Another idea bobbed to the surface. "Well, then—try it this way. Earth isn't their native planet, so maybe they have to eat a lot of different things to get all of their daily requirements. I mean, their metabolisms must be different because they've evolved for a different set of conditions, so they have to be unable to make the best use of Earth-type foods—it follows, doesn't it?—so they'd have to increase their intake just to survive."

  "Um, but look, if that were true of the millipedes, then it would have to be true for the worms. They'd have to be even more ravenous than they already are. They'd be eating everything in sight."

  "Well, they do, don't they?"

  He shrugged. "Who knows what's normal for a worm?"

  "Another worm?" I suggested.

  "Mm," he said. And then added, "—Except, there are no normal worms on this planet."

  "Huh?" I looked at him suddenly.

  "It was a joke!" he said.

  "No—say it again!"

  "There are no normal worms on this planet."

  "What did you mean by that?"

  He shrugged. "I don't know; it just seemed . . . obvious. You know? I mean, we don't know what the worms are like in their own ecology; we only know them in ours—and we don't even know how they got here. So if there's something—anything—that's making them or their behavior atypical, we wouldn't know, would we? And neither would any other worm on this planet, because they'd all be experiencing the same effects."

  "That's great!" I said, "It really is. I wonder if anyone else has realized that yet."

  "Oh, I'm sure they have."

  "But I'll bet that's part of the answer. We're dealing with crazy Chtorrans! And I like your other idea too—about something keeping their blood sugar permanently low. I just wish I had a good biological justification for it." I scribbled it into my notebook. "But it fits in with something else. Here, look at these—" I went rummaging through the mess on the desk behind me and came up with a folder marked UGH. I pulled out a sheaf of color eight-by-tens and passed them across. He stood up to take them. He leaned against the table and began to leaf through them.

  "When did you take these?"

  "This morning, while you were on the terminal. I finally found my close-up lenses. There's some real high-power stuff there. Look at the structure of their mouths."

  He grimaced. "They look like worm mouths."

  I shrugged. "Similar evolutionary lines, I guess. What else do you see?"

  "The teeth are like little knives."

  "You notice anything else? The teeth are slanted inward. Here, look—compare these two pictures where he's eating the cigar. When the mouth is at its widest, the teeth are pointing straight up and down and just a little bit outward; but as the mouth closes, they curve inward. Here, see how they mesh? Once a millipede bites something, the teeth not only cut it, they push it down the throat. A millipede can't stop eating—not until the object is finished—because he can't let go. Every time he opens his mouth, he automatically takes another bite; every time he closes, he pushes it down his throat. That's why his teeth have to grind and cut and slash—otherwise, he'd choke to death."

  "Um, I doubt that last," he said. "I don't think they're capable of choking. With a mouth arrangement like that, they wouldn't have a swallowing mechanism that could so easily kill them. It would be self-defeating. I'd guess that the arrangement of the teeth is so they can get a good hold on their prey and, if nothing else, get one good bite out of it—like Louis."

  "Have it your own way, Professor—but I watched him eat the cigar, and that's the way he used those teeth."

  "But, Jimbo—that doesn't make sense. What happens to the little bastard who gets stuck to a tree?"

  "He eats or dies," I offered. "Remember what you learned in school: 'Mother Nature doesn't give a shit.' "

  "Mm," Ted shook his head and continued paging through the photographs. "How did you shoot this one?" He was staring down the wide-open mouth of one of the millipedes.

  "Which one? Oh, that. I shot that through a pane of glass. There's a spot of grease smeared on it; he's trying to bite it off. The focus isn't so good because of the grease, but it was the only way I could look down his mouth. They learned real quick that they couldn't get through the glass, so they stopped lunging at it when I held up a finger. That's why the grease. Here, this one's sharper—this was before he scratched the glass."

  Ted peered close. "Hand me that magnifying glass, will you? Here, look—what do you make of this?"

  "Hey! I didn't notice that before—a second row of teeth!"

  "Gee," said Ted. "I wonder if he ever bites his tongue."

