Avram Davidson - The Avram Davidson Treasury - a tribute collection

“I guess it can be arranged. See, the Commissioner-General on Selopé III wants one for his private zoo. Tell you what: We’ll take one for him and one for you — I’ll tell the supercargo it’s a spare. But if one croaks, the C-G has to get the other. Okay?”

At Harper’s nod the purser took a tag out of his pocket, tied it around the Yahoo’s wrist, waved his cap to the lighter as it came near. “Although why anybody’d want one of these beats me,” he said, cheerfully. “They’re dirtier than animals. I mean, a pig or a horse’ll use the same corner of the enclosure, but these things’ll dirty anywhere. Still, if you want one—” He shrugged.

As soon as the lighter had picked up the limp form (the pulse was still fluttering feebly) Harper and the purser went back to the passenger launch. As they made a swift ascent to the big ship the purser gestured to the two lighters. “That’s going to be a mighty slow trip those two craft will make back up,” he remarked.

Harper innocently asked why. The purser chuckled. The coxswain laughed.

“The freight-crewmen want to make their points before the convicts. That’s why.”

The chicken cadet, his face flushed a deeper pink than usual, tried to sound knowing. “How about that, purser? Is it pretty good stuff?”

The other passengers wiped their perspiring faces, leaned forward eagerly. The purser said, “Well, rank has its privileges, but that’s one I figure I can do without.”

His listeners guffawed, but more than one looked down toward the lighters and then avoided other eyes when he looked back again.

Barnum’s Planet (named, as was the custom then, after the skipper who’d first sighted it) was a total waste, economically speaking. It was almost all water and the water supported only a few repulsive-looking species of no discernible value. The only sizable piece of land — known, inevitably, as Barnumland, since no one else coveted the honor — was gaunt and bleak, devoid alike of useful minerals or arable soil. Its ecology seemed dependent on a sort of fly: A creature rather like a lizard ate the flies and the Yahoos ate the lizards. If something died at sea and washed ashore, the Yahoos ate that, too. What the flies ate no one knew, but their larvae ate the Yahoos, dead.

They were small, hairy, stunted creatures whose speech — if speech it was — seemed confined to moans and clicks and grunts. They wore no clothing, made no artifacts, did not know the use of fire. Taken away captive, they soon languished and died. Of all the primitives discovered by man, they were the most primitive. They might have been left alone on their useless planet to kill lizards with tree branches forever — except for one thing.

Barnum’s Planet lay equidistant between Coulter’s System and the Selopes, and it was a long, long voyage either way. Passengers grew restless, crews grew mutinous, convicts rebellious. Gradually the practice developed of stopping on Barnum’s Planet “to let off steam”—archaic expression, but although the nature of the machinery man used had changed since it was coined, man’s nature hadn’t.

And, of course, no one owned Barnum’s Planet, so no one cared what happened there.

Which was just too bad for the Yahoos.

It took some time for Harper to settle the paperwork concerning his “souvenir,” but finally he was given a baggage check for “One Yahoo, male, live,” and hurried down to the freight deck. He hoped it would be still alive.

Pandemonium met his ears as he stepped out of the elevator. A rhythmical chanting shout came from the convict hold. “Hear that?” one of the duty officers asked him, taking the cargo chit. Harper asked what the men were yelling. “I wouldn’t care to use the words,” the officer said. He was a paunchy, gray-haired man, one who probably loved to tell his grandchildren about his “adventures.” This was one he wouldn’t tell them.

“I don’t like this part of the detail,” the officer went on. “Never did, never will. Those creatures seem human to me —stupid as they are. And if they’re not human,” he asked, “then how can we sink low enough to bring their females up for the convicts?”

The lighters grated on the landing. The noise must have penetrated to the convict hold, because all semblance of words vanished from the shouting. It became a mad cry, louder and louder.

“Here’s your pet,” the gray-haired officer said. “Still out, I see… I’ll let you have a baggage-carrier. Just give it to a steward when you’re done with it.” He had to raise his voice to be heard over the frenzied howling from the hold.

The ship’s surgeon was out having tea at the captain’s table. The duty medical officer was annoyed. “What, another one? We’re not veterinarians, you know… Well, wheel him in. My intern is working on the other one… whew! ” He held his nose and hastily left.

The intern, a pale young man with close-cropped dark hair, looked up from the pressure-spray he had just used to give an injection to the specimen Yahoo selected for the Commissioner-General of Selopé III. He smiled faintly.

“Junior will have company, I see… Any others?”

Harper shook his head. The intern went on, “This should be interesting. The young one seems to be in shock. I gave him two cc’s of anthidar sulfate, and I see I’d better do the same for yours. Then… Well, I guess there’s still nothing like serum albumen, is there? But you’d better help me strap them down. If they come to, there’s a cell back aft we can put them in, until I can get some cages rigged up.” He shot the stimulant into the flaccid arm of Harper’s Yahoo.

“Whoever named these beasties knew his Swift,” the young medico said. “You ever read that old book, Gulliver’s Travels? ”

Harper nodded.

“Old Swift went mad, didn’t he? He hated humanity, they all seemed like Yahoos to him… In a way I don’t blame him. I think that’s why everybody despises these Primitives: They seem like caricatures of ourselves. Personally, I look forward to finding out a lot about them, their metabolism and so on… What’s your interest?”

He asked the question casually, but shot a keen look as he did so. Harper shrugged. “I hardly know, exactly. It’s not a scientific one, because I’m a businessman.” He hesitated. “You ever hear or read about the Tasmanians?”

The intern shook his head. He thrust a needle into a vein in the younger Yahoo’s arm, prepared to let the serum flow in. “If they lived on Earth, I wouldn’t know. Never was there. I’m a third generation Coulterboy, myself.”

Harper said, “Tasmania is an island south of Australia. The natives were the most primitive people known to Earth. They were almost all wiped out by the settlers, but one of them succeeded in moving the survivors to a smaller island. And then a curious thing happened.”

Looking up from the older Primitive, the intern asked what that was.

“The Tasmanians — the few that were left — decided that they’d had it. They refused to breed. And in a few more years they were all dead… I read about them when I was just a kid. Somehow, it moved me very much. Things like that did —the dodo, the great auk, the quagga, the Tasmanians. I’ve never been able to get it out of my mind. When I began hearing about the Yahoos, it seemed to me that they were like the old Tasmanians. Only there are no settlers on Barnumland.”

The intern nodded. “But that won’t help our hairy friends here a hell of a lot. Of course no one knows how many of them there are — or ever were. But I’ve been comparing the figures in the log as to how many females are caught and taken aboard.” He looked directly at Harper. “And on every trip there are less by far.”