Over the next week, I was able to get progressively more and more data from the Lookout. Although what I really wanted, the medical telemetry histories of all the crew members, was unavailable, I was able to get quite a bit of other information. We had all eagerly awaited the bird's eye view of the Explorer's landing site, as photographed by the Lookout during one of its orbital passes. Unfortunately, as we should have expected, the picture, although dramatic to us, revealed almost nothing. The ship appeared to be intact; apparently, there was no large tentacled sea creature after all. Nor was there a massive explosion which would leave only a crater where the Explorer had rested. Whatever happened to the ship and its crew was not a massive physical trauma. We continued to get the four faint life signals, but the data were still so bizarre it still was not decipherable.
On one orbital pass of the Lookout, I had it train its high-resolution optical camera at the location where five of the dead crew members (or at least their medical telemetry units) were located. It was a perfect photo shoot. The sun was directly overhead, minimizing shadows. The weather of Harvey's World cooperated marvelously as it always does, and I received crystal clear images which resolved items on the ground as small as twenty-five millimeters. "What do you make of this?" I asked George when he came into the main cabin to see how I was doing.
"This is DOA site Number One?" he asked.
"Yeah," I said. "It was taken about three hours ago. I had to download it from the Lookout about a dozen times, then let Mother fill in the gaps and enhance the resolution. The process may have corrupted a few of the pixels, but considering what I had to go through to get it, this is a pretty darn good photo."
The photo showed a cluster of the large black herbivores lying in a loose arrangement around an off-white patch of vegetation. "According to the Lookout, the remains of five of our comrades are lying within a meter of the center of those herbivores."
"How mobile are those herbivores?" The Captain asked, just as she stuck her head into the cabin.
"Don't know, Captain," I said. "My guess is they're as mobile as terrestrial cows. They're about the same size as cows. In this environment, with abundant grasslands, they don't have to move fast. No carnivores were noted in any of the Explorer's reports. Herbivores typically only move fast when they're running from a carnivore's dinner table."
"They look like they're napping after a good meal," quipped George. George wasn't the type to make jokes. I think he was probably serious.
"What about the survivors? How do they look?" Janet asked.
"Sorry," I admitted. "It was simpler to direct the Lookout to scan here. The coordinates just happened to be right on nice, whole number radians. It would have taken another couple of hours to retransmit the longer location coordinates of the survivors. I can still get them in another hour or so."
"Can you get another shot of this same spot in twenty-four hours?" asked Janet. "And in the meantime, can you start downloading the survivors' coordinates to the Lookout?"
"You don't want much, do you?" I snickered. The trouble with making these gadgets work is that nobody understands all the agony you go through to make it look easy.
"I'd like to see what changes a full day makes," Janet explained.
"In that case," I replied, "I'll wait only 21 hours, 42 minutes, and 15 seconds. Days are shorter on Harvey's World."
"But I also want to see our people as soon as possible," she added.
"The difficult we do right away," I said with a slight sigh. "The impossible takes just a little longer. I'll let you know when I've got 'em."
What I had told the Captain was only partly BS. It really was tougher to instruct the Lookout to spy on the survivors. But, I guess I was afraid of what I might find. We were still two months away. What if they were in imminent mortal danger? Nineteen people had died on that planet. The four who remained could be dying at any moment. I could not bear to see them die before my eyes. I had seen enough men die, and I was not eager to repeat the thrill. At least here, I knew that I'd have no horrible desire (too horrible even to admit to that psychiatrist who talked me into coming here) that I wanted someone to die because I was hungry. Thank God for Space Fairer's Amnesia. There are some things I don't want to remember.
But I'm a professional. I came here halfway beyond the explored galaxy to save my fellow man. I could not save them if I could not understand how they died. So I did what the Captain asked. It only took forty-five minutes to instruct the Lookout where to look. It required 378 repetitions of the command before the Lookout got it through the ion jet static, then another forty acknowledgments from the Lookout before I realized it had gotten it. The picture was worth the effort, was not worth the worry, and answered virtually no questions.
The image of Survivor site Number One was just as clear as DOA site Number One. Three of the four survivors were visible. They lay immobile, haphazardly in a group. All around them a small herd of the cows was lying down with them. One of the survivors was naked, another was in a fully armored environmental suit. The other was in normal space fatigues. Nearby was one of those strange off-white clumps of vegetation. The cows seemed to like them. I guess they made comfortable beds.
