The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6

THE BROTHERHOOD OF KEEPERS by Dean McLaughlin

Dean McLaughlin is a quiet, self-contained young man who works full time in a college bookstore, and in his spare time turns out, too infrequently, thoughtful and thought-provoking stories, mostly for Analog (Astounding).

He says that “half of the idea” for this story originated with his father (the Ann Arbor astronomer of the same name): “Xi Scorpii is a genuine bona fide binary star, roughly 80 light-years from here (and Lambda Serpentis would make a very good way-station stop en route). The twin stars actually could play catch with a planet as described in the story.

“The other half of the story’s genesis was some remarks In Loren Eiseley’s essay, ‘The Fire Apes,’ with which I didn’t entirely agree....”

The cold wind screamed and drove dart-chips of crystal stuff deep into Chier-cuala’s fur.

Chier-cuala struggled up the hill. It was hard going. His walking flippers couldn’t find good footing in the white, soft powder that smothered the land, and the slope was steep. His stubby legs ached with fatigue. He floundered and wallowed in the white powder. It was cold.

He couldn’t remember any cold time like this one. Never had it been so cold. Never had the wind blown so hard— so endlessly. It had not stopped for many sleeping times. And never had the strange white powder lain so thick on the ground.

Chier-cuala couldn’t understand.

The cold, hard darts of crystal stuff clung to his fur. He brushed them away. The wind plastered more against him.

The wind leaked through his thick pelt and chilled him. His walking flippers ached and throbbed with the cold. He whimpered softly.

Stubbornly, he pressed on toward the crest of the hill. He needed food. His hunger was a compelling agony. It was the only thing that could have driven him out into this cold and wind. Always before, when a cold time came, he had huddled in his lair until it stopped—until the sky was blue again, and the powderlike white stuff on the ground turned to wetness, and the air turned warm.

But this time the cold had not stopped, and the wind still blew, and the sky remained gray. He had not eaten since...

He remembered the last thing he ate—the small, clumsy creature he had caught in the recesses of his lair. It was so small he would have ignored it, except he was starved.

And after he ate it, he had slept through a dark time, and then there was a bright time during which he did not eat because there was nothing, and then another dark time through which his sleep was troubled by visions of edible creatures.

Now, forced out of his lair by his hunger, he climbed the hill. The odd creatures on the hilltop had given him good things to eat, sometimes, when he did things which they made him understand they wanted him to do. Purposeless things, and some of them were very hard, but the odd creatures gave him good things to eat when he did them.

The slope was covered with the cold, white powder, and the broken-off stems and stalks of what had been a forest stuck up nakedly. Shattered pieces of them, buried under the white powder, slashed his walking flippers and blue stains marked his path.

Chier-cuala tried to pull himself up the steep slope by grasping the upright stalks in his prehensile, paddlelike forepaws. The stalks broke. He fell back—rolled downhill in a whirl of the white powder. It got into his fur. It was wet and cold.

He lay where he stopped rolling. He whimpered, too weary to move. Finally, knowing he must move and making the effort, he struggled up and went on. He did not try to grasp the stalks again.

At last, he found a way to the hilltop. The wind blew more fiercely up there. It slashed through his fur and chilled his body. He cried softly, miserably. His walking flippers were full of pain—turning numb. The blue stains in his footprints grew large. Clumsily, he stumbled across the hilltop toward the place of the odd creatures.

He whacked a forepaw against the flat thing that blocked the entrance. It did not move. He slapped again, and then again and again, harder and harder. He uttered a broken, heart-forsaken cry. He could not understand why the odd creatures did not take away the entrance-block and give him food.

He had to have food. He was hungry.

The cold wind screamed.

Chier-cuala slapped the door and sobbed.

They called it coffee, even though it was brewed from the stems of a plant which originated forty light-years from Earth. It had a citric, quininelike taste. Hot and sweetened, it served the same function as coffee. Some people even preferred it.

It was an odd hour; Sigurd Muller and Loren Estanzio were alone in the commissary. Muller sipped from his cup —it was too hot yet. He set it down.

“What do you think about it?” he asked the younger man.

Estanzio made an awkward, unconvincing shrug. “It sort of scares me,” he admitted.

“Yeah?” Muller leaned his weight on the table. “Why?”