  "Those are molars!" I said. "See? They're not as sharp. The first row is for cutting; these are for grinding. And look—do you see anything farther back?"

  "I'm not sure. It's awfully dark down there."

  "We can digitize this and bring up the resolution, but doesn't that look like a third row?"

  I looked at him. "Ted, maybe these things have teeth all the way down their throats. That's why they can eat so much, and so many different things. By the time the food reaches the stomach, it's been ground to pulp. They'll still need strong stomach acids, but now the food has a lot more surface area exposed to the action of the enzymes."

  "Well, this makes them a little more . . . believable." Ted grinned. "I find it very hard to trust any kind of creature that eats tennis shoes, wallpaper and baseballs, not to mention bicycle seats, clotheslines and Sergeant Kelly's coffee."

  "Ted, give me a break. Please."

  "All right—they wouldn't drink the coffee. That's probably what the Chtorrans use in that corral fence to keep them from getting out—Sergeant Kelly's coffee grounds."

  "Oh, no," I said. "Didn't I tell you?"

  He looked up. "What?"

  "You should have guessed. What's the one thing the millipedes won't eat—the one organic thing?"

  He opened his mouth. He closed it.

  "That's right," I said. "Used food. No creature can live in its own excrement—the things its metabolism can't use. And that's what the worms put between the double walls of their corral. As soon as the millipedes sense it, they back away."

  "Wait a minute, boy—are you telling me the worms are going around gathering up millipede droppings for fence insulation?"

  "Not at all. I didn't say anything about millipede waste. I just said it was waste"—he opened his mouth to interrupt; I didn't let him—"and it's not terrestrial waste either. Remember we were wondering why we never found any worm droppings? This is why. Evidently, the worms have been using it to keep their 'chickens' from escaping. The worms and the millipedes must be similar enough so that it doesn't make any difference. What a worm can't use, neither can a millipede. The tests on the droppings from the enclosure and the specimens we've got here show a lot of similarities. Mostly the differences are dietary, although a lot of the special enzymes don't match up. If I had more sophisticated equipment, I'd be able to spot the subtler differences."

  Abruptly, Ted's expression was thoughtful. "Have you written any of this down?"

  "I've made some notes. Why?"

  "Because I heard Duke talking to Dr. Obama about you—about us. He wants Obie to send us to Denver."

  "Huh?"

  Ted repeated it. "Duke wants Obie to send us to Denver. With the specimens. On Thursday."

  I shook my head. "That doesn't make sense. Why should Duke do any favors for us?"

  Ted perched himself on the edge of the table. The three millipedes looked at him with patient black eyes. I wondered if the mesh of their cage was strong enough. Ted said, "Duke's not doing us any favors. He's doing it for himself. We don't belong up here and he doesn't want to be a babysitter. And after what happened with Shorty—well, you know."

  I sat down again. I felt betrayed. "I thought . . . I mean . . ." I shut up and tried to think.

  "What?" asked Ted.

  I held up a hand. "Wait a minute. I'm trying to remember what Duke said." I shook my head. "Uh-uh—he didn't say anything. Not about this. I guess I just thought I heard—" I stopped.

  "Heard what?"

  "I don't know." I felt frustrated. "I just thought that we were going to be part of the Special Forces Team."

  Ted dropped off the table, pulled the other chair around and sat down opposite me. "Jim boy, sometimes you can be awfully dumb. Listen to your Uncle Ted now. Do you know where these Special Forces Teams came from? I thought not. These are—or were—top-secret crack-trained units. So secret even our own intelligence agencies didn't know they existed. They were created after the Moscow Treaties. Yes, illegally—I know—and you used a flame-thrower last week, remember? It saved your life. Guess what the Special Forces were for—and a lot of other innocuous looking institutions. Too bad you slept through history, Jim, or you'd understand. Anyway, the point is, these men have lived together and trained together for years. And they're all weapons experts. Have you ever seen Sergeant Kelly on the practice range?"

