The Project Gutenberg EBook of Pet Farm, by Roger Dee
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: Pet Farm
Author: Roger Dee
Illustrator: Dick Francis
Release Date: May 12, 2010 [EBook #32344]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PET FARM ***
Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
Pet Farm
By ROGER DEE
Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS
[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction
February 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the
U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
[Sidenote: _The next worst thing to hell is being shanghaied into the
Paradise of an alien planet!_]
They had fled almost to the sheer ambient face of the crater wall when
the Falakian girl touched Farrell's arm and pointed back through the
scented, pearly mists.
"Someone," she said. Her voice stumbled over the almost forgotten Terran
word, but its sound was music.
"No matter," Farrell answered. "They're too late now."
He pushed on, happily certain in his warm euphoric glow of mounting
expectancy that what he had done to the ship made him--and his new-found
paradise with him--secure.
He had almost forgotten who _they_ were; the pale half-memories that
drifted through his mind touched his consciousness lightly and without
urgency, arousing neither alarm nor interest.
The dusk grew steadily deeper, but the dimming of vision did not matter.
Nothing mattered but the fulfillment to come.
Far above him, the lacy network of bridging, at one time so baffling,
arched and vanished in airy grace into the colored mists. To right and
left, other arms of the aerial maze reached out, throwing vague
traceries from cliff to cliff across the valley floor. Behind him on the
plain he could hear the eternally young people playing about their
little blue lake, flitting like gay shadows through the tamarisks and
calling to each other in clear elfin voices while they frolicked after
the fluttering swarms of great, bright-hued moths.
The crater wall halted him and he stood with the Falakian girl beside
him, looking back through the mists and savoring the sweet, quiet
mystery of the valley. Motion stirred there; the pair of them laughed
like anticipant children when two wide-winged moths swam into sight and
floated toward them, eyes glowing like veiled emeralds.
Footsteps followed, disembodied in the dusk.
"It is only Xavier," a voice said. Its mellow uninflection evoked a
briefly disturbing memory of a slight gray figure, jointed yet curiously
flexible, and a featureless oval of face.
It came out of the mists and halted a dozen yards away, and he saw that
it spoke into a metallic box slung over one shoulder.
"He is unharmed," it said. "Directions?"
Xavier? Directions? From whom?
Another voice answered from the shoulder-box, bringing a second mental
picture of a face--square and brown, black-browed and taciturnly
humorless--that he had known and forgotten.
Whose, and where?
"Hold him there, Xav," it said. "Stryker and I are going to try to reach
the ship now."
The moths floated nearer, humming gently.
"You're too late," Farrell called. "Go away. Let me wait in peace."
"If you knew what you're waiting for," a third voice said, "you'd go
screaming mad." It was familiar, recalling vaguely a fat, good-natured
face and ponderous, laughter-shaken paunch. "If you could see the place
as you saw it when we first landed...."
The disturbing implications of the words forced him reluctantly to
remember a little of that first sight of Falak.
... The memory was sacrilege, soiling and cheapening the ecstasy of his
anticipation.
But it _had_ been different.
* * * * *
His first day on Falak had left Farrell sick with disgust.
He had known from the beginning that the planet was small and arid,
non-rotating, with a period of revolution about its primary roughly
equal to ten Earth years. The _Marco Four_'s initial sweep of
reconnaissance, spiraling from pole to pole, had supplied further
information without preparing him at all for what the three-man
Reclamations team was to find later.
The weed-choked fields and crumbled desolation of Terran slave barracks
had been depressing enough. The inevitable scattering of empty domes
abandoned a hundred years before by the Hymenop conquerors had completed
a familiar and unpromising pattern, a workaday blueprint that differed
from previous experience only in one significant detail: There was no
shaggy, disoriented remnant of descendants from the original colonists.
The valley, a mile-wide crater sunk between thousand-foot cliffs,
floored with straggling bramble thickets and grass flats pocked with
stagnant pools and quaking slime-bogs, had been infinitely worse. The
cryptic three-dimensional maze of bridges spanning the pit had made
landing there a ticklish undertaking. Stryker and Farrell and Gibson,
after a conference, had risked the descent only because the valley
offered a last possible refuge for survivors.
