Natural Immunity

Captain Eugene Chodor crossed his arms and settled back on his heels. "Maybe it was mutiny?" he suggested.

His blandly handsome features looked even blander and blanker than usual as he spoke, and he smiled at his own suggestion. His blue eyes were clear and placid. But beneath the good humor there was a tightness in both his voice and expression.

"There's never been a mutiny in the Space Force," ship's surgeon Hans Pruitt replied. He balanced on his haunches and fiddled with a long stick. Every minute or so he had to brush back the soft, crimson petals of the gargantuan flower that threatened to engulf him. There was a whole canopy of them overhead, big as beach umbrellas, nodding gently in the perfumed breeze that gusted softly from the nearby beach.

"There's precedents if you know where to look," the captain said. "The Bounty."

"Was the Farsight's captain a Bligh?"

"Bligh wasn't a Bligh." Chodor paused. "And would you please stop poking at it?"

"It" was a silver boot, of the same style and manufacture as the ones he and Pruitt wore: a thing issued by the United Earth Space Force. It was light, comfortable, and sturdy: designed to be as close to the experience of not wearing a boot at all as possible.

And like, the boots he and Pruitt wore, it had a human foot in it—the bones of one, at least. The difference was that these bones weren't attached to any leg.

Pruitt tossed away the stick he'd been using to push the boot this way and that. He wasn't a fastidious man, but the boot was evidence, though neither man knew what it was evidence for. "Do we tell the others we found the crew of the Farsight?" he asked.

"We only found one," Chodor pointed out. "And only part of him."

Star HDEX 396671 was a yellow dwarf with two terrestrial planets in its habitable zone. The system had long been on the Space Force's "to explore" list, but its distance and position relative to other stars of interest had pushed it nearer the bottom of the list than the top. That had changed, though, when the ESS Farsight finally staged a visit, and reported not merely an Earth-like climate for one of the terrestrial planets, but nearly an Edenic one.

For three months the Farsight had sent back a steady stream of data so enticing as to be incredible. Mild temperatures in both northern and southern hemispheres, even at maximal axial tilt. Landforms that took the shape of small to medium-sized islands in a belt at low latitudes about the equator. Abundant ocean life. Even the vulcanism was restricted (to all appearances) to gentle eruptions that replenished the soils and atmosphere without undue violence.

The terrestrial fauna too was uncannily benign. There were no aerial creatures larger than a sparrow, nor any land-dwelling ones larger than a house cat. Some few were carnivorous but hardly dangerous, and the explorers reported that one rodent-like creature was so soft, inquisitive and friendly as to be irresistible.

Only the "elephant trees," as the Farsight's botanist had christened them, daunted. They were Brobdingnagian, and they dominated every island. Their trunks were squat, fat, and turnip-shaped, like an African baobab, but they sprouted at the top into a hydra-like cluster of flexible necks that drooped almost to the ground and opened into enormous, floppy-petaled flowers. At their base they sprouted sprays of fern-like fronds that choked every avenue between them. Inside these fronds and within the flowers nested broods of almost every terrestrial animal discoverable by the Farsight surveyors.

Then the explorers had fallen silent. When contact couldn't be reestablished, the armored corvette Paladin was sent to investigate. It had spotted the derelict ship easily, but for safety's sake had set down on a beach one kilometer from the glade where the Farsight placidly rested, so that her men had to slash their way through luxuriant undergrowth to reach it.

The boot was in the sickbay freezer when Lieutenant Tristan Miller—a mission specialist assigned from Port Ganymede—and Ensign Paul Shadansky emerged onto the beach from the dense jungle that covered the island's low hills. "Run into anything?" the captain asked.

"Aw, shoot, cap'n," the ensign said. "There ain't nothin' worse 'round here than what's in my mama's flower box back home."

Chodor cocked a querying eye at Miller, who shook his head.

"I've been through everything they left behind," he said, "from her log to her crew's private recordings, backward and forward, ten times. Whatever got 'em, it got 'em sudden. They didn't see anything we haven't seen ourselves."

"Which is nothing," Shadansky added.

Chodor wished the lack of evidence didn't leave him even more jittery. He set Shadansky to patrolling the landing area—which in practice freed him to build sandcastles and splash in the surf—while he took Miller inside to show him the boot. "Where'd you find it?" Miller asked.

"Frenchie found it." That was the engineer of the five-man corvette. "Rather, he found a belt buckle with a detector. Pruitt and I dug around deeper. We turned the boot up nearby, under one of those big flowers."

"Can you show me where?"

"I can show you the trench. I can't show you anything in it, because there isn't anything."

Miller pondered the boot for some minutes. "Dismemberment," he finally said.

"That was my thought," said Chodor. "But where are the mutineers?"

Miller squinted at the wall behind the captain. "If it was me, I'd make a canoe and paddle as far away as possible."

"If they were rational," the captain said. "But I've been thinking, what if they weren't?" He poked at the boot with a pencil. "I mean ... dismemberment."