  "Huh? No—"

  "Well, you should—or maybe you shouldn't. You'd be too terrified to complain about her coffee. These people think and act as a family. Do you know what that makes us? Just a couple of local yokels. We're outsiders—and there's nothing we can do that will change that. Why do you think Duke gave us this lab—practically shoved it on us? Because he wants an excuse to send us packing. And this is it. He'll be able to say we're too valuable as scientists to be risked out here in the field."

  "Oh," I said. "And I was just beginning to like it here."

  "Better than Denver?" Ted asked.

  "I've never been to Denver."

  "Trust me. You'll love it. It'll be just like civilization. Jim, do you really want to stay here, where the odds are seven to one that you'll end up in a Chtorran stewpot? Or didn't you know that?"

  I didn't answer right away. At least now I knew why Ted had been so cooperative these past few days. But I still felt as if a rug had been yanked out from under me. I looked across at Ted. He was peering into my face, still waiting for my reaction.

  "Damn," I said. "I wish you weren't always so . . . ubiquitous."

  He shrugged. "So what? You'll thank me for it in Denver."

  "I know. That's the annoying part!"

  15

  Bad Luck All Around

  "Bread always falls butter-side down. If it doesn't, you buttered it on the wrong side."

  —SOLOMON SHORT

  The Thursday chopper was pushed back till Saturday—and then to Tuesday, and then it was canceled altogether. Who knew what that meant?

  Duke wouldn't say. It'd be here when it got here. Sergeant Kelly looked annoyed, she needed her supplies, but she held her peace and got creative instead. There's a lot you can do with P-rations and powdered milk. Sometimes the results are even edible.

  In the meantime, Ted and I tried to make ourselves useful.

  Translation: we kept out of the way, before somebody might have found some real work for us.

  We still didn't know for sure if we were going to Denver. Neither Duke nor Dr. Obama had said anything to us. In fact, they were both spending a lot of time closeted in Dr. Obama's office, studying the daily satellite reconnaissance photos.

  Ted said not to worry, nobody ever told anybody anything, that was the army way. If they told us, we'd only worry about it. This way, we didn't have to worry about anything.

  I worried anyway—and made the best use I could of the time.

  I borrowed the helmet camera and set it up in front of the millipede cage. I digitized the image, fed it into one of the computers, calibrated the gray scale, and wrote myself an activity monitor. The program counted the number of pixel changes per second, noted the scale of change, the time, and the temperature. As it built up information, it correlated trends, fit them into curves, and made them available for display on continually updating graphs.

  While we waited for the bug tests to produce results, we studied our other samples. The worm-hut stuff was beyond my ability to analyze. Ditto the chewing-gum stuff I'd scraped off the wall. It was a very weird substance. It had a fleshy smell, and it had a texture like oatmeal. Parts of it were as runny as mucus; parts of it were thick and chewy-feeling. Whatever it was, it had a tendency to grow fur—long strands of a brackish-smelling fungus.

  I didn't like it and kept it in a dark box. Every few hours I looked into the box to confirm my suspicions that the fungus was still growing. It was.

  I had replanted the midnight ivy, the black basil, and the purple stuff in plastic tubs. Almost all of the samples took root immediately; they were very hardy plants and they thrived in the rich Colorado soil, spreading out quickly. Just how fast could they spread? I took cuttings of each and stuck them in new tubs. I was surprised—and even a little delighted—to see that cuttings of the ivy and the purple stuff began to put down visible roots in less than twenty-four hours. The basil didn't seem as eager.

  I took more cuttings to confirm. Very soon I had enough of the neon-looking ivy and the darker purple stuff to plant a border of them around the front of the bath house. Just like the worm hut. The basil grew tall in its tubs, and anywhere else I transplanted it, but cuttings of it just withered.

  Ted and I wondered if any of this stuff was edible—or hallucinogenic. But neither of us were brave enough to try it.

  Every four hours we turned the eggs in our makeshift incubator—and worried what we would do if they hatched.

  I didn't tell Duke, but I brought the flame-thrower into the bath house and kept it charged.