The young man was embarrassed. “Well,” he explained, “you remember last year, just after I got here, you put me through the test sequence—the same one you use on the floppers?”

Muller smiled. “I put all you young squirts through it. You’re supposed to be smart, or you wouldn’t get to come here. It’s a good calibration standard.”

Estanzio nodded. “I didn’t do so good,” he said.

“You did average,” Muller recalled, as if it was an unimportant matter. He tapped a fingernail on the table top. “The trick with an intelligence test, you’ve got to make it tougher than the smartest guy to take it. Otherwise, it’s a no-good test.” He slouched back and half closed his eyes. “In the seven years I’ve been here, the average intelligence of the scientist-candidates that come here hasn’t gone up an inch. I guess you kids have reached an evolutionary plateau.”

“That’s the thing that scares me,” Estanzio confessed. “I mean, I knew all about mazes and problems, but the set you’ve got had me stopped. And when I saw that flopper catch on to the pattern maze—when it didn’t even know the principle of a maze...” He hesitated. “I’m scared,” he repeated lamely.

“It was a smart one, all right,” Muller said.

Estanzio wasn’t ready to go quite that far. “It could have been a fluke,” he suggested.

Muller shook his head. “No fluke,” he said. He leaned closer. “What if I told you the one we had today wasn’t the first?”

Estanzio frowned. “I hadn’t heard of any others,” he said doubtfully. “And I know there haven’t been any since I’ve been here.”

“You’ve just been here a year,” Muller reminded him. “I had two the year before you came. They both came from, the same place—the same place this one came from.”

“Ziggurat Mountain?”

“Yeah,” Muller said. “An enclave shut up in the mountains with no way out and a population of about seven and a half thousand. It used to be six thousand—it’s been going up the last ten years.”

Estanzio thought about that for a while. Idly, he turned the handle of his coffee cup one way, then the other. “Just the sort of place we could expect it,” he said finally.

Muller nodded, smiling. “Now tell me why.”

“Well, it’s a small population in a limited area—isolated —-and they’re under extreme selection pressure. It’s the sort of situation that’s almost sure to show an evolutionary trend.”

“You got that out of Houterman’s book,” Muller said.

Estanzio flushed. “Sure. But he’s right, isn’t he?”

Muller shrugged. “It’s the same basic principle,” he agreed. “But he wasn’t talking about the setup here. He was talking about evolution by genetic drift—where the genes already exist. That’s not what’s happening here.”

“Are you sure?” Estanzio asked hesitantly.

“Yeah,” Muller stated. “We’ve had this station here ever since the planet switched from Alpha to Beta—that’s close to a thousand years. We’ve been testing Floppers all that time. If the genes had been around back then, they’d’ve shown up in the first couple of centuries. They didn’t. The first flopper that showed up even halfway intelligent—don’t scowl like that, I’ve checked the records—was just forty years ago. And guess where he came from.”

“Ziggurat Mountain?” Estanzio guessed.

Muller rapped a fist on the table. “Right,” he said through his teeth. “It’s a mutation. It’s got to be. And it happened right there in the enclave.”

Estanzio was silent a moment. “Why did you kill it?” he asked.

“Same reason I killed the other two,” Muller said. “I want a look at its brain. The first two—I thought they were flukes. Now I don’t think so—and a look at this one’s brain cells will prove it.”

“But wasn’t that against the rules?” Estanzio wondered. “I mean, a flopper showing exceptional characteristics----”

Muller scratched his satanic beard. “So it was against the rules,” he said contemptuously. “I had to find out, and that’s the only way.”

Abruptly, then, he changed the subject—or seemed to. “You go back with the supply ship, don’t you?”

It wasn’t really much of a question. Only a very unusual scientist-candidate stayed more than one year. Estanzio nodded.

Muller smiled, satisfied. “O.K.,” he said. “When you get back, you can talk about this all you want. But while you’re still here... it didn’t happen. None of it. Understand?”

“I... I think so,” Estanzio said slowly. “But... why?”

“Because they’re getting smart,” Muller told him. “If we don’t do something, they’ll all get smart—smarter than we are. And they’re vicious—you’ve seen what the wild ones are like. Well, we can’t let it happen. That’s why we’ve had this station here all these years—to watch ‘em, because someone way back then figured this might happen. So we can stop ‘em if it does. But there’s just enough softheads around here that want it to happen. We don’t want them finding out—or anybody else.”

