“Essential food value suddenly stolen from your ingested food,” the monitor chattered. “Pepsin stolen from your stomach, thalmatite stolen from your thalamus, thyroxine stolen from your pharynx, Cape buffalo essence stolen from your esophagus and stomach, mushrooms and currants and apples stolen from your lower stomach and small intestine, rum alcohol stolen from your stomach and ileum and bloodstream, and normal blood alcohol and blood sugar stolen as part of the same theft. Slurry of rye bread and butter and coffee stolen from your paunch and antrum stomach. Essence of Elton eels stolen from some saltwater swamp of you. And at the same time, insulin and glucagon are stolen from your pancreas, hepatocytes and bile salts from your bile duct and duodenum; and words, ideas, and inklings have been swiped from several parts of your brain. No wonder you’re queasy and hungry at the same time.”
“Thank you, ship’s monitor,” George Mahoon said. “Well, it seems that I’ve been infected by some microbe or germ or virus. I’ll take a few of the anti-anti pills to quell the infection.”
“Forget the anti-anti pills, George!” Elton Fad cried angrily. “I think we should take a couple of steel bars and teach the Thieving Bears a lesson. There are microbes and germs and viruses infecting me too, but they are about half my own size and are known as the Thieving Bears. Damn those tittering little idiots! They’re beginning to intrude too intimately with their thefts and their eatings; but I don’t know how they’re doing these things so interiorly. Sometimes I wish I’d gone into the family business and never become an explorer at all.” Elton Fad’s family was in eels: they were big and rich people in eels.
A little doll made out of wax and rags, with thorns and pins and needles sticking clear through it, and with its throat cut horribly, came sailing through the air and landed on the table where all the explorers had just finished their fine meal that had lost its power just after passing its climax. The tortured little doll had Dixie Late-Lark’s face on it. Its mouth was wide open and it was screaming silently and horribly.
“At least we know that the bears can read and absorb world-French,” Gladys Marclair laughed. And they all laughed. “They couldn’t have learned about the poupées-fetiches, the fetish dolls, anywhere except from Dixie’s French horror stories. Why, it’s Stridente Mimi, Screaming Mimi herself. That’s really Dixie’s theme story. Oh, I wish that Dixie would come back so she could see this comical takeoff of herself. Shut your mouth, doll-Dixie!”
Gladys pushed her forefinger against the mouth of the little fetish doll to close it, but the doll bit her finger suddenly, viciously, terribly, and set the blood gushing from it. When Gladys got her finger loose again, the doll opened its mouth wide once more and continued to scream silently and horribly from a now blood-dribbling mouth. It has long been noted that fetish dolls seem to have a life of their own.
That little comic interlude cheered them all a bit, and they left the table in a happier state. And they went out from the ship.
Oh, the Thieving Bears wanted to play games, did they! Well, the explorers would beat them at their games, and they would solve all the mysteries about them at the same time. But the explorers had now come to regard the bears as more complex and as more nearly intelligent than they had previously seemed. They were still tittering little stinkers, though. The Thieving Bears were bigger than police dogs and a little bit smaller than Great Danes. They were toothless and clawless and apparently harmless. How can you worry about such tittering and giggling things?
“Quick! Come quick!” Selma Last-Rose was calling, in a queer voice on the edge of panic. “Come quick! I’ve found Dixie.”
The Thieving Bears, however large they seemed, gave the impression of being nearly weightless. They had to be nearly weightless to glide on the wind the way they did. They seemed to be mostly—well, it wasn’t hair and it wasn’t feathers—they seemed to be mostly made out of a fluffy and deep-piled covering with not much body inside it.
“Come, come, somebody come!” Selma was still calling in her rattling voice. “Dixie is dead.”
The bears had to be ninety percent fluffy covering and no more than ten percent body. Otherwise, big as they seemed, they couldn’t have gotten through some of the holes that they did go through.
“Horribly, horribly dead,” Selma was chanting in a little-girl singsong voice. “Horribly, horribly dead. Oh please, somebody come and help me look at her. I can hardly manage to look at her all by myself.”
Dead Dixie Late-Lark was an exact life-sized replica of her own many times-transfixed fetish doll. Her throat was just as flamboyantly and terribly cut as the doll’s had been. The same thorns and pins and needles ran through her, but now they were meter-long thorns and two-meter-long needles. And her mouth was very wide open, as had been that of the doll; and Dixie was likewise screaming horribly and silently.
And a tittering, a giggling in the Thieving Bears’ fashion, was coming from her silently screaming mouth and also from her laid-open throat. How ghastly!
The horror was broken a bit, or diverted into a wondering exasperation, by Benny Crix-Crannon’s voice booming, “Here’s another one of them. This one’s better done. It’s good!”
Yes, it was another horribly dead Dixie Late-Lark, with her throat cut even more savagely, with her poor body transfixed with even longer thorns and needles, with the tittering and giggling from her wide-open and silently screaming mouth even more disconcerting.
In all, they found seven life-sized versions of Dixie Late-Lark horribly and ritually murdered. Then all seven of them jumped up, turned into rather young Thieving Bears, and ran away tittering. And the very stones of that planet seemed to join in that tittering and giggling.
But where was Dixie Late-Lark herself? Was that not a pertinent question? More pertinent questions may have been: why did all the explorers stop wondering what had happened to their colleague Dixie Late-Lark? And why did they now feel that her disappearance was unimportant?
“I have lost my judgment,” George Mahoon lamented. “I’ve still got most of the pieces of things in my mind, but I can no longer put them together. Putting things together is what judgment is. One of you others will have to take over the captaincy of this expedition.”
“Oh, bother the captaincy!” Gladys Marclair rejected it. “Expeditions would be better without captains anyhow. And you can’t lose something that you never had, George. Let’s play ‘Ask the Question’ with this situation. And let’s wonder why no bunch, coming here, has played it before. This is an Earth-sized planet and remarkably monotonous. On its look-alike continents, there are hundreds and thousands of little low plains or meadows comparable to this Plain of the Old Spaceships. Why have all the expeditions to this world, from that of John Chancel to our own, landed here within one thousand meters of each other? Instructions for exploration landing sites have always been ‘Random selection, tempered with intelligence.’ And another instruction has been ‘Examine new ground wherever possible.’ For whose convenience have we all landed in this one place? Oh, your diminished judgment, George! Probably somebody has been eating the hippo out of your hippocampus (I’ve always believed that the ‘little hype’ is the center of the judgment as well as of the memory), so now you’re not as well hyped as you were. What if hardly any of the area of this planet has been checked out?”
“Oh, we made sixteen scanning circuits of Thieving Bear Planet before we landed,” George Mahoon said. “Sixteen circuits will give a very good recorded sample. And some of the previous expeditions made the full sixty-four scanning circuits, and the full scan doesn’t miss much.”