Their first real hint of what lay ahead of them came when Xavier, the
ship's mechanical, opened the personnel port against the heat and humid
stink of the place.
"Another damned tropical pesthole," Farrell said, shucking off his
comfortable shorts and donning booted coveralls for the preliminary
survey. "The sooner we count heads--assuming there are any left to
count--and get out of here, the better. The long-term Reorientation boys
can have this one and welcome."
Stryker, characteristically, had laughed at his navigator's prompt
disgust. Gibson, equally predictable in his way, had gathered his gear
with precise efficiency, saying nothing.
"It's a routine soon finished," Stryker said. "There can't be more than
a handful of survivors here, and in any case we're not required to do
more than gather data from full-scale recolonization. Our main job is to
prepare Reorientation if we can for whatever sort of slave-conditioning
deviltry the Hymenops practiced on this particular world."
Farrell grunted sourly. "You love these repulsive little puzzles, don't
you?"
* * * * *
Stryker grinned at him with good-natured malice. "Why not, Arthur? You
can play the accordion and sketch for entertainment, and Gib has his
star-maps and his chess sessions with Xavier. But for a fat old man,
rejuvenated four times and nearing his fifth and final, what else is
left except curiosity?"
He clipped a heat-gun and audicom pack to the belt of his bulging
coveralls and clumped to the port to look outside. Roiling gray fog
hovered there, diffusing the hot magenta point of Falak's sun to a
liverish glare half-eclipsed by the crater's southern rim. Against the
light, the spidery metal maze of foot-bridging stood out dimly, tracing
a random criss-cross pattern that dwindled to invisibility in the mists.
"That network is a Hymenop experiment of some sort," Stryker said,
peering. "It's not only a sample of alien engineering--and a thundering
big one at that--but an object lesson on the weird workings of alien
logic. If we could figure out what possessed the Bees to build such a
maze here--"
"Then we'd be the first to solve the problem of alien psychology,"
Farrell finished acidly, aping the older man's ponderous enthusiasm.
"Lee, you know we'd have to follow those hive-building fiends all the
way to 70 Ophiuchi to find out what makes them tick. And twenty thousand
light-years is a hell of a way to go out of curiosity, not to mention a
dangerous one."
"But we'll go there some day," Stryker said positively. "We'll have to
go because we can't ever be sure they won't try to repeat their invasion
of two hundred years ago."
He tugged at the owlish tufts of hair over his ears, wrinkling his bald
brow up at the enigmatic maze.
"We'll never feel safe again until the Bees are wiped out. I wonder if
they know that. They never understood us, you know, just as we never
understood them--they always seemed more interested in experimenting
with slave ecology than in conquest for itself, and they never killed
off their captive cultures when they pulled out for home. I wonder if
their system of logic can postulate the idea of a society like ours,
which must rule or die."
"We'd better get on with our survey," Gibson put in mildly, "unless we
mean to finish by floodlight. We've only about forty-eight hours left
before dark."
* * * * *
He moved past Stryker through the port, leaving Farrell to stare blankly
after him.
"This is a non-rotating world," Farrell said. "How the devil _can_ it
get dark, Lee?"
Stryker chuckled. "I wondered if you'd see that. It can't, except when
the planet's axial tilt rolls this latitude into its winter season and
sends the sun south of the crater rim. It probably gets dark as pitch
here in the valley, since the fog would trap even diffused light." To
the patiently waiting mechanical, he said, "The ship is yours, Xav. Call
us if anything turns up."
Farrell followed him reluctantly outside into a miasmic desolation more
depressing than he could have imagined.
A stunted jungle of thorny brambles and tough, waist-high grasses
hampered their passage at first, ripping at coveralls and tangling the
feet until they had beaten their way through it to lower ground. There
they found a dreary expanse of bogland where scummy pools of stagnant
water and festering slime heaved sluggishly with oily bubbles of marsh
gas that burst audibly in the hanging silence. The liverish blaze of
Falakian sun bore down mercilessly from the crater's rim.
They moved on to skirt a small lead-colored lake in the center of the
valley, a stagnant seepage-basin half obscured by floating scum. Its
steaming mudflats were littered with rotting yellowed bones and
supported the first life they had seen, an unpleasant scurrying of small
multipedal crustaceans and water-lizards.
