Lloyd Biggle Jr.: The World Menders

“You escaped!”

He kissed her. “Base defies description. I shouldn’t have gone back, but the sector supervisor…”

“… Is fully aware of what an important man my husband is,” Liano said, laughing.

“Anything new?”

She shook her head. “They look. And keep looking. But that’s all.” Taking her hand, he sat down beside her. The screen above them showed the olz gathered around their nightfire. Farrari thought it ironic that the Bureau could do nothing for the olz as long as it thought them human—DEMOCRACY IMPOSED FROM WITHOUT, and all that—but when Farrari suggested that they might be animals, IPR set in motion the infestation of superspecialists from its highest headquarters and immediately approved an elaborate system of laboratories for observation and experiment. Whole villages were transported to the quiet, isolated valleys where IPR had trained its ol agents, and luxurious observation stations were constructed. There were even IPR agents disguised as durrlz and assistants, and the stiles were erected over the zrilm hedges each morning and taken down each night. IPR scientists were working with a village of olz, making physical, physiological, psychological and mental studies that should have been done long ago.

The olz were now believed to be loyal animals who loved their masters and preferred a sadistic beating to neglect, but they were nontheless protohuman, the almost-men whose evolution had been disrupted or—when they found this lovely, fertile land millennia before the rascz arrived—benignly arrested. To the scientists, that condition made them the most mysterious, the most critically, colossally important, the rarest life form in the galaxy, one standing midway between animal and intelligent being, whose existence had been postulated and theorized everywhere intelligent life existed but never before discovered. The olz were unique, and as a source where man could learn about himself they were beyond price.

Branoff IV would become the most important laboratory world in the galaxy, and the plague of visiting scientists would swell to a massive pollution. There would be studies and observations and experiments without number, all of them faithfully reported in an unending flow of treatises and theses and scientific papers that Farrari and Liano were determined to ignore.

They were concerned with the olz , as they had known them, and their own experiment was and would remain unreported except to a few friends who shared their interest in it. Farrari had plastered clay on a slab of rock near the nightfire, and on it he had drawn a stick-figure ol. And the olz were looking at it. While the Bureau wrestled with its moral dilemma and attempted to adjust itself to a situation the authors of its capitalized mottos had never contemplated, while the scientist awesomely probed man’s origins, Farrari and Liano would be exposing the olz to culture.

One day one of two things would happen: an ol would pick up a stick and try to draw a figure of his own; or an ol would suddenly comprehend that the drawing was of himself, and he would do what it told him to do: the dawn of creative thought from the spirit of art.

Soon, Farrari hoped.

He and Liano would be waiting.