The life watch

by Lester Del Rey

He went back to the laboratory trying to think of something ingenious enough to enable him to live up to their queer code. An idea that had nagged him tantalizingly, just below consciousness, nibbled again at his mind, but he let it go. If he could fit a protogravity generator under a plate....

And abruptly, he was digging for the complete set of Hardwick's notes, and scanning the nonsense that the computer had declared meaningless. He picked up the telephone and called the library. "Give me what you've got on Martian sand lizards!"

Most of it was useless. They were typical low-grade Martian life, tiny things covered with fur, but vaguely lizard-like. Then the significant part came. "The females demonstrate a remarkable ability to locate the rare males at extreme distances. Janiekowski found that a female with all sense organs removed could locate a male at a distance of five kilometers, even when the male was enclosed in an airtight box of laminated copper and soundboard. No satisfactory explanation is known."

It had to be some form of telepathy or sensitivity to the life forces of the male lizards! He went over the work done with the creatures a dozen times, and could find no other explanation. And suddenly his mind was milling about, trying to slide away from it again.

"Taboo!" he muttered. "Damn the taboo!" It was too late for a taboo to interfere now, whatever the reasons behind it. And fortified by his growing certainty that something had been done to him, it only served to confirm the fact that he was on the right track at last.

Pat listened to his summary of what he'd found, and nodded hopeful agreement. "A quick test! It's what we need, all right. We still may not find the insulator for the shield, but we can run tests fast enough to have a chance. Metals first, then the other broad classifications, until something vital turns up. Bill, I guess this makes me, and the computer look pretty silly. And after all the yelling I've done about flexibility being needed, too. I hope some zoo or laboratory on Earth has a collection of the little beasts."

It turned out that Harvard was well stocked as a result of a research plan to rework Janiekowski's experiments. In less than five hours, twelve females and two rare males were lying in front of Norden. They looked like small lizards covered with chinchilla hair, and possessing eight legs apiece. The females, with scant modesty, were trying busily to break down the wall that kept them from the males.

Pat had already installed three television pickups and cages at various distant points, doing the work herself to insure secrecy, and picking places most difficult to break into. Now she came back to move the females to their new homes, where they immediately began trying to crawl toward the torpid males, as shown by the television screens. The walls of their cages were equipped with pressure-measuring devices to test the strength of their efforts.

The mummy cloth drew a complete blank, as did the bat's blood. But the ground mandrake set the males to pawing at their cake with their triple tongues out, trying to reach it, while the distant females went berserk.

Pat took the stuff away, snorting at them. "They'll die of frustration in another minute. To them an active male seems to be a combination billionaire, video star, and accomplished Cassanova in the art of love. I guess I know how they feel."