"There can't be any survivors _here_," Farrell said, appalled by the
thought of his kind perpetuating itself in a place like this. "God,
think what the mortality rate would be! They'd die like flies."
"There are bound to be a few," Stryker stated, "even after a hundred
years of slavery and another hundred of abandonment. The human animal,
Arthur, is the most fantastically adaptable--"
He broke off short when they rounded a clump of reeds and stumbled upon
their first Falakian proof of that fantastic adaptability.
* * * * *
The young woman squatting on the mudflat at their feet stared back at
them with vacuous light eyes half hidden behind a wild tangle of matted
blonde hair. She was gaunt and filthy, plastered with slime from head to
foot, and in her hands she held the half-eaten body of a larger
crustacean that obviously had died of natural causes and not too
recently, at that.
Farrell turned away, swallowing his disgust. Gibson, unmoved, said with
an aptness bordering--for him--on irony: "Too damned adaptable, Lee.
Sometimes our kind survives when it really shouldn't."
A male child of perhaps four came out of the reeds and stared at them.
He was as gaunt and filthy as the woman, but less vapid of face.
Farrell, watching the slow spark of curiosity bloom in his eyes,
wondered sickly how many years--or how few--must pass before the boy was
reduced to the same stupid bovinity as the mother.
Gibson was right, he thought. The compulsion to survive at any cost
could be a curse instead of an asset. The degeneracy of these poor
devils was a perpetual affront to the race that had put them there.
He was about to say as much when the woman rose and plodded away through
the mud, the child at her heels. It startled him momentarily, when he
followed their course with his eyes, to see that perhaps a hundred
others had gathered to wait incuriously for them in the near distance.
All were as filthy as the first two, but with a grotesque uniformity of
appearance that left him frowning in uneasy speculation until he found
words to identify that similarity.
"They're all _young_," he said. "The oldest can't be more than
twenty--twenty-five at most!"
Stryker scowled, puzzled without sharing Farrell's unease. "You're
right. Where are the older ones?"
"Another of your precious little puzzles," Farrell said sourly. "I hope
you enjoy unraveling it."
"Oh, we'll get to the bottom of it," Stryker said with assurance. "We'll
have to, before we can leave them here."
They made a slow circuit of the lake, and the closer inspection offered
a possible solution to the problem Stryker had posed. Chipped and
weathered as the bones littering the mudflats were, their grisly
shapings were unmistakable.
"I'd say that these are the bones of the older people," Stryker
hazarded, "and that they represent the end result of another of these
religio-economic control compulsions the Hymenops like to condition into
their slaves. Men will go to any lengths to observe a tradition,
especially when its origin is forgotten. If these people were once
conditioned to look on old age as intolerable--"
"If you're trying to say that they kill each other off at maturity,"
Farrell interrupted, "the inference is ridiculous. In a hundred years
they'd have outgrown a custom so hard to enforce. The balance of power
would have rested with the adults, not with the children, and adults are
generally fond of living.
* * * * *
Stryker looked to Gibson for support, received none, and found himself
saddled with his own contention. "Economic necessity, then, since the
valley can support only a limited number. Some of the old North American
Indians followed a similar custom, the oldest son throttling the father
when he grew too old to hunt."
"But even there infanticide was more popular than patricide," Farrell
pointed out. "No group would practice decimation from the top down. It's
too difficult to enforce."
Stryker answered him with a quotation from the Colonial Reclamations
Handbook, maliciously taking the pontifical classmaster's tone best
calculated to irritate Farrell.
"Chapter Four, Subsection One, Paragraph Nineteen: _Any custom, fixation
or compulsion accepted as the norm by one group of human beings can be
understood and evaluated by any other group not influenced by the same
ideology, since the basic perceptive abilities of both are necessarily
the same through identical heredity. Evaluation of alien motivations,
conversely--_"
"Oh, hell," Farrell cut in wearily. "Let's get back to the ship, shall
we? We'll all feel more like--"
His right foot gave way beneath him without warning, crushing through
the soft ground and throwing him heavily. He sat up at once, and swore
in incredulous anger when he found the ankle swelling rapidly inside his
boot.
"Sprained! Damn it all!"
