PAGE 4
Cum Grano Salis
by
He slipped several bottles into his belt-pak after he had put on his field uniform, so that he could get at them at mealtimes, and trudged out toward the mess hall to the meager breakfast that awaited him.
* * * * *
“Specifically,” said Colonel Fennister, “what we want to know is: What are our chances of staying alive until the relief ship comes?”
He and most of the other officers were still groggy-eyed, having had too much to do to even get an hour’s sleep the night before. Only the phlegmatic Major Grodski looked normal; his eyes were always about half closed.
Captains Jones and Bellwether, in charge of A and B Companies respectively, and their lieutenants, Mawkey and Yutang, all looked grim and irritable.
The civilian components of the policy group looked not one whit better. Dr. Pilar had been worriedly rubbing at his face, so that his normally neat beard had begun to take on the appearance of a ruptured mohair sofa; Dr. Petrelli, the lean, waspish chemist, was nervously trimming his fingernails with his teeth: and the M.D., Dr. Smathers, had a hangdog expression on his pudgy face and had begun drumming his fingers in a staccato tattoo on his round belly.
Dr. Pilar tapped a stack of papers that lay before him on the long table at which they were all seated. “I have Major Grodski’s report on the remaining food. There is not enough for all of us to live, even on the most extended rations. Only the strongest will survive.”
Colonel Fennister scowled. “You mean to imply that we’ll be fighting over the food like animals before this is over? The discipline of the Space Service–“
His voice was angry, but Dr. Pilar cut him off. “It may come to fighting, colonel, but, even if perfect discipline is maintained, what I say will still be true. Some will die early, leaving more food for the remaining men. It has been a long time since anything like this has happened on Earth, but it is not unknown in the Space Service annals.”
The colonel pursed his lips and kept his silence. He knew that what the biologist said was true.
“The trouble is,” said Petrelli snappishly, “that we are starving in the midst of plenty. We are like men marooned in the middle of an ocean with no water; the water is there, but it’s undrinkable.”
“That’s what I wanted to get at,” said Colonel Fennister. “Is there any chance at all that we’ll find an edible plant or animal on this planet?”
The three scientists said nothing, as if each were waiting for one of the others to speak.
* * * * *
All life thus far found in the galaxy had had a carbon-hydrogen-oxygen base. Nobody’d yet found any silicon based life, although a good many organisms used the element. No one yet had found a planet with a halogen atmosphere, and, although there might be weird forms of life at the bottom of the soupy atmospheres of the methane-ammonia giants, no brave soul had ever gone down to see–at least, not on purpose, and no information had ever come back.
But such esoteric combinations are not at all necessary for the postulation of wildly variant life forms. Earth itself was prolific in its variations; Earthlike planets were equally inventive. Carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, plus varying proportions of phosphorus, potassium, iodine, nitrogen, sulfur, calcium, iron, magnesium, manganese, and strontium, plus a smattering of trace elements, seem to be able to cook up all kinds of life under the strangest imaginable conditions.
Alphegar IV was no different than any other Earth-type planet in that respect. It had a plant-dominated ecology; the land areas were covered with gigantic trees that could best be described as crosses between a California sequoia and a cycad, although such a description would have made a botanist sneer and throw up his hands. There were enough smaller animals to keep the oxygen-carbon-dioxide cycle nicely balanced, but the animals had not evolved anything larger than a rat, for some reason. Of course, the sea had evolved some pretty huge monsters, but the camp of the expedition was located a long way from the sea, so there was no worry from that quarter.