I didn’t know, and I left it up to him.
The zoologist wasn’t so easy. He was a member of my exploration team, but he hadn’t volunteered for the job. I asked him how we’d pack back enough vegetation to keep Orzu alive. He said he didn’t know, that was my problem—and anyway, Orzu was probably carnivorous.
That possibility hadn’t occurred to me, and in my last sleep on board the cruiser I was caught in a weird nightmare in which my little redhead developed a third green eye, sprouted long red tentacles, and tried to stuff me into a food synthesizer.
The flyer spiraled down over the north pole, keeping well away from the ocean. My chemist warned that it might be one churning vat of poison, and I didn’t argue with him. Also, we wanted to keep as far from the smouldering equator as possible.
We skimmed over several hundred square miles of jungle without sighting a clearing, and finally we eased the flyer straight down through the trees. Tangled vines caught at it. Huge purple leaves flapped against the ports, and stuck there, blinding the pilot. It was raining globules of some unmentionable liquid.
We had special atmosphere suits with a built-in cooling apparatus. We climbed into them, and Jan Garish was the first man out the air lock. He begged me for the job, and I gave in with appropriate reluctance. He took one step, and sank into the slimy mud up to his hips.
“Welcome to Arnicus,” I said.
The rain left a sticky film on my face plate, and I had to keep wiping it off to see. I scrambled around Garish, found solid ground—I only sank in to my knees—and looked about. The others followed me. We stood shifting from one foot to the other, and watching each other to see if one of us would suddenly sink in over his head.
Garish floundered out of sight into the flapping vegetation, and quickly floundered back again. “We’re in a swamp,” he said.
No one denied it.
“Well,” he said, “it gets worse in that direction. Maybe it’ll get better the other way.”
A good man, Garish. We found solid ground, and I began to feel better. I’d been wondering how anything as big as Orzu could exist in a swamp. We moved the flyer, brought out our tents, and made a camp. The chemist set up a laboratory in the flyer, and gleefully went to work on the atmosphere. My explorers went back to their argument about how best to catch Orzu, if we could locate him. The locating didn’t worry me. If Orzu was around at all, he wouldn’t be easy to overlook. Nine feet high, the report had said.
While the rest of us were hacking out a clearing around the camp, Jan Garish took three men on a preliminary survey of our surroundings. “Don’t try to bring in Orzu all by yourself,” I told him.
“No,” Garish said, after giving the possibility careful consideration. “Maybe we find tracks, though.”
“I don’t even want you tracking him, yet. He might have a nasty temper. If you find a place that looks as if a battle cruiser has ploughed through the jungle, just get back here fast.”
We had the camp in order, and I was relaxing in my tent, comfortably sealed off from the sulphurous Arnicus atmosphere, when he returned. He stomped out of the air lock, pulled off his suit, and sat down glumly.
“Nothing,” he said.
“No Orzu?”
“No nothing. Don’t like the looks of this place. No birds. No animals.”
“Just be patient,” I said. “Maybe Orzu sleeps in the daytime.”
“Maybe.” He grunted, and it was not an optimistic grunt.
The following day we organized our search. We split into three parties, and combed the jungle, working out away from the swam. Nothing.
We shifted our camp, and kept moving away from the swamp until we ran into another swamp. Nothing. At the end of a week we went back to the ship to replenish our supplies, and then we tried again. Nothing.
Another week, and still a third, we stumbled and threshed our way through that putrid jungle. We slopped through swamps. We hacked our way through the thick, purple, slime-coated vegetation. We tripped over trailing vines that always looked like snakes, but never were. We chaffed in those cooled atmosphere suits, and we sweated in them, too, from sheer nervous frustration. Nothing.
The fourth week started out like the first three. Then, on the second day, I came floundering out of a swamp and found a trail—not a very big trail, to be sure, but something had passed that way. I divided my men into two groups, and we started out to follow that trail in both directions. I led one party, or rather, I ran on ahead of it.
“Hey, take it easy,” someone called. “Maybe Orzu bites.”
I didn’t slow down. I’d stopped being afraid of Orzu. All I wanted to do was get my hands on him. I tore down that winding trail, widening the gap between myself and the others, and suddenly came to a sharp turn and blundered into…
A tent. A couple of men standing there, their atmosphere suits sticky with slime. Two, three more men hurrying out of the tent and gaping at me. Two more tents in the background, and beyond them, half buried in the purple jungle, the crumpled remains of a small space yacht.
They swarmed down on me and pumped my hand. Both hands. They climbed all over me. They mobbed the other men as they came up. They leaped and howled with joy, and maybe they wept a little, too. I couldn’t tell, with them wearing suits.
When the celebration had quieted down, one of them, who seemed to be the leader, took me aside and started the hand shaking all over again. “I’m glad to see you,” he said. “Thought we were done for. We crashed two weeks ago. Smashed most of our equipment, and we’re almost out of air, and—say, what are you doing here?”
I sighed. “Looking for Orzu.”
He took two quick steps backwards, and then he jumped at me again, clamped a stranglehold on my neck, and pounded me on the back. “Man, you must be an expert! But how did you manage it in this jungle?”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “And who are you, anyway?”
He stepped back again. “Why, I’m Orzu. Who did you think I was?”
It was my turn to back away, and we were almost too far apart for normal conversation. “Orzu?” I repeated. blankly.
“Stephen Orzu. I’m heading a research party for the University of Arcturus.”
We got into his tent, somehow, and I told him my story. The air was thin, and he looked completely exhausted, but he laughed until he fell off his chair and rolled on the floor.
“You came all the way to Arnicus and spent three weeks in the jungle looking for…” He gasped for breath.
“Orzu,” I said.
“But there isn’t any Orzu!” he panted.
’’There is an Orzu,” I said, feeling the way a child must on Star-Festival Night, when someone says, “There isn’t a Galactic Spirit.”
I gave him a photo-copy of the report from the Journal of Galactic Exploration. He read it carefully, and rolled over onto the floor again. I quieted him down, and got him back onto his chair.
“According to this…” I began.
“I know,” he said. “I wrote that myself for the Journal. But they left out some of it. They left out the part that said the creature’s extinct!”
He sat there, tears running down his face and laughter choking him, and there wasn’t anything that I could say. Not a thing.
“I named it after myself,” he said finally. “I discovered it —discovered some skeletal remains, that is—and I’ve always wanted something like that named after me. The Bureau of Explorations has to approve it before it becomes official, but that’s a routine matter.”
“Oh,” I said.
“You’re quite a few thousand years too late to capture Orzu alive.”
“You don’t say,” I said.