"Spores?" suggested Miller. "Spring is breaking over this hemisphere, and it was almost a year ago, local time, that the Farsight fell out of contact. If those flowers release some kind of pollen— Well, it might be a good idea to reissue the filtration masks."

"I'll put us in orbit on the equinox, just to be extra safe. Mind you, if it turns out there's nothing toxic, it's going to look very bad."

"Why's that?"

Chodor got a pinched look, and he folded his hands.

"We've stopped sleeping in the ship," he said. "Shadansky and Frenchie don't even bother putting on their uniforms anymore, and go about in their jumpers. The doc is growing a beard."

"It's more comfortable," Miller said with a shrug.

"Discipline is breaking down bit by bit."

"So restore it. Give Pruitt a razor and—"

"I don't want to," Chodor said. "And that worries me. It's so ... soft ... here." He made a face. "And it worries me that I'm not worried enough about it."

"So what do you want me to do?"

"Help me worry? I said it would be bad if there was nothing toxic out there. What I meant was—" He paused. "I mentioned the Bounty to the doc. He thought I meant Bligh. But I was thinking of Tahiti."

Miller mulled the name. "But then it would be a one-off," he said. "The Farsight, like the Bounty, but not like the ships sent after her."

"Unless the planet itself is somehow toxic."

Miller's eyebrows shot up. "Toxic against what? Invaders like us? How would that work?" But Chodor could only shrug helplessly.

A week later the equinox arrived. It was one of the hardest things he'd ever had to do when Chodor pulled Shadansky and the others from the surf and packed them back into the Paladin.

"It seems a damn shame," the ensign grumbled as they watched the planet from orbit.

"What is?" The captain had been watching the ensign closely ever since blastoff.

"That down there. Nothing but gentle seas and bobbing flowers and tame little critters. But it's all gonna get itself spoilt." He lowered his head. "First they'll put in a space port," he growled. "Then they'll cut down all the flowers and trees. The high-rises will go up and they'll pour asphalt everywhere. And if the survey teams find any minerals—"

"How far would you go to stop that from happening?" Miller asked.

"Sir?"

"You understood me."

The ensign thought a moment, then shrugged.

"Just seems a shame," he said, "to take it away from Tuffy and his friends."

"Who's Tuffy?" the captain asked.

A fistfight was only narrowly averted when Chodor flushed the titmouse-like creature Shadansky had smuggled aboard out the airlock as a "dangerous possible contaminant."

For two weeks, the Paladin rolled in an elliptical loop about the planet. The first week was the hardest, as the crew readjusted to wearing uniforms (and boots) again. Pruitt was persuaded to shave. But even the captain felt the confinement of the "tin can," and broke his own intention by dropping back to the surface a week early, and he too breathed a sigh of happiness as the landers settled into the sand.

They had taken copious air samples before departing, and these were carefully compared to new ones. No detectable difference was found. Still, the captain ordered ventilators and pressurized suits be worn.

They had spent nearly an hour conducting additional tests when Frenchie called their attention to one change: "Where are the birds?"

Indeed, the absence of the birdlike chirping was almost intolerable once they noticed it. Then Shadansky pointed out that the mouse-like animals he had tended were also gone. "Let's do a forest survey," the captain said. "Everyone stick close," he added as the five crewmen struck into the jungle.

The underbrush, if anything, had grown even denser in their absence, and the track they'd beaten to the abandoned exploration ship was completely overgrown. The canopy had lost all its color, too, for the flowers had withered and the petals fallen, leaving only sinewy pistils the size of a man's leg. They looked remarkably like elephants' trunks.

"These must be the 'proboscises' the Farsight crew noted," Pruitt said as he paused to study one. "Captain, may I take one back to the ship?"

"Why?"

"These are one of the last things the Farsight's crew noted before—" He broke off. "We could pick up where they left off."

Chodor nodded, even as he was bothered by a premonition. Here they stood under the same canopy as the crew of the Farsight. Those men had been oblivious to danger, and had vanished. But though he was almost paranoid with trepidation, he had no more notion than they about the direction and form the danger might take.

So he was watching Pruitt closely, and approving at the way the doctor carefully approached the pistil with gloved hands, when he saw the thing curl, flex, and seize the doctor's head with a crimson-flecked maw. It was like watching a pig get sucked down by a python—or an immense vacuum cleaner hose—as Pruitt shot up through the writhing proboscis and the connecting stem to vanish into the body of the plant.

The proboscis shivered hard and a blew out a wet bubble of blood. When it popped, something fell to the ground.

It was one of Pruitt's boots. From out its top protruded nothing but a bit of white bone.

And the whole thing had made no more sound than a sigh.

Captain Chodor tore his eyes from the boot to gaze back down the long, winding path they'd cut through the forest. Everywhere overhead dangled the green proboscises, now curling and flexing and feeling at the breathless air like the elephant trunks they so uncannily resembled.

A defense against us, the captain thought with borderline hysterical humor as he remembered Shadansky's doleful regret at the planet's likely development. The planet hadn't meant to evolve one. But with these flowering trees—which lulled and nurtured life through the winter, only to devour it in the spring—that's exactly what it had done!