly in the morphology, not so much in the mind, of the resulting individual.
'But we can't transmit memory. The adapted man is worse than a hild in his new environment. He has no history, no techniques, no precedents, not even a language.
Ordinarily the seeding teams more or less take him through elementary school before they leave the planet, but we won't survive long enough for that. We'll have to design our colonists with plenty of built-in protections and locate them in the most favorable environment possible, so that at least some of them will survive the learning process.'
The pilot thought about it, but nothing occurred to him which did not make the disaster seem realer and more intimate with each passing second. 'One of the new creatures can have my personality pattern, but it won't be able to remember being me. Is that right?'
'That's it. There may be just the faintest of residuums—panatropy's given us some data which seem to support the old Jungian notion of ancestral memory. But we're all going to die on Hydrot, Paul. There's no avoiding that. Somewhere we'll leave behind people who behave as we would, think and feel as we would, but who won't remember la Ventura, or Chatvieux, or Joan Heath—or Earth.'
The pilot said nothing more. There was a gray taste in his mouth.
'Saltonstall, what do you recommend as a form?'
The panatropist pulled reflectively at his nose. 'Webbed extremities, of course, with thumbs and big toes heavy and thornlike for defense until the creature has had a chance to learn. Book-lungs, like the arachnids, working out of intercostal spiracles—
they are gradually adaptable to atmosphere-breathing, if it ever decides to come out of the water. Also I'd suggest sporulation. As an aquatic animal, our colonist is going to have an indefinite Hfespan, but we'll have to give it a breeding cycle of about six weeks to keep its numbers up during the learning period; so there'll have to be a definite break of some duration in its active year. Otherwise it'll hit the population problem before it's learned enough to cope with it.'
'Also, it'll be better if our colonists could winter inside a good hard shell,' Eunice Wagner added in agreement. 'So sporulation's the obvious answer. Most microscopic creatures have it.'
'Microscopic?' Phil said incredulously.
'Certainly,' Chatvieux said, amused. 'We can't very well crowd a six-foot man into a two-foot puddle. But that raises a question. We'll have tough competition from the rotifers, and some of them aren't strictly microscopic. I don't think your average colonist should run under 250 microns, Saltonstall. Give them a chance to slug it out.'
'I as thinking of making them twice that big.'
'Then they'd be the biggest things in their environment,' Eunice Wagner pointed out, 'and won't ever develop any skills. Besides if you make them about rotifer size, I'll give them an incentive for pushing out the castle-building rotifers.