Gibson and Stryker, on their knees beside the broken crust of soil,
ignored him. Gibson took up a broken length of stick and prodded
intently in the cavity, prying out after a moment a glistening two-foot
ellipsoid that struggled feebly on the ground.
"A chrysalid," Stryker said, bending to gauge the damage Farrell's heavy
boot had done. "In a very close pre-eclosion stage. Look, the protective
sheathing has begun to split already."
The thing lay twitching aimlessly, prisoned legs pushing against its
shining transparent integument in an instinctive attempt at premature
freedom. The movement was purely reflexive; its head, huge-eyed and as
large as a man's clenched fist, had been thoroughly crushed under
Farrell's heel.
Oddly, its injury touched Farrell even through the pain of his injured
foot.
"It's the first passably handsome thing we've seen in this pesthole," he
said, "and I've maimed it. Finish it off, will you?"
Stryker grunted, feeling the texture of the imprisoning sheath with
curious fingers. "What would it have been _in imago_, Gib? A giant
butterfly?"
"A moth," Gibson said tersely. "_Lepidoptera_, anyway."
He stood up and ended the chrysalid's strugglings with a bolt from his
heat-gun before extending a hand to help Farrell up. "I'd like to
examine it closer, but there'll be others. Let's get Arthur out of
here."
* * * * *
They went back to the ship by slow stages, pausing now and then while
Gibson gathered a small packet of bone fragments from the mudflats and
underbrush.
"Some of these are older than others," he explained when Stryker
remarked on his selection. "But none are recent. It should help to know
their exact age."
An hour later, they were bathed and dressed, sealed off comfortably in
the ship against the humid heat and stink of the swamp. Farrell lay on a
chart room acceleration couch, resting, while Stryker taped his swollen
ankle. Gibson and Xavier, the one disdaining rest and the other needing
none, used the time to run a test analysis on the bones brought in from
the lakeside.
The results of that analysis were more astonishing than illuminating.
A majority of the fragments had been exposed to climatic action for some
ten years. A smaller lot averaged twenty years; and a few odd chips,
preserved by long burial under alluvial silt, thirty.
"The older natives died at ten-year intervals, then," Stryker said. "And
in considerable numbers; the tribe must have been cut to half strength
each time. But why?" He frowned unhappily, fishing for opinion. "Gib,
can it really be a perversion of religious custom dreamed up by the
Hymenops to keep their slaves under control? A sort of festival of
sacrifice every decade, climaxing in tribal decimation?"
"Maybe they combine godliness with gluttony," Farrell put in, unasked.
"Maybe their orgy runs more to long pig than to piety."
He stood up, wincing at the pain, and was hobbling toward his sleeping
cubicle when Gibson's answer to Stryker's question stopped him with a
cold prickle along his spine.
"We'll know within twenty-four hours," Gibson said. "Since both the
decimations and the winter darkness periods seem to follow the same
cycle, I'd say there's a definite relationship."
* * * * *
For once Farrell's cubicle, soundproofed and comfortable, brought him
only a fitful imitation of sleep, an intermittent dozing that wavered
endlessly between nightmare and wakefulness. When he crawled out again,
hours later, he found Xavier waiting for him alone with a thermo-bulb of
hot coffee. Stryker and Gibson, the mechanical said blandly, had seen no
need of waking him, and had gone out alone on a more extensive tour of
investigation.
The hours dragged interminably. Farrell uncased his beloved accordion,
but could not bear the sound of it; he tried his sketch-book, and could
summon to mind no better subjects than drab miasmic bogs and steaming
mudflats. He discarded the idea of chess with Xavier without even
weighing it--he would not have lasted past the fourth move, and both he
and the mechanical knew it.
He was reduced finally to limping about the ship on his bandaged foot,
searching for some routine task left undone and finding nothing. He even
went so far as to make a below-decks check on the ship's
matter-synthesizer, an indispensable unit designed for the conversion of
waste to any chemical compound, and gave it up in annoyance when he
found that all such operational details were filed with infallible
exactness in Xavier's plastoid head.
The return of Stryker and Gibson only aggravated his impatience. He had
expected them to discover concealed approaches to the maze of bridging
overhead, tunnelings in the cliff-face to hidden caverns complete with
bloodstained altars and caches of sacrificial weapons, or at least some
ominous sign of preparation among the natives. But there was nothing.
