The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  They went on with the tour. For Reese, it was an endless trial. Hitchcock listened only to the things he cared to hear, and trained his camera on every laboring flopper they passed.

  Reese endured it as long as he could. He had no illusions why Hitchcock had come to Xi Scorpii—the man was convinced the floppers were victims of human oppression, and planned to expose it. He and his Society for Humane Practices had already done something like that on a score of other planets, completely disregarding the actual facts. Reese had hopes he could persuade the man tp leave Xi Scorpii alone, but he had no idea how he could do it.

  Finally, when Hitchcock unlimbered his camera at the sight of a flopper washing dishes in the commissary, he thought he saw his chance.

  “Why are you doing that?” he demanded.

  “I am gathering evidence,” Hitchcock replied. He held his whirring camera steady, not looking at Reese. “When I return home, I intend to see this outrage stopped.”

  Reese was nonplused. Even knowing Hitchcock’s intentions, he could not imagine what the man was talking about.

  “I will not stand still and see any person enslaved,” Hitchcock stated.

  So that was it. “But... they’re animals,” Reese explained. “We’ve trained them to do these jobs because we don’t have enough people here to do them. They... they’re just domesticated animals.”

  Hitchcock put up his camera and turned. “Do you ask me to deny the evidence of my own eyes?” he demanded. “I see this one washing dishes, and you tell me it’s only an animal?”

  “Why not,” Reese wondered softly. “It’s a...a rather intelligent animal, of course—somewhat more advanced than, say, the terrestrial chimpanzee. But that still leaves it far below the human level. Are... are you against using animals to take the burden of work off a man’s shoulders?”

  Hitchcock said succinctly, “Let us continue our tour.”

  He walked off, forcing Reese to tag after him. They were out in the corridor again when Hitchcock said, his voice scathing, “I was advised that the welfare of the natives was being neglected, but—”

  “Who told you that?” Reese wondered blankly.

  Hitchcock was impatient. “It’s common knowledge on every civilized planet,” he stated.

  “But it... it’s not true!” Reese protested. “You can’t even properly call them natives. They’re only animals—in fact, rather primitive animals in most respects. They do have fairly well developed brains—that is, we can teach them some reasonably complicated things, and they have moderately good judgment—but they haven’t any abstract reasoning power, or the ability to symbolize, or...or social instinct—none of the things that make people human.”

  “I came here,” Hitchcock replied, “to judge that for myself. I have heard excuses like yours on other planets I’ve visited—planets where the most outrageous violations of decency were practiced. Why, can you imagine—on Epsilon Eridani they were actually eating them! As for conditions here, I will come to my own conclusions.”

  He paused then, slowed his stride, and turned to Reese. “Well, where do we go now?”

  Originally, Reese had planned for them to continue along the corridor. The microfilm reference library would have been next. But now, suddenly, he changed his mind. He nodded across the corridor toward a spiral stairwell.

  “Down there,” he said.

  As they clambered down the narrow stairs—Reese going first—Reese said, “So far, you’ve only seen floppers who were born here—I mean, here in the dome. You see, when this”—’-he gestured inclusively around himself—”was being built, they were brought in for study, to set a standard we could guide our work by. They’ve been here ever since. We’ve let them breed without any control, and they haven’t been under the selection pressure the ones outside have been under, so they still ought to be almost identical to their ancestors. That makes them a good comparison-standard against the floppers outside.”

  They emerged from the stairway into a corridor that looked very much like the one they’d left. Reese led Hitchcock into a side corridor which ended at a double-doored threshold. Passing through, they walked out onto a gallery overlooking a roomful of partitioned cubicles on the floor below. Most of the cubicles had floppers in them.

  “These are wild floppers we’ve brought in to examine,” Reese explained.

  Hitchcock crossed to the rail and aimed his camera downward. “They are no different from the others,” he declared truculently. “Must you keep them in solitary confinement? It’s inhuman!”

  “But it’s not like that at all,” Reese tried to explain. “They come from different geographical areas, and we put them back when we’re done with them. We have to keep them apart to prevent them from breeding. Besides, they might kill each other.”

  The sound of their voices had made the floppers look upward. Their lipless, fleshless jawbones clashed slaveringly. Hitchcock moved his camera back and forth across their upturned, bloodlusting faces.

  “I want you to see something,” Reese said. He crossed to a cold locker recessed in the wall and took out a large haunch of meat. It was a hideous blue-green color, and a translucent, cartilaginous length of bone protruded from it.

  “Watch,” he told Hitchcock.

  Hitchcock was horrified. “You’re going to feed them that?” he demanded. “But it’s putrescent!”

  “Oh, no,” Reese assured him, earnestly shaking his head. “That’s its natural color.” He did not add that it came from a domesticated Flopper which had died; Hitchcock would have claimed he was promoting cannibalism. Crossing to the rail, he dropped the haunch into one of the pens.

