Judith Merril - The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6

Dean McLaughlin is a quiet, self-contained young man who works full time in a college bookstore, and in his spare time turns out, too infrequently, thoughtful and thought-provoking stories, mostly for Analog (Astounding).

He says that “half of the idea” for this story originated with his father (the Ann Arbor astronomer of the same name): “Xi Scorpii is a genuine bona fide binary star, roughly 80 light-years from here (and Lambda Serpentis would make a very good way-station stop en route). The twin stars actually could play catch with a planet as described in the story.

“The other half of the story’s genesis was some remarks In Loren Eiseley’s essay, ‘The Fire Apes,’ with which I didn’t entirely agree....”

The cold wind screamed and drove dart-chips of crystal stuff deep into Chier-cuala’s fur.

Chier-cuala struggled up the hill. It was hard going. His walking flippers couldn’t find good footing in the white, soft powder that smothered the land, and the slope was steep. His stubby legs ached with fatigue. He floundered and wallowed in the white powder. It was cold.

He couldn’t remember any cold time like this one. Never had it been so cold. Never had the wind blown so hard— so endlessly. It had not stopped for many sleeping times. And never had the strange white powder lain so thick on the ground.

Chier-cuala couldn’t understand.

The cold, hard darts of crystal stuff clung to his fur. He brushed them away. The wind plastered more against him.

The wind leaked through his thick pelt and chilled him. His walking flippers ached and throbbed with the cold. He whimpered softly.

Stubbornly, he pressed on toward the crest of the hill. He needed food. His hunger was a compelling agony. It was the only thing that could have driven him out into this cold and wind. Always before, when a cold time came, he had huddled in his lair until it stopped—until the sky was blue again, and the powderlike white stuff on the ground turned to wetness, and the air turned warm.

But this time the cold had not stopped, and the wind still blew, and the sky remained gray. He had not eaten since...

He remembered the last thing he ate—the small, clumsy creature he had caught in the recesses of his lair. It was so small he would have ignored it, except he was starved.

And after he ate it, he had slept through a dark time, and then there was a bright time during which he did not eat because there was nothing, and then another dark time through which his sleep was troubled by visions of edible creatures.

Now, forced out of his lair by his hunger, he climbed the hill. The odd creatures on the hilltop had given him good things to eat, sometimes, when he did things which they made him understand they wanted him to do. Purposeless things, and some of them were very hard, but the odd creatures gave him good things to eat when he did them.

The slope was covered with the cold, white powder, and the broken-off stems and stalks of what had been a forest stuck up nakedly. Shattered pieces of them, buried under the white powder, slashed his walking flippers and blue stains marked his path.

Chier-cuala tried to pull himself up the steep slope by grasping the upright stalks in his prehensile, paddlelike forepaws. The stalks broke. He fell back—rolled downhill in a whirl of the white powder. It got into his fur. It was wet and cold.

He lay where he stopped rolling. He whimpered, too weary to move. Finally, knowing he must move and making the effort, he struggled up and went on. He did not try to grasp the stalks again.

At last, he found a way to the hilltop. The wind blew more fiercely up there. It slashed through his fur and chilled his body. He cried softly, miserably. His walking flippers were full of pain—turning numb. The blue stains in his footprints grew large. Clumsily, he stumbled across the hilltop toward the place of the odd creatures.

He whacked a forepaw against the flat thing that blocked the entrance. It did not move. He slapped again, and then again and again, harder and harder. He uttered a broken, heart-forsaken cry. He could not understand why the odd creatures did not take away the entrance-block and give him food.

He had to have food. He was hungry.

The cold wind screamed.

Chier-cuala slapped the door and sobbed.

They called it coffee, even though it was brewed from the stems of a plant which originated forty light-years from Earth. It had a citric, quininelike taste. Hot and sweetened, it served the same function as coffee. Some people even preferred it.

It was an odd hour; Sigurd Muller and Loren Estanzio were alone in the commissary. Muller sipped from his cup —it was too hot yet. He set it down.

“What do you think about it?” he asked the younger man.

Estanzio made an awkward, unconvincing shrug. “It sort of scares me,” he admitted.

“Yeah?” Muller leaned his weight on the table. “Why?”

The young man was embarrassed. “Well,” he explained, “you remember last year, just after I got here, you put me through the test sequence—the same one you use on the floppers?”

Muller smiled. “I put all you young squirts through it. You’re supposed to be smart, or you wouldn’t get to come here. It’s a good calibration standard.”

Estanzio nodded. “I didn’t do so good,” he said.

“You did average,” Muller recalled, as if it was an unimportant matter. He tapped a fingernail on the table top. “The trick with an intelligence test, you’ve got to make it tougher than the smartest guy to take it. Otherwise, it’s a no-good test.” He slouched back and half closed his eyes. “In the seven years I’ve been here, the average intelligence of the scientist-candidates that come here hasn’t gone up an inch. I guess you kids have reached an evolutionary plateau.”

“That’s the thing that scares me,” Estanzio confessed. “I mean, I knew all about mazes and problems, but the set you’ve got had me stopped. And when I saw that flopper catch on to the pattern maze—when it didn’t even know the principle of a maze...” He hesitated. “I’m scared,” he repeated lamely.

“It was a smart one, all right,” Muller said.

Estanzio wasn’t ready to go quite that far. “It could have been a fluke,” he suggested.

Muller shook his head. “No fluke,” he said. He leaned closer. “What if I told you the one we had today wasn’t the first?”

Estanzio frowned. “I hadn’t heard of any others,” he said doubtfully. “And I know there haven’t been any since I’ve been here.”

“You’ve just been here a year,” Muller reminded him. “I had two the year before you came. They both came from, the same place—the same place this one came from.”

“Ziggurat Mountain?”

“Yeah,” Muller said. “An enclave shut up in the mountains with no way out and a population of about seven and a half thousand. It used to be six thousand—it’s been going up the last ten years.”

Estanzio thought about that for a while. Idly, he turned the handle of his coffee cup one way, then the other. “Just the sort of place we could expect it,” he said finally.

Muller nodded, smiling. “Now tell me why.”

“Well, it’s a small population in a limited area—isolated —-and they’re under extreme selection pressure. It’s the sort of situation that’s almost sure to show an evolutionary trend.”

“You got that out of Houterman’s book,” Muller said.

Estanzio flushed. “Sure. But he’s right, isn’t he?”

Muller shrugged. “It’s the same basic principle,” he agreed. “But he wasn’t talking about the setup here. He was talking about evolution by genetic drift—where the genes already exist. That’s not what’s happening here.”