They were almost on top of us when we reached the ladder and there wasn’t time or room for all of us to use it. I was the last in line and I saw I’d never make it and a dozen possible escape plans flickered through my mind. But I knew they wouldn’t work fast enough. Then I saw the rope, hanging where I’d left it after the unloading job, and I made a jump for it. I’m no rope-climbing expert, but I shinnied up it with plenty of speed. And right behind me came Weber, who was no rope-climber, either, but who was doing rather well.
I thought of how lucky it had been that I hadn’t found the time to take down the rig and how Weber had ridden me unmercifully about not doing it. I wanted to shout down and point it out to him, but I didn’t have the breath.
We reached the port and tumbled into it. Below us, the stampeding critters went grinding through the camp. There seemed to be millions of them. One of the terrifying things about it was how silently they ran. They made no outcry of any kind; all you could hear was the sound of their hoofs pounding on the ground. It seemed almost as if they ran in some blind fury that was too deep for outcry.
They spread for miles, as far as one could see on the star-lit plains, but the spaceship divided them and they flowed to either side of it and then flowed back again, and beyond the spaceship there was a little sector that they never touched. I thought how we could have been safe staying on the ground and huddling in that sector, but that’s one of the things a man never can foresee.
The stampede lasted for almost an hour. When it was all over, we came down and surveyed the damage. The animals in their cages, lined up between the ship and the camp, were safe. All but one of the sleeping tents were standing. The lantern still burned brightly on the table. But everything else was gone. Our food supply was trampled in the ground. Much of the equipment was lost and wrecked. On either side of the camp, the ground was churned up like a half-plowed field. The whole thing was a mess.
It looked as if we were licked.
The tent Kemper and I used for sleeping still stood, so our notes were safe. The animals were all right. But that was all we had—the notes and animals.
“I need three more weeks,” said Weber. “Give me just three weeks to complete the tests.”
“We haven’t got three weeks,” I answered. “All our food is gone.”
“The emergency rations in the ship?’
“That’s for going home.”
“We can go a little hungry.”
He glared at us—at each of us in turn—challenging us to do a little starving.
“I can go three weeks,” he said, “without any food at all.”
“We could eat critter,” suggested Parsons. “We could take a chance.”
Weber shook his head. “Not yet. In three weeks, when the tests are finished, then maybe we will know. Maybe we won’t need those rations for going home. Maybe we can stock up on critters and eat our heads off all the way to Caph.”
I looked around at the rest of them, but I knew, before I looked, the answer I would get.
“All right,” I said. “We’ll try it.”
“It’s all right for you,” Fullerton retorted hastily. “You have your diet kit.”
Parsons reached out and grabbed him and shook him so hard that he went cross-eyed. “We don’t talk like that about those diet kits.”
Then Parsons let him go.
We set up double guards, for the stampede had wrecked our warning system, but none of us got much sleep. We were too upset.
Personally, I did some worrying about why the critters had stampeded. There was nothing on the planet that could scare them. There were no other animals. There was no thunder or lightning—as a matter of fact, it appeared that the planet might have no boisterous weather ever. And there seemed to be nothing in the critter makeup, from our observation of them, that would set them off emotionally.
But there must be a reason and a purpose, I told myself. And there must be, too, in their dropping dead for us. But was the purpose intelligence or instinct?
That was what bothered me most. It kept me awake all night long.
At daybreak, a critter walked in and died for us happily.
We went without our breakfast and, when noon came, no one said anything about lunch, so we skipped that, too.
Late in the afternoon, I climbed the ladder to get some food for supper. There wasn’t any. Instead, I found five of the fattest punkins you ever laid your eyes on. They had chewed holes through the packing boxes and the food was cleaned out. The sacks were limp and empty. They’d even managed to get the lid off the coffee can somehow and had eaten every bean.
The five of them sat contentedly in a corner, blinking smugly at me. They didn’t make a racket, as they usually did. Maybe they knew they were in the wrong or maybe they were just too full. For once, perhaps, they’d gotten all they could eat.
I just stood there and looked at them and I knew how they’d gotten on the ship. I blamed myself, not them. If only I’d found the time to take down the unloading rig, they’d never gotten in. But then I remembered how that dangling rope had saved my life and Weber’s and I couldn’t decide whether I’d done right or wrong.
I went over to the corner and picked the punkins up. I stuffed three of them in my pockets and carried the other two. I climbed down from the ship and walked up to camp. I put the punkins on the table.
“Here they are,” I said. “They were in the ship. That’s why we couldn’t find them. They climbed up the rope.”
Weber took one look at them. “They look well fed. Did they leave anything?”
“Not a scrap. They cleaned us out entirely.”
The punkins were quite happy. It was apparent they were glad to be back with us again. After all, they’d eaten everything in reach and there was no further reason for their staying in the ship.
Parsons picked up a knife and walked over to the critter that had died that morning.
“Tie on your bibs,” he said.
He carved out big steaks and threw them on the table and then he lit his stove. I retreated to my tent as soon as he started cooking, for never in my life have I smelled anything as good as those critter steaks.
I broke out the kit and mixed me up some goo and sat there eating it, feeling sorry for myself.
Kemper came in after a while and sat down on his cot.
“Do you want to hear?” he asked me.
“Go ahead,” I invited him resignedly.
“It’s wonderful. It’s got everything you’ve ever eaten backed clear off the table. We had three different kinds of red meat and a slab of fish and something that resembled lobster, only better. And there’s one kind of fruit growing out of that bush in the middle of the back …”
“And tomorrow you drop dead.”
“I don’t think so,” Kemper said. “The animals have been thriving on it. There’s nothing wrong with them.”
It seemed that Kemper was right. Between the animals and men, it took a critter a day. The critters didn’t seem to mind. They were johnny-on-the-spot. They walked in promptly, one at a time, and keeled over every morning.
The way the men and animals ate was positively indecent. Parsons cooked great platters of different kinds of meat and fish and fowl and what-not. He prepared huge bowls of vegetables. He heaped other bowls with fruit. He racked up combs of honey and the men licked the platters clean. They sat around with belts unloosened and patted their bulging bellies and were disgustingly contented.