Simak, Cliffard D - Drop Dead - Notisblokk

VIP免费

2024-11-23 1 0 55.84KB 22 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Simak, Cliffard D - Drop Dead

Title: Drop dead

Author: Clifford D. Simak

Original copyright year: unknown, re-published 1962

Genre: science fiction

------------------------------------------------------------------------

DROP DEAD

Clifford D. Simak

THE CRITTERS were unbelievable. They looked like something from the maudlin

pen of a well-alcoholed cartoonist.

One herd of them clustered in a semicircle in front of the ship, not

jittery or belligerent - just looking at us. And that was strange.

Ordinarily, when a spaceship sets down on a virgin planet, it takes a week

at least for any life that might have seen or heard it to creep out of

hiding and sneak a look around.

The critters were almost cow-size, but nohow as graceful as a cow. Their

bodies were pushed together as if every blessed one of them had run

full-tilt into a wall. And they were just as lumpy as you'd expect from a

collision like that. Their hides were splashed with large squares of pastel

color - the kind of color one never finds on any self-respecting animal:

violet, pink, orange, chartreuse, to name only a few. The overall effect

was of a checkerboard done by an old lady who made crazy quilts.

And that, by far, was not the worst of it.

From their heads and other parts of their anatomy sprouted a weird sort of

vegetation, so that it appeared each animal was hiding, somewhat

ineffectively, behind a skimpy thicket. To compound the situation and make

it completely insane, fruits and vegetables - or what appeared to be fruits

and vegetables - grew from the vegetation.

So we stood there, the critters looking at us and us looking back at them,

and finally one of them walked forward until it was no more than six feet

from us. It stood there for a moment, gazing at us soulfully, then dropped

dead at our feet.

The rest of the herd turned around and trotted awkwardly away, for all the

world as if they had done what they had come to do and now could go about

their business.

Julian Oliver, our botanist, put up a hand and rubbed his balding head with

an absentminded motion.

"Another what is it coming up!" he moaned. "Why couldn't it, for once, be

something plain and simple?"

"It never is," I told him. "Remember that bush out on Hamal V that spent

half its life as a kind of glorified tomato and the other half as grade A

poison ivy?"

"I remember it," Oliver said sadly.

Max Weber, our biologist, walked over to the critter, reached out a

cautious foot and prodded it.

"Trouble is," he said, "that Hamal tomato was Julian's baby and this one

here is mine."

Side 1

Simak, Cliffard D - Drop Dead

"I wouldn't say entirely yours," Oliver retorted. "What do you call that

underbrush growing out of it?"

I came in fast to head off an argument. I had listened to those two

quarreling for the past twelve years, across several hundred light-years

and on a couple dozen planets. I couldn't stop it here, I knew, but at

least I could postpone it until they had something vital to quarrel about.

"Cut it out," I said. "It's only a couple of hours till nightfall and we

have to get the camp set up."

"But this critter," Weber said. "We can't just leave it here."

"Why not? There are millions more of them. This one will stay right here

and even if it doesn't -"

"But it dropped dead!"

"So it was old and feeble."

"It wasn't. It was right in the prime of life."

"We can talk about it later," said Alfred Kemper, our bacteriologist. "I'm

as interested as you two, but what Bob says is right. We have to get the

camp set up."

"Another thing," I added, looking hard at all of them. "No matter how

innocent this place may look, we observe planet rules. No eating anything.

No drinking any water. No wandering off alone. No carelessness of any

kind."

"There's nothing here," said Weber. "Just the herds of critters. Just the

endless plains. No trees, no hills, no nothing."

He really didn't mean it. He knew as well as I did the reason for observing

planet rules. He only wanted to argue.

"All right," I said, "which is it? Do we set up camp or do we spend the

night up in the ship?"

That did it.

We had the camp set up before the sun went down and by dusk we were all

settled in. Carl Parsons, our ecologist, had the stove together and the

supper started before the last tent peg was driven.

I dug out my diet kit and mixed up my formula and all of them kidded me

about it, the way they always did.

It didn't bother me. Their jibs were automatic and I had automatic answers.

It was something that had been going on for a long, long time. Maybe it was

best that way, better if they'd disregarded my enforced eating habits.

I remember Carl was grilling steaks and I had to move away so I couldn't

smell them. There's never a time when I wouldn't give my good right arm for

a steak or, to tell the truth, any other kind of normal chow. This diet

stuff keeps a man alive all right, but that's about the only thing that can

be said of it.

I know ulcers must sound silly and archaic. Ask any medic and he'll tell

you they don't happen any more. But I have a riddled stomach and the diet

kit to prove they sometimes do. I guess it's what you might call an

occupational ailment. There's a lot of never-ending worry playing nursemaid

to planet survey gangs.

After supper, we went out and dragged the critter in and had a closer look

at it.

Side 2

Simak, Cliffard D - Drop Dead

It was even worse to look at close than from a distance.

There was no fooling about that vegetation. It was the real McCoy and it

was part and parcel of the critter. But it seemed that it only grew out of

certain of the color blocks in the critter's body.

We found another thing that practically had Weber frothing at the mouth.

One of the color blocks had holes in it - it looked almost exactly like one

of those peg sets that children use as toys. When Weber took out his

jackknife and poked into one of the holes, he pried out an insect that

looked something like a bee. He couldn't quite believe it, so he did some

more probing and in another one of the holes he found another bee. Both of

the bees were dead.

He and Oliver wanted to start dissection then and there, but the rest of us

managed to talk them out of it.

We pulled straws to see who would stand first guard and, with my usual

luck, I pulled the shortest straw. Actually there wasn't much real reason

for standing guard, with the alarm system set to protect the camp, but it

was regulation - there had to be a guard.

I got a gun and the others said good night and went to their tents, but I

could hear them talking for a long time afterward. No matter how hardened

you may get to this Survey business, no matter how blase´, you hardly ever

get much sleep the first night on any planet.

I sat on a chair at one side of the camp table, on which burned a lantern

in lieu of the campfire we would have had on any other planet. But here we

couldn't have a fire because there wasn't any wood.

I sat at one side of the table, with the dead critter lying on the other

side of it and I did some worrying, although it wasn't time for me to start

worrying yet. I'm an agricultural economist and I don't begin my worrying

until at least the first reports are in.

But sitting just across the table from where it lay, I couldn't help but do

some wondering about that mixed-up critter. I didn't get anywhere except go

around in circles and I was sort of glad when Talbott Fullerton, the Double

Eye, came out and sat down beside me.

Sort of, I said. No one cared too much for Fullerton. I have yet to see the

Double Eye I or anybody else ever cared much about.

"Too excited to sleep?" I asked him.

He nodded vaguely, staring off into the darkness beyond the lantern's

light.

"Wondering," he said. "Wondering if this could be the planet."

"It won't be," I told him. "You're chasing an El Dorado, bunting down a

fable."

"They found it once before," Fullerton argued stubbornly. "It's all there

in the records."

"So was the Gilded Man. And the Empire of Prester John. Atlantis and all

the rest of it. So was the old Northwest Passage back on ancient Earth. So

were the Seven Cities. But nobody ever found any of those places because

they weren't there."

He sat with the lamplight in his face and he had that wild look in his eyes

and his hands were knotting into fists, then straightening out again.

"Sutter," he said unhappily, "I don't know why you do this - this mocking

of yours. Somewhere in this universe there is immortality. Somewhere,

Side 3

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Simak, Cliffard D - Drop Dead - Notisblokk.pdf

共22页,预览3页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Simak, Cliffard D - Drop Dead - Notisblokk

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: