The Year's Best Science Fiction 9

Planaria are worms. Worm-runners are people who run worms through mazes. The Worm Runners’ Digest is the journal of the Planaria Research Group of the University of Michigan’s Mental Health Research Institute. Worm-runners throughout the country—amateur and professional—use the WRD as an information and idea exchange, discussing via lab reports, speech reprints, research papers, semipersonal letters, art, verse, parody, fable, and farce the latest news about worms, themselves, and the human condition, with special reference to the provocative and productive research initiated by the PRG on the biochemistry of learning and memory.

I was fascinated by WRD. And I not only learned about worms; I thought I had found out something about the Ul Kworn too. Who would be more likely to think of worms than a veterinarian?

So I wrote to Dr. Bone. He answered, “The Ul Kworn was built up from terrestrial precursors, but he was made to the requirements of the gadgetry. The gadget is real. NASA had it walking around the banks of the Potomac, shooting out sticky threads and reeling them in for several months before I got the idea for a story. I modified the gadget by making it sessile, but the rest of the machine is about the way it really is. Since NASA intends to shoot it at Mars in the not-too-distant future, I had the planet.

“So all that was left was to build a believable character that could be elemental enough to be trapped by the machine, yet advanced enough to elicit sympathy from the reader. The hunger motivation was inherent in the machine. . . .

“Physically, the Ul is a composite of a snail, a starfish and an amoeba, with the protective mantle being my own creation and dictated by Mars’ temperature variations. His reproductive pattern was pirated almost verbatim from the coelenterates, in this case Hydra, which reproduces sexually and asexually.

“A far worse problem was to arrange some sort of social order that would make the NASA gadget a problem. By using the hunger motivation and a scanty food supply, I hit upon the idea of territorial strips. After that the formulation of social rules was easy.”

Easy, that is, for a man whose profession has accustomed him to thinking and feeling nonhuman thoughts and emotions. We do not ell possess this faculty in the same degree; too many of us are completely untrained in its use—or more accurately, perhaps, have had it trained out of us. Call it imagination, intuition, empathy: it is something other than logic; something more than the simple sum of observations and deductions. Children have it, far more than adults—as they have other capacities for learning that most of us can hardly perceive.