The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  Balls, you say, it looks crazy to me. And you—with your aftershave lotion and your little red car, pushing papers across a desk all day and chasing tail all night—tell me, just how the hell do you think you would look to Tiglath-Pileser, say, or Attila the Hun?

  Student Body

  F. L. WALLACE

  F. L. Wallace (1915–2004) was an interesting US writer of science fiction and mystery whose small body of work often demonstrates sensitivity to ecological issues. Wallace spent most of his life in California as a mechanical engineer after attending the University of Iowa and UCLA. His first published story, “Hideaway,” appeared in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction. Galaxy Science Fiction and other science fiction magazines published subsequent stories of his, including “Delay in Transit,” “Bolden’s Pets,” and “Tangle Hold.” Because he left the field in the 1960s and had no major advocates, Wallace quickly became forgotten, although the e-book release of a collection in 2009 has begun to bring him once again to notice.

  The 1950s were Wallace’s period of greatest activity, during which he quickly established a reputation for style, wit, and emotional depth. In “Accidental Flight” (Galaxy, 1952), a population of the disabled—in fact accident victims, mutants, cyborgs, and others with psi powers—transforms an asteroid hospital into a starship powered by engines that manipulate gravity; they set off for the stars, where they find redemption in being of use to the human race. Worlds in Balance (1955) assembles two typical stories, but Wallace never put together a full-length collection of his work.

  “Student Body” (Galaxy, 1953) showcases Wallace’s adroit handling of environmental issues in a manner more sophisticated than that of most writers of the era other than Frank Herbert (at novel length). Complex issues involving both alien contact and the impact of invasive species are housed within a tense plot. Although “Student Body” received no particular accolades upon publication, it endures as an example of a work ahead of its time—a future classic.

  STUDENT BODY

  F. L. Wallace

  The first morning that they were fully committed to the planet, the executive officer stepped out of the ship. It was not quite dawn. Executive Hafner squinted in the early light; his eyes opened wider, and he promptly went back inside. Three minutes later, he reappeared with the biologist in tow.

  “Last night you said there was nothing dangerous,” said the executive. “Do you still think it’s so?”

  Dano Marin stared. “I do.” What his voice lacked in conviction, it made up in embarrassment. He laughed uncertainly.

  “This is no laughing matter. I’ll talk to you later.”

  The biologist stood by the ship and watched as the executive walked to the row of sleeping colonists.

  “Mrs. Athyl,” said the executive as he stopped beside the sleeping figure.

  She yawned, rubbed her eyes, rolled over, and stood up. The covering that should have been there, however, wasn’t. Neither was the garment she had on when she had gone to sleep. She assumed the conventional position of a woman who is astonished to find herself unclad without her knowledge or consent.

  “It’s all right, Mrs. Athyl. I’m not a voyeur myself. Still, I think you should get some clothing on.” Most of the colonists were awake now. Executive Hafner turned to them. “If you haven’t any suitable clothing in the ship, the commissary will issue you some. Explanations will be given later.”

  The colonists scattered. There was no compulsive modesty among them, for it couldn’t have survived a year and a half in crowded spaceships. Nevertheless, it was a shock to awaken with no clothing on and not know who or what had removed it during the night. It was surprise more than anything else that disconcerted them.

  On his way back to the spaceship, Executive Hafner paused. “Any ideas about it?”

  Dano Marin shrugged. “How could I have? The planet is as new to me as it is to you.”

  “Sure. But you’re the biologist.”

  As the only scientist in a crew of rough-and-ready colonists and builders, Marin was going to be called on to answer a lot of questions that weren’t in his field.

  “Nocturnal insects, most likely,” he suggested. That was pretty weak, though he knew that in ancient times locusts had stripped fields in a matter of hours. Could they do the same with the clothing of humans and not awaken them? “I’ll look into the matter. As soon as I find anything, I’ll let you know.”

  “Good.” Hafner nodded and went into the spaceship.

  —

  Dano Marin walked to the grove in which the colonists had been sleeping. It had been a mistake to let them bed down there, but at the time the request had been made, there had seemed no reason not to grant it. After eighteen months in crowded ships everyone naturally wanted fresh air and the rustle of leaves overhead.

  Marin looked out through the grove. It was empty now; the colonists, both men and women, had disappeared inside the ship, dressing, probably.

  The trees were not tall and the leaves were dark bottle-green. Occasional huge white flowers caught sunlight that made them seem larger than they were. It wasn’t Earth and therefore the trees couldn’t be magnolias. But they reminded Marin of magnolia trees and thereafter he always thought of them as that.

  The problem of the missing clothing was ironic. Biological Survey never made a mistake—yet obviously they had. They listed the planet as the most suitable for man of any so far discovered. Few insects, no dangerous animals, a most equitable climate. They had named it Glade because that was the word which fitted best. The whole landmass seemed to be one vast and pleasant meadow.

  Evidently there were things about the planet that Biological Survey had missed.

