DR. CHATVIEUX took a long time over the microscope, leaving la Ventura with nothing to do but look at the dead landscape of Hydrot. Waterscape, he thought, would be a better word. From space, the new world had shown only one small, triangular continent, set amid endless ocean; and even the continent was mostly swamp.
The wreck of the seed-ship lay broken squarely across the one real spur of rock which Hydrot seemed to possess, which reared a magnificent twenty-one feet above sea level. From this eminence, la Ventura could see forty miles to the horizon across a flat bed of mud. The red light of the star Tau Ceti, glinting upon thousands of small lakes, pools, ponds and puddles, made the watery plain look like a mosaic of onyx and ruby.
“If I were a religious man,” the pilot said suddenly, “I’d call this a plain case of divine vengeance.”
Chatvieux said: “Hmn?”
“It’s as if we’d been struck down for—is it hubris, arrogant pride?”
“Well, is it?” Chatvieux said, looking up at last. “I don’t feel exactly swollen with pride. Do you?”
“I’m not exactly proud of my piloting,” la Ventura admitted. “But that isn’t quite what I meant. I was thinking about why we came here in the first place. It takes a lot of arrogance to think that you can scatter men, or at least things very much like men, all over the face of the galaxy. It takes even more pride to do the job—to pack up all the equipment and move from planet to planet and actually make men, make them suitable for every place you touch.”
“I suppose it does,” Chatvieux said. “But we’re only one of several hundred seed-ships in this limb of the galaxy, so I doubt that the gods picked us out as special sinners.” He smiled dryly. “If they had, maybe they’d have left us our ultraphone, so the Colonization Council could hear about our cropper. Besides, Paul, we try to produce men adapted to Earthlike planets, nothing more than that. We’ve sense enough to know that we can’t adapt men to a planet like Jupiter, or to a sun, like Tau Ceti.”
“Anyhow, we’re here,” la Ventura said grimly. “And we aren’t going to get off. Phil tells me that we don’t even have our germ-cell bank any more, so we can’t seed this place in the usual way. We’ve been thrown onto a dead world and dared to adapt to it. What are the panatropes to do with our carcasses—provide built-in waterwings?”
“No,” Chatvieux said calmly. “You and I and all the rest of us are going to die, Paul. Panatropic techniques don’t work on the body; that was fixed for you for life when you were conceived. To attempt to rebuild it for you would only maim you. The panatropes affect only the genes, the inheritance-carrying factors. We can’t give you built-in waterwings, any more than we can give you a new set of brains. I think we’ll be able to populate this world with men, but we won’t live to see it.”
The pilot thought about it, a lump of cold blubber collecting in his stomach. “How long do you give us?”
“Who knows? A month, perhaps.”
The bulkhead leading to the wrecked section of the ship was pushed back, admitting salt, muggy air, heavy with carbon dioxide. Philip Strasvogel, the communications officer, came in, tracking mud. Like la Ventura, he was now a man without a function, and it appeared to bother him. He was not well equipped for introspection, and with his ultraphone totally smashed, unresponsive to his perpetually darting hands, he had been thrown back into his own mind, whose resources were few. Only the tasks Chatvieux had set him to had prevented him from setting like a gelling colloid into a permanent sulk.
He unbuckled from around his waist a canvas belt, into the loops of which plastic vials were stuffed like cartridges. “More samples, Doc,” he said. “All alike—water, very wet. I have some quicksand in one boot, too. Find anything?”
“A good deal, Phil. Thanks. Are the others around?”
Strasvogel poked his head out and hallooed. Other voices rang out over the mudflats. Minutes later, the rest of the survivors of the crash were crowding into the panatrope deck: Saltonstall, Chatvieux’ senior assistant, a perpetually sanguine, perpetually youthful technician willing to try anything once, including dying; Eunice Wagner, behind whose placid face rested the brains of the expedition’s only remaining ecologist; Elfftherios Venezuelos, the always-silent delegate from the Colonization Council; and Joan Heath, a midshipman whose duties, like la Ventura’s and Phil’s, were now without meaning, but whose bright head and tall, deceptively indolent body shone to the pilot’s eyes brighter than the home sun.
Five men and two women—to colonize a planet on which “standing room” meant treading water.
They came in quietly and found seats or resting places on the deck, on the edges of tables, in corners. Joan Heath went to stand beside la Ventura. They did not look at each other, but the warmth of her shoulder beside his was all that he needed. Nothing was as bad as it seemed.
Venezuelos said, “What’s the verdict, Dr. Chatvieux?”
“This place isn’t dead,” Chatvieux said. “There’s life in the sea and in the fresh water, both. On the animal side of the ledger, evolution seems to have stopped with the crustacea; the most advanced form I’ve found is a tiny crayfish, from one of the local rivulets, and it doesn’t seem to be well distributed. The ponds and puddles are well-stocked with small metazoans of lower orders, right up to the rotifers—including a castle-building rotifer like Earth’s Floscularidae. In addition, there’s a wonderfully variegated protozoan population, with a dominant ciliate type much like Paramoecium, plus various Sarcodines, the usual spread of phytoflagellates, and even a phosphorescent species I wouldn’t have expected to see anywhere but in salt water. As for the plants, they run from simple blue-green algae to quite advanced thallus-producing types— though none of them, of course, can live out of the water.”
“The sea is about the same,” Eunice said. “I’ve found some of the larger simple metazoans—jellyfish and so on— and some Palinuridae almost as big as lobsters. But it’s normal to find salt-water species running larger than fresh-water. And there’s the usual plankton and nanno-plankton population.”
“In short,” Chatvieux said, “we’ll survive if we fight.”
“Wait a minute,” la Ventura said. “You’ve just finished telling me that we wouldn’t survive. And you were talking about us, the seven of us here, not about the genus Man, because we don’t have our germ-cell banks any more.”
“We don’t have the banks. But we ourselves can contribute germ-cells, Paul. I’ll get to that in a moment.” Chatvieux turned to Saltonstall. “Martin, what would you think of taking to the sea? We came out of it once.”
“No good,” Saltonstall said immediately. “I like the idea, but I don’t think this planet ever heard of Swinburne, or Homer either. Looking at it as a colonization problem alone, as if we weren’t involved in it ourselves, I wouldn’t give you an Oc dollar for epi oinopa ponton. The evolutionary pressure there is too high; the competition from other species is prohibitive; seeding the sea should be the last thing we attempt. The colonists wouldn’t learn a thing before they’d be gobbled up.”
“Why?” la Ventura said. Once more, the death in his stomach was becoming hard to placate.
“Eunice, do your sea-going Coelenterates include anything like the Portuguese man-of-war?”
The ecologist nodded.
“There’s your answer, Paul,” Saltonstall said. “The sea is out. It’s got to be fresh water, where the competition is less formidable and there are more places to hide.”
“We can’t compete with a jellyfish?” la Ventura asked.