  The Flopper grabbed it before it hit the floor—grabbed it between its flexible paws and crammed it against its maw. It masticated the meat, bone and all, with its toothless, bare-bone jaws. It worked the meat to a messy pulp and sucked it inward, its throat pulsing hideously.

  When they saw the meat dropped, the floppers in the surrounding pens tried to get to it—tried to leap and climb out of their prisons, but the pen walls were too smooth and high. Blind-stubborn, they kept on trying, slamming their bodies again and again against the partitions. They yelped crazily. The room was full of thunder, rasping screams, and screechings.

  Through it all, with wild looks of apprehension, the favored one suckled and gobbled at the haunch. Its lipless mouth worked greedily. Trickles of blue-stained drool oozed down its front. In a remarkably short time, the haunch was gone without a trace.

  The other floppers were still trying to reach the pen where they had seen the haunch fall. And now, gorged and still drooling, the flopper in that pen was trying to get out, too. It leaped and fell back, leaped and fell back, time after time—its goggling brown eyes turned upward, its appetite whetted. Involuntarily, Hitchcock flinched back from its ferocity, then bent eagerly forward so his camera could witness its rage. The crazed creature’s hacking cries were swallowed in the general tumult.

  Hitchcock stopped his camera, finally, and turned. He shouted something. The noise smothered his words. Reese gestured to the door. He led Hitchcock outside.

  * * * *

  When the door closed behind them, shutting off the ear-blasting noise, Hitchcock turned on Reese.

  “They seem to hate you,” he observed. “Don’t you feed them?”

  “We fed them not more than an hour ago,” Reese said, with a glance at his watch. “They didn’t behave with much intelligence, did they?”

  “Hm-m-m,” Hitchcock growled. “A starving man would act that way.”

  “But these... they weren’t starved,” Reese argued. “They were probably half-starved when they were captured, of course, but they’ve been fed since then—most of them several times.”

  “I cannot believe that,” Hitchcock retorted. “Those creatures were starved.”

  Reese shook his head. “Their reaction was pure habit,” he said. “Food is scarce for them. It’s been scarce all their lives. Their ... their ravenousness is natural for the
m.”

  With a look of scornful pleasure on his face, Hitchcock pounced. “May I ask why you permit them to starve?”

  It came to Reese that he had made a mistake. In trying to win a small argument, he had given Hitchcock support for a much more serious—much more difficult argument.

  “Why... why,” he stammered. “We’re scientists. We’re here to... to study the Floppers. It’s our whole reason for being here. You see... you see, we believe the floppers stand a very good chance of developing human-level intelligence. We’ve been watching for signs of it for nearly a thousand years, now. And if we tried to make their lives any easier, it would interfere with their development.”

  “Nonsense,” Hitchcock sniffed.

  “It isn’t nonsense,” Reese persisted reasonably. “It’s a logical conclusion based on the principle of natural selection. If you’d let me explain the situation here—”

  “I am fully aware of the situation here,” Hitchcock replied. “I consider it disgraceful.”

  Reese gritted his teeth. “This is an unusual planet,” he said earnestly, hoping the man would pause and begin to doubt. “That is, its orbit is unusual.”

  “Well, certainly,” Hitchcock said. “I would expect a planet in a double-star system to have a distorted orbit.”

  “It’s worse than that,” Reese persisted mildly. “When this system was explored the first time, this planet had an orbit around Alpha—it’s still in the books as Alpha II. But now it’s going around Beta.”

  “What?” Hitchcock boggled. “Preposterous.”

  “It’s true,” Reese said helplessly. “And not only that, we think Alpha and Beta have been passing it back and forth ever since it was formed. They have rather eccentric orbits around each other, you see, and they come rather close together every forty-five years. If the planet is in the right part of its orbit when they’re closest together, the other star captures it.”

  “Does this happen very often?” Hitchcock asked sarcastically.

  Reese made a helpless gesture. “It’s different every time,” he explained. “It might stay with one star for a hundred thousand years, or maybe just for a couple of hundred. Each time it’s traded, it takes up a different orbit—that is, different from any it’s ever had before. The next time it happens will be three and a half thousand years from now.”

  Hitchcock sniffed. “This is very interesting, if true,” he said. “But it has nothing to do with the deplorable way you have treated the natives.”

  “It has everything to do with how we treat them,” Reese insisted. “You see, every time the planet changed orbits, its climate has been drastically altered. We have a lot of geological evidence of that. I guess Alpha and Beta are more similar than most binary pairs, but there’s still quite a difference in their radiation. And the various orbits the planet took put it at different distances out from them.”

  “I presume this has some significance,” Hitchcock interrupted testily.

  Reese nodded. “We’re almost certain that the living things on this planet can endure great extremes of climate— if they couldn’t, they’d have died out long ago. It’s even possible that life here was wiped out completely by some of the changes—it might have happened hundreds of times before the cycle we’re seeing now got started. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know for sure.”

