In their ignorance they would even fight it. There had been the ship that had come before. The first ship had contained many of the keen-thinking fragments. There had been two varieties, life producers and the sterile ones. (How different this second ship was. The keen-thinkers were all sterile,
while the other fragments, the fuzzy-thinkers and the no-thinkers, were all producers of life. It was strange.)
How gladly that first ship had been welcomed by all the planet! He could remember the first intense shock at the realization that the visitors were fragments and not complete. The shock had give way to pity, and the pity to action. It was not certain how they would fit into the community, but there had been no hesitation. All life was sacred and somehow room would have been made for them-for all of them, from the large keen-thinkers to the little multipliers in the darkness.
But there had been a miscalculation. They had not correctly analyzed the course of the fragments' ways of thinking. The keen-thinkers became aware of what had been done and resented it. They were frightened, of course; they did not understand.
They had developed the barrier first, and then, later, had destroyed themselves, exploding their ships to atoms.
Poor, foolish fragments.
This time, at least, it would be different. They would be saved, despite themselves.
John Drake would not have admitted it in so many words, but he was very proud of his skill on the photo-typer. He had a travel-kit model, which was a six-by- eight, featureless dark plastic slab, with cylindrical bulges on either end to hold the roll of thin paper. It fitted into a brown leather case, equipped with a beltlike contraption that held it closely about the waist and at one hip. The whole thing weighed less than a pound.
Drake could operate it with either hand. His fingers would flick quickly and easily, placing their light pressure at exact spots on the blank surface, and, soundlessly, words would be written.
He looked thoughtfully at the beginning of his story, then up at Dr. Weiss. 'What do you think, Doc?'
'It starts well.'
Drake nodded. 'I thought I might as well start with Saybrook himself. They haven't released his story back home yet. I wish I could have seen Saybrook's original report. How did he ever get it through, by the way?'
'As near as I could tell, he spent one last night sending it through the sub-ether. When he was finished, he shorted the motors, and converted the entire ship into a thin cloud of vapor a millionth of a second later. The crew and himself along with it.'
'What a man! You were in this from the beginning, Doc?'
'Not from the beginning,' corrected Weiss gently. 'Only since the receipt of Saybrook's report.'
He could not help thinking back. He had read that report, realizing even then how wonderful the planet must have seemed when Saybrook's coloniz-
ing expedition first reached it. It was practically a duplicate of Earth, with an abounding plant life and a purely vegetarian animal life.
There had been only the little patches of green fur (how often had he used that phrase in his speaking and thinking!) which seemed strange. No living individual on the planet had eyes. Instead, there was this fur. Even the plants, each blade or leaf or blossom, possessed the two patches of richer green.
Then Saybrook had noticed, startled and bewildered, that there was no conflict for food on the planet. All plants grew pulpy appendages which were eaten by the animals. These were regrown in a matter of hours. No other parts of the plants were touched. It was as though the plants fed the animals as part of the order of nature. And the plants themselves did not grow in overpowering profusion. They might almost have been cultivated, they were spread across the available soil so discriminately.
How much time, Weiss wondered, had Saybrook had to observe the strange law and order on the planet?-the fact that insects kept their numbers reasonable, though no birds ate them; that the rodent-like things did not swarm, though no carnivores existed to keep them in check.
And then there had come the incident of the white rats.
That prodded Weiss. He said, 'Oh, one correction, Drake. Hamsters were not the first animals involved. It was the white rats.'
'White rats,' said Drake, making the correction in his notes.
'Every colonizing ship,' said Weiss, 'takes a group of white rats for the purpose of testing any alien foods. Rats, of course, are very similar to human beings from a nutritional viewpoint. Naturally, only female white rats are taken.'
Naturally. If only one sex was present, there was no danger of unchecked multiplication in case the planet proved favorable. Remember the rabbits in Australia.
'Incidentally, why not use males?' asked Drake.
'Females are hardier,' said Weiss, 'which is lucky, since that gave the situation away. It turned out suddenly that all the rats were bearing young.'
'Right. Now that's where I'm up to, so here's my chance to get some things straight. For my own information, Doc, how did Saybrook find out they were in a family way?'
'Accidentally, of course. In the course of nutritional investigations, rats are dissected for evidence of internal damage. Their condition was bound to be discovered. A few more were dissected; same results. Eventually, all that lived gave birth to young-with no male rats aboard!'
'And the point is that all the young were born with little green patches of fur instead of eyes.'
'That is correct. Saybrook said so and we corroborate him. After the rats, the pet cat of one of the children was obviously affected. When it finally
kittened, the kittens were not bom with closed eyes but with little patches of green fur. There was no tomcat aboard.
'Eventually Saybrook had the women tested. He didn't tell them what for. He didn't want to frighten them. Every single one of them was in the early stages of pregnancy, leaving out of consideration those few who had been pregnant at the time of embarkation. Saybrook never waited for any child to be born, of course. He knew they would have no eyes, only shining patches of green fur.
