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

“You’re a very clever man, Mr. Reese,” he conceded with gleeful ferocity. “But not clever enough. You cannot deny the things I have seen with my own eyes. Nor can you lay all the blame at the feet of your underlings. What this man has done”—he gestured at Muller—”has no bearing on the fundamental fact that the welfare of this planet’s natives has been willfully and shamefully ignored—and that you have refused to do anything about it. If you do not correct this situation at once, I will expose you to every civilized community in the universe!”

“But you don’t understand,” Reese protested.

“I have not yet finished,” Hitchcock snapped. “In addition, if you still refuse, we—my Society for Humane Practices and I—shall do it ourselves. We shall sponsor a public subscription. We shall send food, clothes—all the things these poor people need. As many shiploads as necessary. And we shall see that you and all your scientists are removed from this planet. Your presence here will not be tolerated.”

“Have you any idea how much it would cost?” Reese wondered.

“The cost is not important,” Hitchcock said. ‘The public will gladly pay whatever is needed.”

Reese conceded the point. The knowledge that he could not win against this man was strong in him. It paralyzed his will. He wished he were a woman, or a child, so he could retreat into the weakness of frustrated tears.

“You’ve done this sort of thing before, haven’t you?” he said bitterly, remembering what he had heard of Hitchcock’s doings on other planets.

“I have,” Hitchcock confirmed. “I have been very successful at it.” He paused, waiting for Reese to speak. Reese said nothing.

“If you have nothing more to say—” he said. He turned toward the door.

Desperately, then, Reese spoke.

“Only this,” he said with a firmness he did not feel. Hitchcock turned back and faced him. He tapped a finger on the desk. “I gather from what Sigurd has said that some floppers may be intelligent,” he said. He spoke very slowly, deliberately. “Some, but not all. In fact, speaking in terms of the entire planetary population, only a very few are intelligent. All the rest are still animals.”

Hitchcock was not impressed. “All of them need our help,” he stated. “We cannot and we shall not give it to some and deny it to others, no matter what criterion you propose. I can think of nothing so unthinkable.”

“The point I’m trying to make,” Reese persisted patiently, “is that... that the floppers are in a period of transition. Right now, only some of them are intelligent—only a few. But some day, all of them will be intelligent, because ... because they are living under arduous conditions, and the intelligent ones are better able to survive—the population increase Sigurd mentioned is evidence of that. So, comparatively speaking, a greater proportion of the intelligent ones will survive to maturity. And the mature ones will tend to live longer than... than the ordinary ones—so they will tend to produce more young. It’s a perfect example of the natural selection process. But it won’t happen if we try to help them.”

“What?” Hitchcock demanded. “Preposterous!”

“It... it’s very true,” Reese assured him. “You see, if we gave them everything they need, the intelligent ones wouldn’t have an advantage over the ordinary ones—they’d all have an equal life-expectancy. Add the ordinary ones outnumber the intelligent ones by a fantastic margin, so— even if the intelligence gene-complex is a dominant—the intelligent ones would be absorbed into the race within a few generations. There wouldn’t be anything left of them.”

Hitchcock appeared to consider the argument, but his face was set stubbornly. Bitterly, Reese wondered if the man understood a thing he’d said.

Then Hitchcock spoke. “Am I to conclude, then,” he said, “that you want the natives to suffer? To starve? To... to die? To battle each other for a scrap of food? Do you admit that this is what you want?”

He had understood part of it, Reese concluded glumly. The ugly part. “I think it is necessary,” he had to admit. “I think it is the only way the floppers can advance. Remember, something like this must have happened to our own ancestors. If it hadn’t, we would still be mindless brutes.”

“Nonsense,” Hitchcock snapped. “The fact that our ancestors had no one to help them has nothing to do with it. They would have become men no matter what happened. It was their destiny to become men—the same destiny as these poor people, here. Nothing can possibly stand in their way—no man can interfere with destiny. They are suffering and dying because you deliberately neglect their welfare. You have the power to end that suffering and you are morally bound to do it. To refuse, Mr. Reese, is to turn your back on humanity.”

Reese sat perfectly still, a feeling of blind hopelessness crushing down on him. “I think,” he said slowly. “I think I know why Sigurd helped you so much. He wants to suppress the intelligent ones. Am I right, Sigurd?”

“Sure I want ‘em kept down,” Muller snapped. “We’d better, if we know what’s good for us. You’ve seen the wild ones—they’re a bunch of animals. Nothing they’d like better than to tear a man apart and eat the pieces.”

“On the other hand,” Reese put in thoughtfully, “the ones here in the outpost are docile.”

Muller disparaged the point with a wave of the hand. “They don’t count,” he claimed. “They’re way off the main track. It’s the ones on the mainland that count. If we let them get smart, there’ll be no stopping ‘em. They’ll hunt us down. We’ll be the animals! If we don’t stop ‘em, they’ll chase us right out of the universe. Right now, we can stop ‘em. Later on it’ll be too late. So we’d better get at it. Right now.”

He really believed it, Reese realized wonderingly. He meant every word of it.

“Sigurd, I don’t agree,” Reese said slowly. He hoped he sounded reasonable. “In the first place, we conducted some personality experiments on them about twenty years ago. We took the offspring of wild floppers and raised them with our tame ones. They developed none of the... the bloodthirsty traits of their parents. So I’m sure that this ... this viciousness we see in them is a characteristic forced on them by their environment.”

“Yeah?” Muller scoffed. “But the smart ones aren’t growing up here in the dome. They’re growing up out there —on the mainland.”

Reese nodded. “True,” he admitted. “But before they could be any danger to us, they would have to develop a civilization—a technology. And one of the characteristics of a technological civilization is the ability of its people to control their environment. By removing the causes of their viciousness, they would also remove the need for being vicious. Also, I believe they have shown this same viciousness toward each other—to the point of cannibalism. But recently, I understand, some of them have taken to hunting in groups. They have discovered the advantages of cooperation. Don’t you think this shows a trend away from ... from animal savageness? Don’t you, Sigurd?”

“You want to take a chance on it?” Muller challenged.

“Taking that chance is the only honorable thing we can do,” Reese told him firmly.

“Huh!” Muller snorted. “And how do you think they’ll look at us, once they get smart, with us sitting here not doing a thing to help ‘em? They’ll hate us. They’ll hate us like hell!”

Reese hesitated, then shook his head. “No, Sigurd,” he decided. “The transition will be a slow, very gradual process. It will be all right to start helping them long before they could become a danger to us. Also, if they do become as intelligent as you say, they will probably understand that they could not have evolved to intelligence if we had tried to help them.”