"No more than yesterday," Stryker said. Failure had cost him a share of
his congenital good-humor, leaving him restless and uneasy. "There's
nothing to find, Arthur. We've seen it all."
Surprisingly, Gibson disagreed.
"We'll know what we're after when darkness falls," he said. "But that's
a good twelve hours away. In the meantime, there's a possibility that
our missing key is _outside_ the crater, rather than here inside it."
* * * * *
They turned on him together, both baffled and apprehensive.
"What do you mean, outside?" Farrell demanded. "There's nothing there
but grassland. We made sure of that at planetfall."
"We mapped four Hymenop domes on reconnaissance," Gibson reminded him.
"But we only examined three to satisfy ourselves that they were empty.
The fourth one--"
Farrell interrupted derisively. "That ancient bogey again? Gib, the
domes are _always_ empty. The Bees pulled out a hundred years ago."
Gibson said nothing, but his black-browed regard made Farrell flush
uncomfortably.
"Gib is right," Stryker intervened. "You're too young in Colonial
Reclamations to appreciate the difficulty of recognizing an alien logic,
Arthur, let alone the impossibility of outguessing it. I've knocked
about these ecological madhouses for the better part of a century, and
the more I see of Hymenop work, the more convinced I am that we'll never
equate human and Hymenop ideologies. It's like trying to add quantities
of dissimilar objects and expressing the result in a single symbol; it
can't be done, because there's no possible common denominator for
reducing the disparate elements to similarity."
* * * * *
When Farrell kept silent, he went on, "Our own reactions, and
consequently our motivations, are based on broad attributes of love,
hate, fear, greed and curiosity. We might empathize with another species
that reacts as we do to those same stimuli--but what if that other
species recognizes only one or two of them, or none at all? What if
their motivations stem from a set of responses entirely different from
any we know?"
"There aren't any," Farrell said promptly. "What do you think they would
be?"
"There you have it," Stryker said triumphantly. He chuckled, his
good-nature restored. "We can't imagine what those emotions would be
like because we aren't equipped to understand. Could a race depending
entirely on extra-sensory perception appreciate a Mozart quintet or a
Botticelli altar piece or a performance of _Hamlet_? You know it
couldn't--the esthetic nuances that make those works great would escape
it completely, because the motives that inspired their creation are
based on a set of values entirely foreign to its comprehension.
"There's a digger wasp on Earth whose female singles out a particular
species of tarantula to feed her larvae--and the spider stands patiently
by, held by some compulsion whose nature we can't even guess, while the
wasp digs a grave, paralyzes the spider and shoves it into the hole with
an egg attached. The spider could kill the wasp, and will kill one of
any other species, but it submits to that particular kind without a
flicker of protest. And if we can't understand the mechanics of such a
relationship between reflexive species, then what chance have we of
understanding the logic of an _intelligent_ race of aliens? The results
of its activities can be assessed, but not the motivations behind those
activities."
"All right," Farrell conceded. "You and Gib are right, as usual, and I'm
wrong. We'll check that fourth dome."
"You'll stay here with Xav," Stryker said firmly, "while Gib and I
check. You'd only punish yourself, using that foot."
* * * * *
After another eight-hour period of waiting, Farrell was nearing the end
of his patience. He tried to rationalize his uneasiness and came finally
to the conclusion that his failing hinged on a matter of conditioning.
He was too accustomed to the stable unity of their team to feel
comfortable without Gibson and Stryker. Isolated from their perpetual
bickering and the pleasant unspoken warmth of their regard, he was
lonesome and tense.
It would have been different, he knew, if either of the others had been
left behind. Stryker had his beloved Reclamations texts and his
microfilm albums of problems solved on other worlds; Gibson had his
complicated galactic charts and his interminable chess bouts with
Xavier....
Farrell gave it up and limped outside, to stand scowling unhappily at
the dreary expanse of swampland. Far down under the reasoning levels of
his consciousness a primal uneasiness nagged at him, whispering in
wordless warning that there was more to his mounting restlessness than
simple impatience. Something inside him was changing, burgeoning in
strange and disturbing growth.
A pale suggestion of movement, wavering and uncertain in the eddying
fog, caught his eye. A moment of puzzled watching told him that it was
the bedraggled young woman they had seen earlier by the lake, and that
she was approaching the ship timorously and under cover.
"But why?" he wondered aloud, recalling her bovine lack of curiosity.
"What the devil can she want here?"
A shadow fell across the valley. Farrell, startled, looked up sharply to
see the last of the Falakian sun's magenta glare vanishing below the
crater's southern rim. A dusky forerunner of darkness settled like a
tangible cloud, softening the drab outlines of bramble thickets and
slime pools. The change that followed was not seen but felt, a swelling
rush of glad arousal like the joy of a child opening its eyes from
sleep.
To Farrell, the valley seemed to stir, waking in sympathy to his own
restlessness and banishing his unease.
* * * * *
The girl ran to him through the dusk on quick, light feet, timidity
forgotten, and he saw with a pleasant shock of astonishment that she was
no longer the filthy creature he had first seen by the lakeside. She was
pretty and nubile, eyes and soft mouth smiling together in a childlike
eagerness that made her at once infinitely desirable and untouchably
innocent.
"Who are you?" he asked shakily.
[Illustration]
Her hesitant voice was music, rousing in Farrell a warm and expectant
euphoria that glowed like old wine in his veins.
"Koaele," she said. "Look--"
Behind her, the valley lay wrapped like a minor paradise in soft pearly
mists and luminous shadows, murmurous with the far sound of running
water and the faint chiming of voices that drifted up from the little
blue lake to whisper back in cadenced echo from the fairy maze of
bridging overhead. Over it all, like a deep, sustained cello note, rose
the muted humming of great flame-winged moths dipping and swaying over
bright tropical flowers.
"_Moths?_" he thought. And then, "_Of course._"
The chrysalids under the sod, their eclosion time completed, were coming
into their own--bringing perfection with them. Born in gorgeous
iridescent _imago_, they were beautiful in a way that hurt with the
yearning pain of perfection, the sorrow that imperfection existed at
all--the joy of finally experiencing flawlessness.
An imperative buzzing from the ship behind him made a rude intrusion. A
familiar voice, polite but without inflection, called from an open port:
"Captain Stryker in the scoutboat, requesting answer."
Farrell hesitated. To the girl, who followed him with puzzled, eager
eyes, he begged, "Don't run away, _please_. I'll be back."
In the ship, Stryker's moon-face peered wryly at him from the main
control screen.
"Drew another blank," it said. "You were right after all, Arthur--the
fourth dome was empty. Gib and I are coming in now. We can't risk
staying out longer if we're going to be on hand when the curtain rises
on our little mystery."
"Mystery?" Farrell echoed blankly. Earlier discussions came back slowly,
posing a forgotten problem so ridiculous that he laughed. "We were wrong
about all that. It's wonderful here."
* * * * *
Stryker's face on the screen went long with astonishment. "Arthur, have
you lost your mind? _What's wrong there?_"
"Nothing is wrong," Farrell said. "It's _right_." Memory prodded him
again, disturbingly. "Wait--I remember now what it was we came here for.
But we're not going through with it."
He thought of the festival to come, of the young men and girls running
lithe in the dusk, splashing in the lake and calling joyously to each
other across the pale sands. The joyous innocence of their play brought
an appalling realization of what would happen if the fat outsider on the
screen should have his way:
The quiet paradise would be shattered and refashioned in smoky facsimile
of Earth, the happy people herded together and set to work in dusty
fields and whirring factories, multiplying tensions and frustrations as
they multiplied their numbers.
For what? For whom?
"You've got no right to go back and report all this," Farrell said
plaintively. "You'd ruin everything."
The alternative came to him and with it resolution. "But you won't go
back. I'll see to that."
He left the screen and turned on the control panel with fingers that
remembered from long habit the settings required. Stryker's voice
bellowed frantically after him, unheeded, while he fed into the ship's
autopilot a command that would send her plunging skyward bare minutes
later.
Then, ignoring the waiting mechanical's passive stare, he went outside.