'He even prepared bacterial cultures (Saybrook was a thorough man) and found each bacillus to show microscopic green spots.'
Drake was eager. 'That goes way beyond our briefing-or, at least, the briefing I got. But granted that life on Saybrook's Planet is organized into a unified whole, how is it done?'
'How? How are your cells organized into a unified whole? Take an individual cell out of your body, even a brain cell, and what is it by itself? Nothing. A little blob of protoplasm with no more capacity for anything human than an amoeba. Less capacity, in fact, since it couldn't live by itself. But put the cells together and you have something that could invent a spaceship or write a symphony.'
'I get the idea,' said Drake.
Weiss went on, 'All life on Saybrook's Planet is a single organism. In a sense, all life on Earth is too, but it's a fighting dependence, a dog-eat-dog dependence. The bacteria fix nitrogen; the plants fix carbon; animals eat plants and each other; bacterial decay hits everything. It comes full circle. Each grabs as much as it can, and is, in turn, grabbed.
'On Saybrook's Planet, each organism has its place, as each cell in our body does. Bacteria and plants produce food, on the excess of which animals feed, providing in turn carbon dioxide and nitrogenous wastes. Nothing is produced more or less than is needed. The scheme of life is intelligently altered to suit the local environment. No group of life forms multiplies more or less than is needed, just as the cells in our body stop multiplying when there are enough of them for a given purpose. When they don't stop multiplying, we call it cancer. And that's what life on Earth really is, the kind of organic organization we have, compared to that on Saybrook's Planet. One big cancer. Every species, every individual doing its best to thrive at the expense of every other species and individual.'
'You sound as if you approve of Saybrook's Planet, Doc.'
'I do, in a way. It makes sense out of the business of living. I can see their viewpoint toward us. Suppose one of the cells of your body could be conscious of the efficiency of the human body as compared with that of the cell itself, and could realize that this was only the result of the union of many cells into a higher whole. And then suppose it became conscious of the existence of free-living cells, with bare life and nothing more. It might feel a very strong desire to drag the poor thing into an organization. It might feel
sorry for it, feel perhaps a sort of missionary spirit. The things on Saybrook's Planet-or the thing; one should use the singular-feels just that, perhaps.'
'And went ahead by bringing about virgin births, eh, Doc? I've got to go easy on that angle of it. Post-office regulations, you know.'
'There's nothing ribald about it, Drake. For centuries we've been able to make the eggs of sea urchins, bees, frogs, et cetera develop without the intervention of male fertilization. The touch of a needle was sometimes enough, or just immersion in the proper salt solution. The thing on Saybrook's Planet can cause fertilization by the controlled use of radiant energy. That's why an appropriate energy barrier stops it; interference, you see, or static.
'They can do more than stimulate the division and development of an unfertilized egg. They can impress their own characteristics upon its nucleo-proteins, so that the young are born with the little patches of green fur, which serve as the planet's sense organ and means of communication. The young, in other words, are not individuals, but become part of the thing on Saybrook's Planet. The thing on the planet, not at all incidentally, can impregnate any species-plant, animal, or microscopic.'
'Potent stuff,' muttered Drake.
'Totipotent,' Dr. Weiss said sharply. 'Universally potent. Any fragment of it is totipotent. Given time, a single bacterium from Saybrook's Planet can convert all of Earth into a single organism! We've got the experimental proof of that.'
Drake said unexpectedly, 'You know, I think I'm a millionaire, Doc. Can you keep a secret?'
Weiss nodded, puzzled.
'I've got a souvenir from Saybrook's Planet,' Drake told him, grinning. 'It's only a pebble, but after the publicity the planet will get, combined with the fact that it's quarantined from here on in, the pebble will be all any human being will ever see of it. How much do you suppose I could sell the thing for?'
Weiss stared. 'A pebble?' He snatched at the object shown him, a hard, gray ovoid. 'You shouldn't have done that, Drake. It was strictly against regulations.'
'I know. That's why I asked if you could keep a secret. If you could give me a signed note of authentication-What's the matter, Doc?'
Instead of answering, Weiss could only chatter and point. Drake ran over and stared down at the pebble. It was the same as before-
Except that the light was catching it at an angle, and it showed up two little green spots. Look very closely; they were patches of green hairs.
He was disturbed. There was a definite air of danger within the ship. There was the suspicion of his presence aboard. How could that be? He had done nothing yet. Had another fragment of home come aboard and been
less cautious? That would be impossible without his knowledge, and though he probed the ship intensely, he found nothing.
And then the suspicion diminished, but it was not quite dead. One of the keen-thinkers still wondered, and was treading close to the truth.
How long before the landing? Would an entire world of life fragments be deprived of completeness? He clung closer to the severed ends of the wire he had been specially bred to imitate, afraid of detection, fearful for his altruistic mission.