I reprogrammed the Lookout. It would monitor this spot as continuously as possible. At night it would scan in infrared. I canceled Janet's order to look at DOA Number One the next day. I wanted to know what happened to these poor guys. I wanted them out of there. I wanted them home. I was going to get them home somehow.
We all watched that scene for five days. If Janet remembered her order to review DOA Number One the second day, she never mentioned it. We all watched Survivor Number One, or as we called it, "SN1." The picture did not change for five days. Our survivors never moved. The cows never moved. The medical telemetry never changed. The medical telemetry still didn't make any sense. I think it was driving us all mad. It bugged the heck out of me. Poor Janet slept even less than before. Even George started to act a little wacko. He lost some of that nauseating can-do good cheer that usually dripped out the large pores all over his well-toned body. He never got rude, but there was at least one time when he was not overtly polite to me. I knew that this whole thing was tearing him up inside.
Finally, Janet gave the order. "Let's look at something else." she said. "We've got a whole planet to figure out. Lets make sense of it." Now I know why they made her captain. She's the only one of us who had half a pico-gram of intelligence.
George snapped out of it pretty well, too. He suggested that we survey the cows. (We had started calling them cows without even realizing it.) We had another meeting around our psychiatrist couch in the main control room. "Let's survey those things," he suggested. "Let's do a census, record their movements and create some statistics. How often do they eat? How often do they sleep? Do they have sex, or do they reproduce by mitosis? Do they ever swim in the ocean? If these blasted things are eating our people, we've got to understand them. It's a sure bet the Explorer didn't understand them."
"I agree with you, George," the Captain said. "But remember, we don't know that these things hurt the crew. Why did one crew member die in the ship? Why were the SN1 victims dressed so differently from each other? Don't jump to conclusions."
"Affirmative," George replied. "You're the scientist, Captain, I'm just a wayward biologist who's not too bright but can lift heavy things. Maybe the cows only eat them when they're dead. I don't know, but we've got to find out."
"I know, I know. Just keep your mind open, that's all."
I didn't say much. I'm not smart enough to be Captain, and I'm not some buzz-cut muscle man with a fancy degree in biological science. I push buttons for a living, and I had some more to push now. We were getting closer to Harvey's World, so it was easier to cut through the ion jet static. I programmed the Lookout to identify, then count the cows. I wasn't able to track each individual cow, but I could take a series of snapshots at five minute intervals, then have the Lookout plot the location of each cow on a spherical coordinate grid. Later, Mother could calculate the statistics about where the cows like to congregate. Presumably, the places they went would vary by the hour of the day, and then also vary over the course of weeks and months. Within several days, I expected to get some good data trends.
About a week later, we had a general conference. "I think we can dispense with following the full protocol for these meetings," Janet said nodding to me. Finally, we could start a meeting somewhere other than the absolute beginning. "Chief, would you get us started with our current status?" she asked. I handled out the printouts from the mission file. It had grown thick. I had been busy setting up the data recording, and helping Janet and George get the information they wanted. First, I opened with the technical details.
"We're two weeks from super-orbital injection around the Gas Giant," I started. "Our current decel is 0.703g's. We'll increase this slightly just before we make entry. I plan to bring us just into the thin outer atmosphere at both sides of our elliptical perihelion around the Giant. It will slow us, and help to mitigate any slight errors in our trajectory which may have gone undetected until now. Harvey's World is this side of the Giant, of course, so we'll complete almost one full orbit around the Giant before falling into Harvey's gravity well. It'll take us another day or two to maneuver into geosynchronous position above the Explorer. I think that within eighteen to nineteen days we'll be able to shut down the ion drive and finally open our eyes and ears.
"The electrical noise from the ion jet is not as serious now as it had been because we're closer to the Lookout and don't have to boost the gain much. However, I still can't get real-time telemetry (we're on about a thirty-five minute delay now), so by general agreement . . ." (George and I nodded to each other.) "I have continued to download near-current data, rather than use the limited bandwidth to get the historical medical data that we'd really prefer to have."
"Very good, Chief," Janet said. "Mister Wendt?"
George cleared his throat a couple of times. It amazed me how a guy who radiated such physical power could get so tongue-tied talking to this group that he had come to know so well. It was interesting because George only had this problem when "presenting" to us in these meetings; he was fine in normal conversation. Janet had told me once that George had almost flunked out of the Academy during his last semester since he found it almost impossible to make the formal oral presentation of his graduation thesis.