  The computer chirruped every hour and printed out an updated set of bug graphs. They were all starting to look the same. By now we had enough data that no individual aberration could significantly distort the curves. But so what? The information was inconclusive.

  The bugs did not like heat. Temperatures above twenty-five degrees centigrade made them lethargic, and higher than thirty-five degrees they refused to move at all. Generally they seemed to prefer a ten-degree environment, although they remained active at temperatures as low as freezing. Lower than that, they would curl up.

  It made me curious. Were these daytime or nighttime temperatures for Chtorran life forms? Were these bugs diurnal or nocturnal? Just what had I measured here anyway? I decided to chart their activity levels through a full range of lighting conditions, charting the curve all the way from pitch dark to bright sunlight, also correlating it through a complete range of temperatures.

  The bath house had been rigged with two bare twelve-hundred-lumen plates; when I replaced them with outdoor lamps, some of the vari-temp, night-into-day lights for hydro- and aeroponics, the millipedes curled up as if to shield themselves, regardless of the temperature. Clearly, they did not like bright light. That was interesting, but we were going to have to be much more precise.

  We borrowed the air conditioner from Dr. Obama's office—we didn't dare try to take the one from the mess hall—and Larry found a spare heater for us somewhere. Between the two I was able to achieve most of the test temperatures I wanted. I put the lights on a rheostat, added a photo-diode to measure the lumens, and connected everything to the computer. I rewrote the program and let the whole thing run.

  The result was a two-dimensional database demonstrating the millipedes' reactions to a variety of environments. Cold and bright. Cold and dark. Hot and bright. Hot and dark. And everything in between.

  But it was still inconclusive. The bugs liked low temperatures and dim lights. They tolerated high temperatures. They didn't like bright lights at any temperature. That didn't make sense. It was too simple. Did they come from a dark planet? There wasn't enough data.

  We got a call. The rescheduled chopper was postponed another week. We hadn't even heard it had been rescheduled. Sergeant Kelly shook her head and opened up another barrel of industrial-grade catsup. The millipedes didn't seem to mind. They ate everything we put in their cage.

  Nobody had any idea if we could expect the chopper at all. Duke and Larry disappeared for a couple of days; we assumed they were out scouting for supplies or gasoline, checking any abandoned buildings in the region. I didn't ask. I decided to repeat the whole series of tests, but this time with the lights tweaked to different color spectra each time. I wanted to simulate the lighting conditions that might be found on planets circling various nearby stars. Ted downloaded the relevant information from the Omni Net. I didn't ask whose account number he was using.

  This left me with a three-dimensional graph—and now I was nine times as certain that I didn't trust the results. There was a funny anomaly at the low end of the spectrum. I knew it meant something, but I was more confused than ever.

  I wished I had a Coke.

  Powdered lemonade wasn't the same.

  I leaned back in my chair, folded my arms across my chest, and stated at the screen. I was waiting for inspiration to strike. I knew it wouldn't. What would happen was, I would wake up in the middle of the night with an idea that would have to be tested immediately. I'd lose half a night's sleep because inspiration was such a damned inconvenient thing. Why couldn't it keep normal hours like the rest of us?

  I got up and padded around the zoo, checking the rest of the specimens.

  The gray stuff had filled the box with blue fungal threads. It smelled like mildew. Not bad, but not so good either.

  Outside, the purple stuff had spread again. Ditto the midnight ivy. It was starting to climb the brick walls of the bath house. It had a sharp minty smell. The basil-looking stuff was growing tall. It smelled a lot like Terran basil, only sharper. I cut all the plants back and began transplanting the cuttings around the side of the building. What the hell. It was something to do.

  I was just finishing when Duke came up the hill. "McCarthy!" He sounded grim. "What're you doing?"

  I stood up, brushing the dirt from my hands. I wiped my palms on my jeans. It was obvious what I'd been doing. What Duke meant was why?

  I shrugged. I pointed at the plants and the tools. "I want to see what these things can do. This is the best way to find out."

 

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