The valley beckoned. The elfin laughter of the people by the lake
touched a fey, responsive chord in him that blurred his eyes with
ecstatic tears and sent him running down the slope, the Falakian girl
keeping pace beside him.
Before he reached the lake, he had dismissed from his mind the ship and
the men who had brought it there.
* * * * *
But they would not let him forget. The little gray jointed one followed
him through the dancing and the laughter and cornered him finally
against the sheer cliffside. With the chase over, it held him there,
waiting with metal patience in the growing dusk.
The audicom box slung over its shoulder boomed out in Gibson's voice,
the sound a noisy desecration of the scented quiet.
"Don't let him get away, Xav," it said. "We're going to try for the ship
now."
The light dimmed, the soft shadows deepened. The two great-winged moths
floated nearer, humming gently, their eyes glowing luminous and intent
in the near-darkness. Mist currents from their approach brushed
Farrell's face, and he held out his arms in an ecstasy of anticipation
that was a consummation of all human longing.
"_Now_," he whispered.
The moths dipped nearer.
The mechanical sent out a searing beam of orange light that tore the
gloom, blinding him briefly. The humming ceased; when he could see
again, the moths lay scorched and blackened at his feet. Their dead eyes
looked up at him dully, charred and empty; their bright gauzy wings
smoked in ruins of ugly, whiplike ribs.
He flinched when the girl touched his shoulder, pointing. A moth dipped
toward them out of the mists, eyes glowing like round emerald lanterns.
Another followed.
The mechanical flicked out its orange beam and cut them down.
A roar like sustained thunder rose across the valley, shaking the ground
underfoot. A column of white-hot fire tore the night.
"The ship," Farrell said aloud, remembering.
He had a briefly troubled vision of the sleek metal shell lancing up
toward a black void of space powdered with cold star-points whose names
he had forgotten, marooning them all in Paradise.
The audicom boomed in Gibson's voice, though oddly shaken and strained.
"Made it. Is he still safe, Xav?"
"Safe," the mechanical answered tersely. "The natives, too, so far."
"No thanks to _him_," Gibson said. "If you hadn't canceled the blastoff
order he fed into the autopilot...." But after a moment of ragged
silence: "No, that's hardly fair. Those damned moths beat down Lee's
resistance in the few minutes it took us to reach the ship, and nearly
got me as well. Arthur was exposed to their influence from the moment
they started coming out."
Stryker's voice cut in, sounding more shaken than Gibson's. "Stand fast
down there. I'm setting off the first flare now."
* * * * *
A silent explosion of light, searing and unendurable, blasted the night.
Farrell cried out and shielded his eyes with his hands, his ecstasy of
anticipation draining out of him like heady wine from a broken urn. Full
memory returned numbingly.
When he opened his eyes again, the Falakian girl had run away. Under the
merciless glare of light, the valley was as he had first seen it--a
nauseous charnel place of bogs and brambles and mudflats littered with
yellowed bones.
In the near distance, a haggard mob of natives cowered like gaping,
witless caricatures of humanity, faces turned from the descending blaze
of the parachute flare. There was no more music or laughter. The great
moths fluttered in silent frenzy, stunned by the flood of light.
"_So that's it_," Farrell thought dully. "_They come out with the winter
darkness to breed and lay their eggs, and they hold over men the same
sort of compulsion that Terran wasps hold over their host tarantulas.
But they're nocturnal. They lose their control in the light._"
Incredulously, he recalled the expectant euphoria that had blinded him,
and he wondered sickly: "_Is that what the spider feels while it watches
its grave being dug?_"
A second flare bloomed far up in the fog, outlining the criss-cross
network of bridging in stark, alien clarity. A smooth minnow-shape
dipped past and below it, weaving skilfully through the maze. The
mechanical's voice box spoke again.
"Give us a guide beam, Xav. We're bringing the _Marco_ down."
The ship settled a dozen yards away, its port open. Farrell, with Xavier
at his heels, went inside hastily, not looking back.
Gibson crouched motionless over his control panel, too intent on his
readings to look up. Beside him, Stryker said urgently: "Hang on. We've
got to get up and set another flare, quickly."
The ship surged upward.
* * * * *
Hours later, they watched the last of the flares glare below in a
steaming geyser of mud and scum. The ship hovered motionless, its only
sound a busy droning from the engine room where her mass-synthesizer
discharged a deadly cloud of insecticide into the crater.