Finally, George got all his sniffling and twitching done, and started with his presentation. "The medical data is like nothing I've ever seen," he began. "As you know, we have sixteen redlines, four missing in actions, and four active bio signatures. The data has been too spotty to accurately correlate which transponder belongs to which crew member. As the Chief said, I've been more interested in continually monitoring our survivors and figuring out what the others died from than in figuring out who they are.
"But let me first discuss what we know about the non-survivors. The redlines' telemetry units are working properly. All of the internal fault checking signatures show green, and all the data are consistent with mortality. All but one of the units gives readings that are consistent with units that have been removed from their occupant. (The one exception is the redline in the Explorer.) The removal of the telemetry units could have been deliberate, which would allow for the unlikely possibility that the redlines are actually alive. More likely, I think, is that their owners have either been consumed by the local flora and fauna, or have been exposed to the balmy atmosphere of Harvey's World and rotted away. With the previously stated exception of the crew member in the Explorer cabin, all the data being transmitted are consistent with telemetry units laying either directly on, or slightly below the surface. Temperature is about where I expect the surface of Harvey's to be. The salinity is low, about the same as typical soil. EEG is very low frequency and very atypical of any biological activity, and is probably due to some iron in the soil causing minor eddy currents. I read no pulse, although I am picking up some minor vibrations which I believe to be footsteps of our bovine friends walking near the units. In short, unless we get into orbit and happen to spot a fully equipped surgical hospital capable of removing a cylindrical abdominal implant that is six cm long and one cm in diameter, I think we can conclude that we have in fact lost sixteen of our colleagues."
"What about the body in the Explorer?" Janet asked.
"The data is a little more definite on that one," George replied. "I'm showing just the slightest signs of cytoplasmic activity, probably caused by the late stages of bacterial decomposition. All the other data are textbook perfect for the death of its owner, followed by decomposition. I would not want to take a whiff in the Explorer until we've had a chance to let it air out a bit.
"The Missing in Action data, of course, is indeterminate. One of them is easily explained, as the Chief mentioned a couple of weeks ago. We had one crew member die en-route, and the normal procedure is to deactivate the telemetry unit. The other three are probably the result of death of the bearer. It is possible for these things to fail spontaneously. I've read of three occurrences of this happening over the last decade or so, but it is extremely rare. More likely, I'm afraid, is that they were damaged when the MIAs were consumed by the local flora and fauna. These things will easily survive the gastrointestinal tract of your average terrestrial cow. However, if you postulate severe mechanical stress induced by bone crushing jaws, added to extreme acid attack by digestive juices, then additional mechanical stress by being walked on by herds of these cows, it is conceivable that they stop working. We can hope for a miracle, but it will take one to find one of the MIAs alive."
"What about if they were far away, like deep underwater," I asked. "Would that account for the missing signals?"
"It's possible, " George said. "It is a deep ocean, and the water is mildly saline which adds enough ionic effect to block the EM radiation they transmit with. But the telemetry unit would have to be awfully deep, on the order of seven-hundred or eight-hundred meters beneath the surface. If our friends are that deep, they're gone."
George paused again. I knew he was ready to discuss our survivors now, and this triggered the whole coughing and presentation anxiety reflexes he had just gone through a few seconds ago. Eventually, he finished enough to say "And now for the important stuff."
"The information from the survivors is strange, to say the least. I've studied this stuff for almost twelve years, and I've never run across any set of readings like these before. I double checked with Mother, and she's got nothing in her records either. We've got a very unusual set of bio readings here.
"We have four survivors, and can visually identify three of them from the Lookout images. I have been able to tentatively identify them as Greer, Jones, and Sarco. Greer was in the engineering section, Jones was an astrophysicist who also doubled as an archeologist. Sarco was on the 'unattached' list. All four of them are showing remarkably similar readouts, so I've therefore discounted the possibility of a system failure yielding erroneous data. If there is an error, it's effecting only the four survivors. This is what I've gotten so far."
Once again, George had to work up through his sniffles, coughs and general delays. I wondered if stammering ran in George's family. I never thought about it before, but there could be all types of manifestation to speech hesitation problems. Stammering could be one form, and this annoying sniffle reflex of George's could be another. I wonder if he had the same problem when he sang. I've read that most stammerers can sing just fine, or act in stage plays without any hint of trouble. I've often heard George humming to himself, in that jollier-than-thou attitude of his, but I wonder if he ever was in the Glee Club or something. I'll have to ask Mother when I get a chance. She keeps up with all that kind of worthless trivia.
