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

“Are you sure?” Estanzio asked hesitantly.

“Yeah,” Muller stated. “We’ve had this station here ever since the planet switched from Alpha to Beta—that’s close to a thousand years. We’ve been testing Floppers all that time. If the genes had been around back then, they’d’ve shown up in the first couple of centuries. They didn’t. The first flopper that showed up even halfway intelligent—don’t scowl like that, I’ve checked the records—was just forty years ago. And guess where he came from.”

“Ziggurat Mountain?” Estanzio guessed.

Muller rapped a fist on the table. “Right,” he said through his teeth. “It’s a mutation. It’s got to be. And it happened right there in the enclave.”

Estanzio was silent a moment. “Why did you kill it?” he asked.

“Same reason I killed the other two,” Muller said. “I want a look at its brain. The first two—I thought they were flukes. Now I don’t think so—and a look at this one’s brain cells will prove it.”

“But wasn’t that against the rules?” Estanzio wondered. “I mean, a flopper showing exceptional characteristics----”

Muller scratched his satanic beard. “So it was against the rules,” he said contemptuously. “I had to find out, and that’s the only way.”

Abruptly, then, he changed the subject—or seemed to. “You go back with the supply ship, don’t you?”

It wasn’t really much of a question. Only a very unusual scientist-candidate stayed more than one year. Estanzio nodded.

Muller smiled, satisfied. “O.K.,” he said. “When you get back, you can talk about this all you want. But while you’re still here... it didn’t happen. None of it. Understand?”

“I... I think so,” Estanzio said slowly. “But... why?”

“Because they’re getting smart,” Muller told him. “If we don’t do something, they’ll all get smart—smarter than we are. And they’re vicious—you’ve seen what the wild ones are like. Well, we can’t let it happen. That’s why we’ve had this station here all these years—to watch ‘em, because someone way back then figured this might happen. So we can stop ‘em if it does. But there’s just enough softheads around here that want it to happen. We don’t want them finding out—or anybody else.”

“Oh,” Estanzio said. He frowned helplessly. “But what can we do? How can we stop them?”

“Don’t ask,” Muller chuckled. “I might tell you.”

“Well, I’d like to know,” Estanzio said.

Muller leaned his weight on the table. He tapped the hard surface confidentially. “You heard who’s coming in the supply ship this time?”

Estanzio paused, trying to remember. “Well, there’s Blackett, and Holman, and...”

Muller waved a hand. “I don’t mean personnel. I mean just for a look around.”

“Hitchcock?” Estanzio wondered incredulously. “But he’s ... He’d be on their side. He always is.”

“He might be,” Muller admitted, “if he knew what he was doing. Most of the time, he just meddles. That’s what he’s going to do here.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I’m sure,” Muller said, smiling. “I’m going to help him.” He laughed.

“I was horrified, gentlemen. Horrified.”

That, Adam Hitchcock decided, was the thing to say about Xi Scorpii when he got back to Earth. That was what he would tell his Society for Humane Practices, to signal the beginning of a new crusade.

The Xi Scorpii Foundation would protest, of course. They would say he was misrepresenting the facts. But that didn’t worry him. Men always said that when he exposed their iniquities, and it never made the slightest difference. The public always recognized the truth.

Hitchcock made his decision as soon as he arrived at Xi Scorpii—while he was still descending the stairway scaffold that huddled close up against the Wayfarer’s flank. His mood was surly—it had been a bad trip out. The Wayfarer was a cargo ship, with only minimal provision for passengers; he had been obliged to share his cabin with a young scientist-candidate whose single-minded enthusiasm for the mutational aspects of genetic chemistry left him with a very unflattering picture of the scientific mind.

Carrying a piece of luggage in each hand, Hitchcock trudged down the stairs. It was a long way down, and the scaffold felt rickety. It trembled and creaked in the wind.

Any civilized place would have had an elevator.

The wind was cold. It howled around him. It chilled his throat. It penetrated through the thin overcoat he wore—a coat which was all he’d have needed on any civilized planet. His ash-gray hair was tangled. His ears tingled painfully. His jowls were numb. His head ached and his nostrils watered. It was a dreadful planet.

He paused on the stairway and set down his bags. He tried to draw his collar, tight. It was no use—the cold air continued to ooze through. Grimly, he stared down again. The camera looped over his shoulder bumped his side.

The landing field toward which he descended would not have done justice to a survey camp. It was nothing but a leveled-off rock plain without pavement, no larger than a city block. Various atmosphere craft crowded the edge of the field on the side nearest the outpost’s black dome. On the other side, a cold sea spread all the way to the edge of the sky. Sluggish, floe-choked waves smashed on the rocks, building castles of ice with their spray.

Critically, Hitchcock glanced toward the bright sun. It burned in a blue, clear sky, but it gave no warmth. Nor was the system’s other star more than a fleck of light down close to the ice-dappled sea.

Definitely, this planet wasn’t fit for anything to live on —neither man nor any other creature.

Already, he saw as he continued his descent, the ship was disgorging its cargo. Its hoist settled massive crates and bundles of supplies on sledges which were dragged toward the dome by harnessed teams of shaggy, dirty-white, short-legged creatures about the size of very large dogs. At rest, while waiting for their sleds to be loaded, they squatted on their hind legs, their apparently boneless arms curled up almost double and their mittenlike paws, pressed flat against their bodies. No one was directing them. They seemed to know what to do.

Halfway down the scaffold, Hitchcock stopped again. He turned to the man behind him and pointed at the laboring creatures. “Are those the natives?” he asked. He had to shout to be heard above the howl of the wind.

The man—another of those eager young scientist-candidates—didn’t seem to understand the question. “The Floppers?” he wondered uncertainly, then nodded.

Hitchcock unlimbered his camera and put the scene on tape. It was an outrage! The poor things were slaves!

When he reached the bottom, a man in a thick, hooded garment was waiting beside a sled with removable benches set on it. Its eight-flopper team squatted stoically, cringing from the frigid wind. The man reached out to take Hitchcock’s luggage. “Climb aboard,” he invited loudly. “We’ll be heading for the dome in a minute, as soon as the rest of you get down.”

Hitchcock didn’t let go of his bags. He glanced at the harnessed Floppers. “Thank you,” he said stiffly—and his teeth rattled with the cold. “I prefer to walk.”

The man shrugged, but he looked concerned. “It’s a long way to hike in this wind,” he advised, nodding toward the dome a half mile away. “The first thing you know, you’ve took a deep breath, and then you’ve got frost in your lungs. Better ride along with the rest of us peasants.”

“If they have to pull me, I will not ride,” Hitchcock insisted staunchly.

“Who—the floppers?” the man wondered incredulously. “They grew up in this weather. They eat it for breakfast.”