"There'll be some nasty coughing among the natives for a few days after
this," Gibson said. "But it's better than being food for larvae....
Reorientation will pull them out of that pesthole in a couple of months,
and another decade will see them raising cattle and wheat again outside.
The young adapt fast."
"The young, yes," Stryker agreed uncomfortably. "Personally, I'm getting
too old and fat for this business."
He shuddered, his paunch quaking. Farrell guessed that he was thinking
of what would have happened to them if Gibson had been as susceptible as
they to the overpowering fascination of the moths. A few more chrysalids
to open in the spring, an extra litter of bones to puzzle the next
Reclamations crew....
"That should do it," Gibson said. He shut off the flow of insecticide
and the mass-converter grew silent in the engine room below. "Exit
another Hymenop experiment in bastard synecology."
"I can understand how they might find, or breed, a nocturnal moth with
breeding-season control over human beings," Farrell said. "And how
they'd balance the relationship to a time-cycle that kept the host
species alive, yet never let it reach maturity. But what sort of
principle would give an instinctive species compulsive control over an
intelligent one, Gib? And what did the Bees get out of the arrangement
in the first place?"
Gibson shrugged. "We'll understand the principle when--or if--we learn
how the wasp holds its spider helpless. Until then, we can only guess.
As for identifying the motive that prompted the Hymenops to set up such
a balance, I doubt that we ever will. Could a termite understand why men
build theaters?"
"There's a possible parallel in that," Stryker suggested. "Maybe this
was the Hymenop idea of entertainment. They might have built the bridge
as balconies, where they could see the show."
"It could have been a business venture," Farrell suggested. "Maybe they
raised the moth larvae or pupae for the same reason we raise poultry. A
sort of insectile chicken ranch."
"Or a kennel," Gibson said dryly. "Maybe they bred moths for pets, as we
breed dogs."
Farrell grimaced sickly, revolted by the thought. "A pet farm? God, what
a diet to feed them!"
* * * * *
Xavier came up from the galley, carrying a tray with three steaming
coffee-bulbs. Farrell, still pondering the problem of balance between
dominant and dominated species, found himself wondering for the
thousandth time what went on in the alert positronic brain behind the
mechanical's featureless face.
"What do you think, Xav?" he demanded. "What sort of motive would you
say prompted the Hymenops to set up such a balance?"
"_Evaluation of alien motivations, conversely_," the mechanical said,
finishing the Reclamations Handbook quotation which Stryker had begun
much earlier, "_is essentially impossible because there can be no common
ground of comprehension_."
It centered the tray neatly on the charting table and stood back in
polite but unmenial deference while they sucked at their coffee-bulbs.
"A greater mystery to me," Xavier went on, "is the congenital
restlessness that drives men from their own comfortable worlds to such
dangers as you have met with here. How can I understand the motivations
of an alien people? I do not even understand those of the race that
built me."
The three men looked at each other blankly, disconcerted by the ancient
problem so unexpectedly posed.
It was Stryker who sheepishly answered it.
"That's nothing for you to worry about, Xav," he said wryly. "Neither do
we."
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Pet Farm, by Roger Dee
*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PET FARM ***
***** This file should be named 32344.txt or 32344.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
https://www.gutenberg.org/3/2/3/4/32344/
Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
will be renamed.
Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules,
set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you
do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is
subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
redistribution.
*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
https://gutenberg.org/license).
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the
collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an
individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in
a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check
the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning
the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked
to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg-tm License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or
distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
that
- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is
owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments
must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License. You must require such a user to return or
destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
Project Gutenberg-tm works.
- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
of receipt of the work.
- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the
Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with
the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy
is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any
provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists
because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
https://pglaf.org/fundraising. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
throughout numerous locations. Its business office is located at
809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
[email protected]. Email contact links and up to date contact
information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
page at https://pglaf.org
For additional contact information:
Dr. Gregory B. Newby
Chief Executive and Director
[email protected]
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To
SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
particular state visit https://pglaf.org
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
donations. To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works.
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
with anyone. For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily
keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
https://www.gutenberg.org
This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
