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Weber snorted. "Ridiculous!"
"Not so ridiculous," Kemper retorted. "Not half so ridiculous as some other
things we found. Not one-tenth as ridiculous as no brain or nervous system.
Not any more ridiculous than my bacteria."
"Your bacteria!" Weber said. He drank down half a glass of liquor in a
single gulp to make his disdain emphatic.
"The critters swarm with them," Kemper went on. "You find them everywhere
throughout the entire animal. Not just in the bloodstream, not in
restricted areas, but in the entire organism. And all of them the same.
Normally it takes a hundred different kinds of bacteria to make a
metabolism work, but here there's only one. And that one, by definition,
must be general purpose - it must do all the work that the hundred other
species do."
He grinned at Weber. "I wouldn't doubt but right there are your brains and
nervous systems - the bacteria doubling in brass for both systems."
Parsons came over from the stove and stood with his fists planted on his
hips, a steak fork grasped in one hand and sticking out at a tangent from
his body.
"If you ask me," he announced, "there ain't no such animal. The critters
are all wrong. They can't be made that way." '
"But they are," said Kemper.
"It doesn't make sense! One kind of life. One kind of grass for it to eat.
I'll bet that if we could make a census, we'd find the critter population
is at exact capacity - just so many of them to the acre, figured down
precisely to the last mouthful of grass. Just enough for them to eat and no
more. Just enough so the grass won't be overgrazed. Or undergrazed, for
that matter."
"What's wrong with that?" I asked, just to needle him.
I thought for a minute he'd take the steak fork to me.
"What's wrong with it?" he thundered. "Nature's never static, never
standing still. But here it's standing still. Where's the competition?
Where's the evolution?"
"That's not the point," said Kemper quietly. "The fact is that that's the
way it is. The point is why? How did it happen? How was it planned? Why was
it planned?"
"Nothing's planned," Weber told him sourly. "You know better than to talk
like that."
Parsons went back to his cooking. Fullerton had wandered off somewhere.
Maybe he was discouraged from hearing about the eggs and milk.
For a time, the four of us just sat.
Finally Weber said: "The first night we were here, I came out to relieve
Bob at guard and I said to him..."
He looked at me. "You remember, Bob?" "Sure. You said symbiosis."
"And now?" asked Kemper.
"I don't know. It simply couldn't happen. But if it did - if it could -
this critter would be the most beautifully logical example of symbiosis you
could dream up. Symbiosis carried to its logical conclusion. Like, long
ago, all the life-forms said let's quit this feuding, let's get together,
let's cooperate. All the plants and animals and fish and bacteria got
together -"
"It's far-fetched, of course," said Kemper. "But, by and large, it's not
anything unheard of, merely carried further, that's all. Symbiosis is a
recognized way of life and there's nothing -"
Parsons let out a bellow for them to come and get it, and I went to my tent
and broke out my diet kit and mixed up a mess of goo. It was a relief to
eat in private, without the others making cracks about the stuff I had to
choke down.
I found a thin sheaf of working notes on the small wooden crate I'd set up
for a desk. I thumbed through them while I ate. They were fairly sketchy
and sometimes hard to read, being smeared with blood and other gook from
the dissecting table. But I was used to that. I worked with notes like that
all the blessed time; So I was able to decipher them. The whole picture
wasn't there, of course, but there was enough to bear out what they'd told
me and a good deal more as well.
For examples, the color squares that gave the critters their crazy-quiltish
look were separate kinds of meat or fish or fowl or unknown food, whatever
it might be. Almost as if each square was the present-day survivor of each
ancient symbiont - if, in fact, there was any basis to this talk of
symbiosis.
The egg-laying apparatus was described in some biologic detail, but there
seemed to be no evidence of recent egg production. The same was true of the
lactation system.
There were, the notes said in Oliver's crabbed writing, five kinds of fruit [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]