"What kind of conditions?" Jerry had stepped over to the cart and was opening the metal handling cases and peering in.
"A cool, dry place for the eggs. The millipedes too-a cool room with dim light. I can give you specific recommendations."
"That won't be necessary."
"Ahh-I strongly suggest it."
Jerry opened another case. "Why?"
"Because that's what they like." I stepped over to the cart next to him. "Use a little common sense. Look at the size of their eyes. They're all pupil. Of course they're not going to like bright light."
Jerry hmphed.
I said, "Hazy sunshine blinds them. Indoor light blinds them. Even dim light blinds them. They can maneuver in twilight or dusk, but they can only see well in the dark."
Jerry looked skeptical. "Even absolute dark?"
I nodded. "I think their eyes are heat sensitive. I wasn't able to test it, but it looks as if they can see pretty far into the infra-red."
Ted spoke up then, for the first time. "Tell him what that means, Jim."
"Uh . . ." I wished he hadn't done that. I said, "They're not nocturnal-"
Jerry looked up from the case, frowning. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his lab coat. "I don't get that."
"-on their home planet. On Earth, they have to be."
"Huh?"
"Well," I said, "it's the size of their eyes. That really suggests that they've evolved under much poorer lighting conditions than we have here. It's compensation. Either their home planet is farther from its primary, or the primary doesn't put out as much light in the visible spectrum as Sol. Or both. That makes the planet noticeably cooler than Earth; probably its temperatures range between five and twenty degrees Centigrade. Maybe it's in a long glaciation. The millipedes seem most comfortable between ten and thirteen degrees, but that depends on the amount of light hitting them."
Jerry began to look interested.
"Earth daylight is too bright," I continued. "It slows them down, even makes them curl up. At a light level approximating dusk, they're at their most active across the widest possible temperature range-that's when they really move. When we found them, they were torpid-but only by comparison. I take it to be a pretty good indication of the general level of brightness to be found on Chtorr. Hence, the big eyes."
Jerry said, "Hm," and looked back into the millipede case with studied thoughtfulness.
"If I had access to a terminal," I hinted, "I could tell a lot more. It's very interesting how sensitive to light and temperature differences these creatures are. That suggests to me that the climate on Chtorr is incredibly stable. The nights must be fairly warm in relation to the days. I'd guess that the planet has a fairly hazy atmosphere with a lot of carbon dioxide in it; that would create a greenhouse effect and keep the nights from cooling too much. I also think the planet may not have any moons-or maybe only very small ones. Nothing that can exert strong tidal effects. That would make the planet stormy, not hazy."
"Hazy, huh?" Jerry pursed his lips as he thought. His whole rubbery face deformed. "I do know a little bit of theoretical ecology," he said. "You might be right-" Then he added, "but I doubt it."
"Oh, thanks." I folded my arms across my chest. "Listen, if you know a little bit, then you know a little bit isn't enough."
He nodded his agreement. "I know. I took my degree in T.E."
"B.S.?"
"Ph.D."
"Oh." Suddenly, I felt stupid.
"Listen, I applaud your industriousness-as well as your imagination-but your theory has holes in it big enough to drive a worm through."
"Name six."
"Just one will do." He closed the lid on the case again. "If Chtorr has a hazy atmosphere, then that means they can't see the stars. If the atmosphere is hazy enough, they won't see any moons either, especially not if they're small. That means no celestial objects in the sky to attract their interest-and that means no incentive for an intelligent race to discover space travel. If your theory is correct, these bugs shouldn't be here, and neither should the worms who brought them."
"Their eyes are much more sensitive than ours," I replied. "They should be able to see celestial objects under far worse viewing conditions. Look-" I took a deep breath. "To an exobiologist, the species filling the bottom rungs of the ladder are very efficient little monitors of the physical conditions of the planet-its rotation, its temperature cycles, its light levels, its weather patterns and a thousand and six other variables. You can extrapolate the context of the ecology out of the content, if you know what to look for. Based on this evidence, Chtorr is a perpetually smoke-filled room. Or haze, or smog, or something. The point is, the atmosphere is thick and the primary is dim, but how much of each, I don't know-oh, but I can tell you what color it is."
"Huh?" Jerry's jaw dropped. "How?"
"That's what I've been working on." I tapped my disk. "It's all on here."
He blinked. "What is it?"
"It's a three-dimensional graph-the variables are temperature, light intensity and light frequency, demonstrated by millipede reactivity."
"Oh," said Jerry. He looked impressed.
"Well, hey-!" put in Ted, "What color is it?"
"It's red," I grinned. "The star is dark red. What else?" Jerry considered that. His face was thoughtful. "That's fairly well advanced along the sequence. I can see why the Chtorrans might be looking for a new home; the old one's wearing out." He looked at me. "How do you know?"
"Serendipity," I admitted. "I thought I could approximate darkness with a two-hundred-lumen output in the red bandwell, it works in a dark room; why not here? I got tired of stumbling into things. But then the new measurements didn't fit the curve I'd already established. The bugs were way too active. So I started thinking about the wavelengths of their visual spectrum. All last night I had the computer varying the color temperature of the plates at regular intervals. I gave the bugs eighteen different colors. Most of them provoked no response at all. The yellow gave some, the orange a bit more, but it was the red that made them sit up twice. A little more testing this morning showed they like it best no brighter than a terrestrial twilight-and then it correlates almost perfectly with the other set of tests."
"It sounds like a good piece of work," said Jerry. Suddenly, he grinned. On his face, the effect was grotesque. "It reminds me of a project I did once. We were given three disparate life forms and we had to extrapolate the native ecology. It was a two-year project. I used over twenty thousand hours of parallel processing." He grew more serious. "So please don't be upset when I tell you that your conclusions might be premature. I've been through this exercise once. I know some of the pitfalls. You can't judge a planet by a single life form. There's a lot of difference between rattlesnakes and penguins. You don't know if these millipedes are representative or just a special case. We don't know what part of the planet they're from, or what kind of region-are they from the poles or the equator? Are they representative of mountainous fauna on Chtorr, or swampland creatures? Or desert, or grasslands, or what? And what would that identification imply about conditions on the rest of the planet? What kind of seasons are these bugs geared to-how long are they? What kind of biological cycles? How long are the days, months, years? If they have no moons, or more than one, do they even have cyclical equivalents of months? The real question about these specimens is, where do these millipedes fit in the Chtorran ecology? All you have here are indicators: the worms like to eat bugs, and the bugs like to eat anything-is that a general or arbitrary condition? What can we imply about the shape of their food chain? And what about their breeding-what is their reproductive cycle like? What are their growth patterns? Their psychology-if they even have one? Diseases? And I haven't even begun to ask questions."