  Marin dropped to his knees and began to look for clues. If insects had been responsible, there ought to be a few dead ones, crushed, perhaps, as the colonists rolled over in their sleep. There were no insects, either live or dead.

  He stood up in disappointment and walked slowly through the grove. It might be the trees. At night they could exude a vapor which was capable of dissolving the material from which the clothing had been made. Far-fetched, but not impossible. He crumbled a leaf in his hand and rubbed it against his sleeve. A pungent smell, but nothing happened. That didn’t disprove the theory, of course.

  He looked out through the trees at the blue sun. It was bigger than Sol, but farther away. At Glade, it was about equal to the sun on Earth.

  He almost missed the bright eyes that regarded him from the underbrush. Almost, but didn’t—the domain of biology begins at the edge of the atmosphere; it includes the brush and the small creatures that live in it.

  He swooped down on it. The creature fled squealing. He ran it down in the grass outside the grove. It collapsed into quaking flesh as he picked it up. He talked to it gently and the terror subsided.

  It nibbled contentedly on his jacket as he carried it back to the ship.

  —

  Executive Hafner stared unhappily into the cage. It was an undistinguished animal, small and something like an undeveloped rodent. Its fur was sparse and stringy, unglamorous; it would never be an item in the fur export trade.

  “Can we exterminate it?” asked Hafner. “Locally, that is.”

  “Hardly. It’s ecologically basic.”

  The executive looked blank. Dano Marin added the explanation: “You know how Biological Controls works. As soon as a planet has been discovered that looks suitable, they send out a survey ship loaded with equipment. The ship flies low over a good part of the planet and the instruments in the ship record the neural currents of the animals below. The instruments can distinguish the characteristic neural patterns of anything that has a brain, including insects.

  “Anyway, they have a pretty good idea of the kinds of animals on the planet and their relative distribution. Naturally, the survey party takes a few specimens. They have to in order to correlate the pattern with the actual animal, otherwise the neural pattern would be merely a meaningless squiggle on a microfilm.
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br />   “The survey shows that this animal is one of only four species of mammals on the planet. It is also the most numerous.”

  Hafner grunted. “So if we kill them off here, others will swarm in from surrounding areas?”

  “That’s about it. There are probably millions of them on this peninsula. Of course, if you want to put a barrier across the narrow connection to the mainland, you might be able to wipe them out locally.”

  The executive scowled. A barrier was possible, but it would involve more work than he cared to expend.

  “What do they eat?” he asked truculently.

  “A little bit of everything, apparently. Insects, fruits, berries, nuts, succulents, and grain.” Dano Marin smiled. “I guess it could be called an omnivore—now that our clothing is handy, it eats that, too.”

  Hafner didn’t smile. “I thought our clothing was supposed to be vermin-proof.”

  Marin shrugged. “It is, on twenty-seven planets. On the twenty-eighth, we meet up with a little fella that has better digestive fluids, that’s all.”

  Hafner looked pained. “Are they likely to bother the crops we plant?”

  “Offhand, I would say they aren’t. But then I would have said the same about our clothing.”

  Hafner made up his mind. “All right. You worry about the crops. Find some way to keep them out of the fields. Meanwhile, everyone sleeps in the ship until we can build dormitories.”

  Individual dwelling units would have been more appropriate in the colony at this stage, thought Marin. But it wasn’t for him to decide. The executive was a man who regarded a schedule as something to be exceeded.

  “The omnivore—” began Marin.

  Hafner nodded impatiently. “Work on it,” he said, and walked away.

  The biologist sighed. The omnivore really was a queer little creature, but it was by no means the most important thing on Glade. For instance, why were there so few species of land animals on the planet? No reptiles, numerous birds, and only four kinds of mammals.

  Every comparable planet teemed with a wild variety of life. Glade, in spite of seemingly ideal conditions, hadn’t developed. Why?

  He had asked Biological Controls for this assignment because it had seemed an interesting problem. Now, apparently, he was being pressed into service as an exterminator.

  He reached in the cage and picked up the omnivore. Mammals on Glade were not unexpected. Parallel development took care of that. Given roughly the same kind of environment, similar animals would usually evolve.

  In the Late Carboniferous forest on Earth, there had been creatures like the omnivore, the primitive mammal from which all others had evolved. On Glade, that kind of evolution just hadn’t taken place. What had kept nature from exploiting its evolutionary potentialities? There was the real problem, not how to wipe them out.

  Marin stuck a needle in the omnivore. It squealed and then relaxed. He drew out the blood and set it back in the cage. He could learn a lot about the animal from trying to kill it.

  —

  The quartermaster was shouting, though his normal voice carried quite well.

  “How do you know it’s mice?” the biologist asked him.

  “Look,” said the quartermaster angrily.

  Marin looked. The evidence did indicate mice.

  Before he could speak, the quartermaster snapped, “Don’t tell me they’re only micelike creatures. I know that. The question is: how can I get rid of them?”

  “Have you tried poison?”

  “Tell me what poison to use and I’ll use it.”

