“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.
At the time, however, the members of the expedition didn’t know any of that information for sure. The probe teams had made spot checks and taken random samples, but it was up to the First Analytical Expedition to make sure of everything.
And this much they had discovered: The plants of Alphegar IV had a nasty habit of killing test animals.