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

Hitchcock was using his camera where Muller pointed. He could see that everything was exactly as Muller described it. Muller shifted to the three sets taken from the intelligent floppers. “Now look at these,” he was saying.

The cells were much smaller—not half the size of the cells from the normal flopper—and connecting filaments radiated out from them, proliferating endlessly. They looked like spiderwebs.

Hitchcock caught his breath. Why, minds built of cells like these would be incalculably powerful.

Muller smiled at him “You catch on easy,” he said.

“Why, they... how magnificent!” Hitchcock exclaimed.

This was the proof he wanted—proof that he was told a lie when he was told the floppers were mindless, dumb animals. Proof—undeniable proof—that the floppers were people, and that therefore they were entitled to the fundamental rights of all human beings.

But then an unsettling question—a moment of doubt— came into his thoughts. “How... how did you obtain these ... these wonderful specimens?”

Muller snorted. “How do you think? You don’t think we’d let ‘em run around loose, do you?”

Hitchcock was aghast. “You killed them!”

“Sure,” Muller said. “So what? They’re only animals.”

The deadfall had mashed the small animal practically flat, but some of its springy bones flexed back into shape when Kosh-korrozasch levered the ice block off it. He could see what it had looked like.

What he saw astonished him. It was unlike any creature he knew. He tore off a hind leg. A strip of flank peeled off with it. He squatted in the shelter of a rock ledge and gobbled it, bones and all. Then he tore off the other hind leg.

His hunger subsided then. He paused to examine the carcass more slowly. He had thought he knew all the creatures in the world—their shape, their habits, what they could do, and how they tasted. But this was not one of them.

It made him wonder.

A cold wind-gust blasted him, ruffing his pelt. He hardly noticed. He pondered how it was possible an animal could exist anywhere in the world, and he had not seen it till now. Never, till now, had he seen an animal he did not recognize—not since cubhood, when he was freshly come from his parent’s pouch.

From his high vantage, here in a cleft where the land reached a narrow white tendril up into the mountains, Kosh-korrozasch looked out at the world. The white, featureless land spread wide and far in the seven directions, and the mountains that surrounded the land were rough and massive—dark, and patched with white on their slopes. And there, out in the middle of the land where no mountain belonged, the great, lonely peak rose jaggedly to a flat crest. It was as if one of the monsters that lurked underground had been frozen at the moment it was smashing its way up to freedom.

Kosh-korrozasch had been everywhere in that world— had trod every part of the white, cold land—had searched all the tendrils of land that probed into the mountains— searched all the way to their ends, to where the mountains themselves blocked his way. And he had struggled nearly to the top of the great, lonely peak, there in the middle of the land; he had scraped the scale-food from the rocks up there, on the side where the wind rarely came.

He had learned where there was food in the world, and where there was none. He had learned how to find it, to trap it, to stalk it, and kill it. He knew all he needed to know about the world, and all the animals in it.

.... Except this one dead thing his trap had killed. He wrenched the rearward half of the body from the rest of it, and ate it slowly. It was good tasting food. It filled him with a sense of well-being—of having eaten. Eating was too rare a pleasure. Kosh-korrozasch had been part-starved all his life.

But the creature’s strangeness still nagged him. He crumbled the thing’s foreleg in his maw, and pondered. It was only then that the thought came to him.

It was a strange thought—strange and frightening. But it excited him, and his paws trembled while he ate the rest of the carcass. He ate slowly, savoring the pleasure of food, feeling the thrill and the wonder of his new thought.

Perhaps there was something beyond the edge of the world. Perhaps the creature had come from there.

Life was hard, here in this world. A being starved all his life, and died of hunger. A person spent all his life seeking food, building traps, while the dull ache of hunger gnawed his belly, driving him endlessly on, never satisfied.

Kosh-korrozasch paused when he had finished eating. Using the turquoise blood-dribble of his eating for a bait, he rebuilt the ice-block deadfall. He might never come back here—he knew that—but he might. And if he came back, he might be needing desperately the food it might kill while he was gone.

When it was built, he went away. Climbing upslope, he followed the tendril of land that reached up into the mountains toward the edge of the world. If an animal could enter from outside, perhaps he could leave it the same way.

A person searched for food all his life. Slowly, Kosh-korrozasch climbed toward the edge of the world.

In thirty-two hours, the supply ship would leave this planet for Lambda Serpentis. Adam Hitchcock felt fine.

He would be glad to leave. The dome was like a prison. Outside, the wind was bitter cold and the sea crashed endlessly on the island’s rocky shore. The domesticated Floppers were always underfoot, brainlessly stupid. His quarters had none of the comforts a civilized man was accustomed to, and the food he got was abominably plain.

His endurance had been rudely tested. He was impatient to return to civilization.

But he was satisfied. His mission had been a complete success. He had found out the facts—-he knew the truth, and as soon as he returned home everyone would know the truth. The suffering natives would be given—finally—the aid denied them for so long.

And the record of his Society for Humane Practices would remain a record of unblemished success. Truly, he had reason to be proud.

Before he left, though, he had one more task. It was not important—actually only a mere formality: to give the scientists a chance to correct the conditions he had exposed. They would refuse him, of course—he expected that—but when they refused, they would lose their right to protest when he aroused public censure against them.

He walked into the office of Ben Reese. Reese, engrossed in a mound of papers, did not see him at once.

“I’m a fair man,” Hitchcock proclaimed.

Ben Reese looked up, startled. His paperwork was like a fortress around him. “Did I ever say you weren’t?” he wondered innocently.

Implacably, Hitchcock went on. “I have proof,” he declared, “absolute proof—that the natives of this planet are being maltreated and enslaved, that their needs have been ignored, and that your people have been hounding them to death. Nevertheless, I give you fair warning: if you do not correct these conditions, I shall be compelled to make a public report of my findings. If you force me to do that, I will not be responsible for anything that happens afterward.”

Reese listened in silence. “We’re concerned with scientific research here,” he explained apologetically. “Not welfare. To... to follow your demands would mean the end of everything we’ve worked for, everything we’ve hoped—”

Doubletalk, of course. Hitchcock had expected that. He wasn’t fooled.

“Everything you’ve worked for!” he repeated scathingly. “The deliberate suppression of a people as deserving of human rights as you or I! In clear conscience, I cannot stand by and permit this to go on! I shall—”

Reese raised a placating hand. “That is not true,” he protested. He actually seemed embarrassed. “You forget, Mr. Hitchcock—they are animals, not people. Their minds are primitive... undeveloped.”