  Hitchcock looked down at him with a fastidious expression on his face. “Never have I heard such a preposterous idea,” he declared. “As if the spark of life could be snapped off and on like an electric lamp.”

  Reese had heard of people who thought like that, but he had never met one before. It was like meeting something out of the dark ages. “I was trying to emphasize how... how hardy the life-forms on this planet must be,” he explained diplomatically. “How... how adaptable. We think they have the capacity to evolve hundreds of times faster than on any other planet. So you see, being here is a wonderful opportunity to see evolution at work. And—”

  “You have not yet explained,” Hitchcock reminded him again, “why you have neglected the welfare of the natives here ... why you vivisect them, and—”

  So he was back where he started, Reese thought. It was discouraging, “Why, I thought it was obvious,” he explained. “The Floppers aren’t really intelligent—yet. But they do have the... the potential to become intelligent. It’s really almost inevitable in a situation like this—that is, with an unpredictably erratic environment, intelligence is almost certain to develop sometime, because intelligence is the one specialization that gives an animal the ability to live in a whole lot of different environments. You see, we’re not just studying the evolution process here—we’re ... we’re watching the development of intellect. Sooner or later, somewhere on this planet, the Floppers are almost certain to become... to become intelligent. I mean, intelligent the way a...a human being is intelligent. And we want to be here. We want to see it happen. We’ve never had the chance to see it happen in an animal before.”

  Hitchcock scowled. “You speak as if men were animals,” he criticized. “As if an animal could have a mind.”

  “Well, human beings are a form of animal,” Reese put in.

  “That,” Hitchcock snapped, “is nonsense. Dangerous nonsense. I want to hear no more of it.” He hitched up his camera’s shoulder strap. “As for this matter of intellect, I have only your word they are not intelligent right now. I will have to have proof, Mr. Reese. I must have proof.”

  Ben Reese gave up. He could not prove a thing to a man who refused to believe.

  * * * *

  INTERLUDE

  It was a good time to hunt. No wind blew loose snow on the screecher’s tracks, blotting them. No mistiness obscured the distance, and the sky’s light shimmered on the white land. Qua-orellee kept his eyes tightly lidded to lessen the glare. The tracks were new. The beast could not be very far ahead. Qua-orellee loped along, following them, but he stayed well aside of the trail for fear the snow would open under him like a mouth and devour him.

  He had seen it happen, once. He and some other people were following the tracks of a bushy-tailed runner, and one of the people went close to the creature’s trail. A hole opened under him and he was gone. Qua-orellee and the other people fled instantly. Since that time, Qua-orellee had never gone closer than three body-lengths to any creature’s trail—not even his own.

  The screecher’s tracks vanished over the crest of a rise. Qua-orellee veered away from the trail, to reach the crest well away from where the screecher had been. It was hard to climb the slope with only his rear legs. He dropped down and hobbled along using one of his front limbs. In the flipperlike hand of the other, he clutched his rock.

  His rock was a treasure—his only possession. He would need it when he came upon the screecher and had to kill it. It was hard to find a rock of a good shape and size for killing beasts with, but a rock was wonderfully better than ice. Ice broke easily. It didn’t keep its shape. And, too, it took a much stronger blow to kill with it.

  He never let the rock out of his sight, and rarely out of his hand. He clasped it to him when he slept, and he slept in his own secret place. Any other of the people would eagerly kill him—if they dared to try—to possess that rock.

  He topped the rise. Below him, the screecher’s trail turned down along the valley, away from him. Qua-orellee let out a high-hacking cry, to tell the people who had joined him in the hunt that the screecher had turned in a new direction. Shrill, rasping calls came back from either side of him, repeating the news. Then another cry came from down-valley—the beast had been seen.

  Qua-orellee clutched his rock against him and plunged eagerly down the slope. His big, flipper-feet and short legs made him stumble. He rolled all the way to the bottom in a cloud of snow, but he didn’t let go of his rock. No matter what happened, he would never let go of his rock.

  He stood up and shook the snow out of his fur. Up-valley, two more people—not encumbered with rocks—were bounding down the hillside on all fours. The
y continued across the valley and up the other slope. When they reached the crest, they headed toward where the screecher had been seen. Qua-orellee stayed in the trough of the valley. He followed the trail.

  The valley curved around the bulk of a massive, steep hill. As he rounded the turn, Qua-orellee saw the screecher far ahead. Three people up on the ridge had gotten abreast’ of the beast, and one of them was lolloping down into the valley to head it off. On the ridge on the other side of the valley, the two who had crossed over were rapidly catching up, running on all fours. Qua-orellee was far behind. He hurried as fast he could on his short legs and large feet.

  The other people closed down into the trough of the valley, forming a wide-spaced crescent-circle line in front of the screecher. They had picked up chunks of ice and ice-spears. They confronted the beast.