Finally, George worked through his repertoire, and started to speak again. "First, lets start with the basics," he said. "All four are showing greatly reduced body temperatures; they show severe hypothermia, almost to the point of being exothermic. Their breathing and heart rates are so faint as to be almost undetectable. Endorphin levels are high in the cerebral cortex, despite the presence of elevated levels of cortical steroids, or as you probably think of them, stress hormones."
I interrupted. "So you're saying that they're out cold . . . literally."
"No. That's not what I'm saying. They should be out cold, but EEG data indicates a high level of cerebral activity. I'm also reading acetylcholine levels consistent with intense metal activity, like somebody gets when they undertake a particularly intense mental exercise. The good news, if there is any, is that they clearly are in no pain."
"How do you know that George?" the Captain asked
"The endorphins. You know, the brain's natural opiate. They're swimming in it. They're probably having a ball."
"How long can they live like this?" I asked.
"I don't know. Ordinarily, I'd say they wouldn't last a week or more. Even with their reduced metabolism, they still have to eat, or at least drink. I also don't yet know how long they've been like this. Judging from the photos, it's only been a little while. The bottom line is, though, I think we've got a week, maybe two before their chances look pretty poor."
There wasn't much to say at this point. As I had reported, we were still at least three weeks from a good orbit, then standard protocol called for at least three weeks for orbital surveys. The one cardinal rule of space rescue is "Don't Die Trying." The Captain, or course, has to make this type of decision. She has the authority to override protocol and land immediately. But what would she do? I think I know our Captain; I've lived with her for almost a year.
The Captain started to speak. "Well," she said. "This looks like a good segue into my report. Lets talk about cows."
She pulled out a few sheets of paper, and handed one to George and one to me. "This report," she said, "is a compendium of the movements the cows have made over the last two weeks. You know, if I didn't know better, I'd say our Chief here has been playing tricks on us with this data. We've all seen how the cows at Survivor Number One don't move much. Well, they don't move a whole heck of a lot anywhere else, either. Each cow appears to graze on the local vegetation for 16.2 hours per day, mean. The balance of the time, they lay down and sleep. They move an average of thirty-two meters in that time, getting no farther than twelve meters from their starting point in any one day. These are the most stay-at-home critters I've ever seen."
"What about Bessie, and our other cows at Survivor Number One?" I asked. Bessie was the cow who was right next to Greer.
"We've all noticed how Bessie never moves much. Actually, she does, but then so does Greer. She twitches a leg here, or rolls her head there, but never gets up and rolls over or anything. All over the grass lands, every kilometer or two, there are these off-white clumps of vegetation. All the cows near these clumps are practically immobile, like Bessie. It's my theory that a significant percentage of the cows go into some type of hibernation, perhaps after eating a big carnivorous meal, and find this vegetation particularly comfortable as a bed."
"Wait a minute," George piped in. "Did you say that Greer moves?"
"Yes. Just like Bessie, all our SN1 victims move, but just a little. As you can see from this photo taken this morning, Greer is laying on his side with his left leg under his right leg. But in this photo taken three days ago . . ." She shuffled the papers she held in her hands and then handed one to George. "Greer's left leg is almost completely straight."
"He's asleep," I said quietly as George and I studied the pictures.
"That's what it looks like from the photos, Chief," Janet said.
"We gotta get them out of there," said George. Interestingly, his voice was lower, meaner, and more determined than I've ever heard him . . . and he never sniffled once when he said it.
"I've got to get back to work," I blurted out. "The ion drive needs a few adjustments before our orbital injection." Before the Captain could even give me permission to leave, I quickly headed aft to check on the controls for the ion drive. Actually, even though the ion drive needed some work, I just had to get out of that room. This was not the first time I had watched guys waste away while unconscious. There were two of us in that old fuel tank when we got stranded around the asteroid for so long. Thank God for this plate in my head and my Space Fairer's Amnesia, or I'd still see the horrible image of his dying body, which slowly twitched every now and then. He died before my eyes. I was cold, in pain, and hungry then. I don't want to think those thoughts again. I don't want to see any photos of guys lying helplessly while Life is slowly taken away, with me just a short distance away and unable to do anything about it. I had to push some buttons; it was the only therapy that ever seemed to work for me. As therapies went, it didn't work very well, but it was all that I had, and I wasn't about to give up on it now.