Unfortunately—
I do try never to turn down an assignment; that sort of behavior can give one a bad name, for some damned reason. And I did manage to sell the Colonization sahib who had managed to reach me on the idea that it would make no real difference if I reported to him some time the following morning, rather than in four hours, which would be, after all, fairly late in the evening even for Grand Forks, Idaho, where for some damned reason most of Colonization lives.
I told the fellow that I had to do a little research on the drone reports. God knows I did have to look them up. But I could have them beamed to me aboard my ship, en route, in the morning, and so I did.
I made an extra pie, to take with me and eat on the way to Tree.
I hereby swear and attest: the planet was officially named Tree. I have run into as many funny-sounding planetary names as anybody, I suppose, short of a galactic surveyor (one of my favorites is Copious, which seems to have been named by mistake; some bom damn fool thought it was an ancient-language word for Body—his name was Hubert Boddy, and he thought he’d back into History that way), but Tree hit a new sort of low. Its basic difficulty is that it is the fourth planet in the system, counting from either end (there are seven, and it’s in the middle), so you can’t get away from: Is that Four? No, dat’s Tree. There must be something better for Colonization to do than think up bad straight lines.
The place does have trees, though; I’ll give it that. The course bumps beamed onto my card gave me a trip time, through space-four, of nearly four days (though of course that doesn’t mean anything in terms of normal three-dimensional distance; it’s two days and a bit Earth-Mars, if you ever want to do that jump the hard way, and a couple of hours under two days to Alphacent, which is noticeably further away), and I spent my four days (once the pie was gone) reading drone reports, looking at drone pictures, and generally Droning. If the planet had one thing, it was certainly trees.
Not that they were Earth trees, of course—but they looked a lot closer to that model than anybody could have expected. They were tall things (four feet for teenies, fifty feet for big bastards, and everything in between added in, for sixty or seventy slightly different breeds of foliage) with branches and leaves—though the branches weren’t individual things but a sort of hard flattened twining material that thinned out toward the ends but never quite became fully unified. The leaves weren’t soft green chlorophyll contraptions, either; they were a sort of yellow-tan, very light in color for the most part, and much harder, it turns out, than leaves on Earth trees. They occurred in the thousands on every tree; the leaves were not only collection-plates for nourishment from solar energy (they were the point men for a sort of calcium bond system that worked instead of chlorophyll, but the details are thoroughly hairy, if you don’t mind), but collection-plates for small animals, of which there were millions upon millions.
The trees, or the leaves, emitted something—at that stage nobody had any idea what, since there are limits to the information even a drone ship can collect from orbit—that attracted small animals. Almost bonded to the actual leaves was a sort of translucent surface that rolled up quickly and digested the animals. Every tree its own king-sized, slightly odd, Venus flytrap.
But they looked a lot like Earth-normal trees from any reasonable distance—the color was something my eyes adjusted to easily enough—and they occurred in groves and stands and forests and jungles all over what seemed to be the main continent. The oddity, if you collect oddities, was that no single breed of tree dominated a grove, stand, forest, or jungle, for the most part—statistical flukes occurred, but they were obviously flukes; all the breeds existed happily, and in brotherly calm, everywhere on the planet. Brotherly calm, you understand, is something any Survivor is willing to cheer about.
The planet had six land masses for its trees, four of them a bit bigger, apiece, than Key West. The fifth was about the size of Macallan on Pupil III, if you know it—a little bigger than North America.
The sixth was the size of a really large continent. Tree had decided to go out of its way to show the visitor that it could grow continents in style, and shouldn’t be judged by pinched and early efforts. The big one was where most of the vegetable and animal life seemed to thrive—except for water creatures, of course, though the liquid that washed about three-fifths of the world wasn’t quite water any more than the air was quite Earth-normal air; it was breathable, it did not cause fits or dizziness or nausea, but its figures were just that little bit different, as expected; planets can be siblings, but not, as of right now, identical twins. Though you might not want to take any large bets on that for the next five or six worlds; who knows what the next one is going to be like?
And though there were predators and predatees in the water, as usual exchanging places with each bite, they could safely be left for a little later in my inquiries. My first job was figuring out how to live on land.
I had a portable house. Not a tent, not a jump back into the ship, but a jiffy-building that ran itself up in a hurry—and a good thing, too, because I don’t take my Totum and Robbies planet-testing with me, and I am just too damned lazy to build a log-cabin type of dwelling all by myself. It isn’t at all like dishwashing, and even less like fine cookery.
I had some weapons, too. The planet didn’t look as if it was about to toss up anything wildly dangerous—just the usual animals, more or less, most small and a few surprisingly large, with claws, teeth, serrated beaks, the occasional horn, and other expectable equipment.
Now, most animals, on any world, won’t eat totally unfamiliar things. The stuff might be poisonous. It might taste terrible. It might eat you right back.
But in amassing enough data to come to a decision that some one particular thing is really, totally unfamiliar, most animals will cause death, and great agony. Rather than give them the trouble of trying me out and deciding that I was not edible—a sheer waste of the animal’s time—I carried a variety of weaponry.
And some other things… No sense in running through a full inventory here and now.
So I set up my light housekeeping with heavy weapons, and began making the first, and most important check list: Things to Eat.
It really doesn’t matter if you’re perfectly safe—armed against all intruders, nicely supplied with oxygen and so forth—if there is nothing on the planet you can eat, and eat regularly and often. If that’s the fact, you’re not a colonist, you’re a tourist.
The drones had made some spot analyses not only of atmospheric components but of chemical properties of local animal and vegetable life. There were a few poisonous things, mostly among the plants (though there was one wondrous animal that looked a little like a giraffe with very, very long ears, which killed its prey by spitting a sort of chlorinated goo at it through a tubed tongue; Mother Nature gets exceptionally weird now and then, doesn’t she?), and as usual on almost any world there were a) trace elements missing, which colonists would have to supply either by growing things from elsewhere or by keeping factories of some sort busy, and b) trace elements added, which colonists would have to watch out for by diet regimens and by providing some sort of chelating process if needed to remove the stuff.