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

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.”