  It wasn’t the easiest question to answer. What was poisonous to an animal he had never seen and knew nothing about? According to Biological Survey, the animal didn’t exist.

  It was unexpectedly serious. The colony could live off the land, and was expected to. But another group of colonists was due in three years. The colony was supposed to accumulate a surplus of food to feed the increased numbers. If they couldn’t store the food they grew any better than the concentrates, that surplus was going to be scanty.

  Marin went over the warehouse thoroughly. It was the usual early construction on a colonial world. Not aesthetic, it was sturdy enough. Fused dirt floor, reinforced foot-thick walls, a ceiling slab of the same. The whole was bound together with a molecular cement that made it practically airtight. It had no windows; there were two doors. Certainly it should keep out rodents.

  A closer examination revealed an unexpected flaw. The floor was as hard as glass; no animal could gnaw through it, but, like glass, it was also brittle. The crew that had built the warehouse had evidently been in such a hurry to get back to Earth that they hadn’t been as careful as they should have been, for here and there the floor was thin. Somewhere under the heavy equipment piled on it, the floor had cracked. There a burrowing animal had means of entry.

  Short of building another warehouse, it was too late to do anything about that. Micelike animals were inside and had to be controlled where they were.

  The biologist straightened up. “Catch me a few of them alive and I’ll see what I can do.”

  —

  In the morning, a dozen live specimens were delivered to the lab. They actually did resemble mice.

  Their reactions were puzzling. No two of them were affected by the same poison. A compound that stiffened one in a matter of minutes left the others hale and hearty, and the poison he had developed to control the omnivores was completely ineffective.

  The depredations in the warehouse went on. Black mice, white ones, gray and brown, short-tailed and long-eared, or the reverse, they continued to eat the concentrates and spoil what they didn’t eat.

  Marin conferred with the executive, outlined the problem as he saw it and his ideas on what could be done to combat the nuisance.

  “But we can’t build another warehouse,” argued Hafner. “Not until the atomic generator is set up, at any rate. And then we’ll have other uses for the power.” The executive rested his head in his hands. “I like the other solution better. Build one and see how it works.”

  “I was thinking of three,” said the biologist.

  “One,” Hafner insisted. “We can’t spare the equipment until we know how it works.”

  At that he was probably right. They had equipment, as much as three ships could bring. But the more they brought, the more was expected of the colony. The net effect was that equipment was always in short supply.

  Marin took the authorization to the engineer. On the way, he privately revised his specifications upward. If he couldn’t get as many as he wanted, he might as well get a better one.

  In two days, the machine was ready.

  It was delivered in a small crate to the warehouse. The crate was opened and the machine leaped out and stood there, poised.

  “A cat!” exclaimed the quartermaster, pleased. He stretched out his hand toward the black fuzzy robot.

  “If you’ve touched anything a mouse may have, get your hand away,” warned the biologist. “It reacts to smell as well as sight and sound.”

  Hastily, the quartermaster withdrew his hand. The robot disappeared silently into the maze of stored material.

  In one week, though there were still some mice in the warehouse, they were no longer a danger.

  —

  The executive called Marin into his office, a small sturdy building located in the center of the settlement. The colony was growing, assuming an aspect of permanency. Hafner sat in his chair and looked out over that growth with satisfaction.

  “A good job on the mouse plague,” he said.

  The biologist nodded. “Not bad, except there shouldn’t be any mice here. Biological Survey—”

  “Forget it,” said the exec. “Everybody makes mistakes, even BS.” He leaned back and looked seriously at the biologist. “I have a job I need done. Just now I’m short of men. If you have no objections…”

  The exec was always short of men, would be until the planet was overcrowded, and he would try to find someone t
o do the work his own men should have done. Dano Marin was not directly responsible to Hafner; he was on loan to the expedition from Biological Controls. Still, it was a good idea to cooperate with the executive. He sighed.

  “It’s not as bad as you think,” said Hafner, interpreting the sound correctly. He smiled. “We’ve got the digger together. I want you to run it.”

  Since it tied right in with his investigations, Dano Marin looked relieved and showed it.

  “Except for food, we have to import most of our supplies,” Hafner explained. “It’s a long haul, and we’ve got to make use of everything on the planet we can. We need oil. There are going to be a lot of wheels turning, and every one of them will have to have oil. In time we’ll set up a synthetic plant, but if we can locate a productive field now, it’s to our advantage.”

  “You’re assuming the geology of Glade is similar to Earth?”

  Hafner waggled his hand. “Why not? It’s a nicer twin of Earth.”

  Why not? Because you couldn’t always tell from the surface, thought Marin. It seemed like Earth, but was it? Here was a good chance to find out the history of Glade.

  Hafner stood up. “Any time you’re ready, a technician will check you out on the digger. Let me know before you go.”

  —

  Actually, the digger wasn’t a digger. It didn’t move or otherwise displace a gram of dirt or rock. It was a means of looking down below the surface, to any practical depth. A large crawler, it was big enough for a man to live in without discomfort for a week.