“Oh,” Estanzio said. He frowned helplessly. “But what can we do? How can we stop them?”

“Don’t ask,” Muller chuckled. “I might tell you.”

“Well, I’d like to know,” Estanzio said.

Muller leaned his weight on the table. He tapped the hard surface confidentially. “You heard who’s coming in the supply ship this time?”

Estanzio paused, trying to remember. “Well, there’s Blackett, and Holman, and...”

Muller waved a hand. “I don’t mean personnel. I mean just for a look around.”

“Hitchcock?” Estanzio wondered incredulously. “But he’s ... He’d be on their side. He always is.”

“He might be,” Muller admitted, “if he knew what he was doing. Most of the time, he just meddles. That’s what he’s going to do here.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I’m sure,” Muller said, smiling. “I’m going to help him.” He laughed.

“I was horrified, gentlemen. Horrified.”

That, Adam Hitchcock decided, was the thing to say about Xi Scorpii when he got back to Earth. That was what he would tell his Society for Humane Practices, to signal the beginning of a new crusade.

The Xi Scorpii Foundation would protest, of course. They would say he was misrepresenting the facts. But that didn’t worry him. Men always said that when he exposed their iniquities, and it never made the slightest difference. The public always recognized the truth.

Hitchcock made his decision as soon as he arrived at Xi Scorpii—while he was still descending the stairway scaffold that huddled close up against the Wayfarer’s flank. His mood was surly—it had been a bad trip out. The Wayfarer was a cargo ship, with only minimal provision for passengers; he had been obliged to share his cabin with a young scientist-candidate whose single-minded enthusiasm for the mutational aspects of genetic chemistry left him with a very unflattering picture of the scientific mind.

Carrying a piece of luggage in each hand, Hitchcock trudged down the stairs. It was a long way down, and the scaffold felt rickety. It trembled and creaked in the wind.

Any civilized place would have had an elevator.

The wind was cold. It howled around him. It chilled his throat. It penetrated through the thin overcoat he wore—a coat which was all he’d have needed on any civilized planet. His ash-gray hair was tangled. His ears tingled painfully. His jowls were numb. His head ached and his nostrils watered. It was a dreadful planet.

He paused on the stairway and set down his bags. He tried to draw his collar, tight. It was no use—the cold air continued to ooze through. Grimly, he stared down again. The camera looped over his shoulder bumped his side.

The landing field toward which he descended would not have done justice to a survey camp. It was nothing but a leveled-off rock plain without pavement, no larger than a city block. Various atmosphere craft crowded the edge of the field on the side nearest the outpost’s black dome. On the other side, a cold sea spread all the way to the edge of the sky. Sluggish, floe-choked waves smashed on the rocks, building castles of ice with their spray.

Critically, Hitchcock glanced toward the bright sun. It burned in a blue, clear sky, but it gave no warmth. Nor was the system’s other star more than a fleck of light down close to the ice-dappled sea.

Definitely, this planet wasn’t fit for anything to live on —neither man nor any other creature.

Already, he saw as he continued his descent, the ship was disgorging its cargo. Its hoist settled massive crates and bundles of supplies on sledges which were dragged toward the dome by harnessed teams of shaggy, dirty-white, short-legged creatures about the size of very large dogs. At rest, while waiting for their sleds to be loaded, they squatted on their hind legs, their apparently boneless arms curled up almost double and their mittenlike paws, pressed flat against their bodies. No one was directing them. They seemed to know what to do.

Halfway down the scaffold, Hitchcock stopped again. He turned to the man behind him and pointed at the laboring creatures. “Are those the natives?” he asked. He had to shout to be heard above the howl of the wind.

The man—another of those eager young scientist-candidates—didn’t seem to understand the question. “The Floppers?” he wondered uncertainly, then nodded.

Hitchcock unlimbered his camera and put the scene on tape. It was an outrage! The poor things were slaves!

When he reached the bottom, a man in a thick, hooded garment was waiting beside a sled with removable benches set on it. Its eight-flopper team squatted stoically, cringing from the frigid wind. The man reached out to take Hitchcock’s luggage. “Climb aboard,” he invited loudly. “We’ll be heading for the dome in a minute, as soon as the rest of you get down.”

Hitchcock didn’t let go of his bags. He glanced at the harnessed Floppers. “Thank you,” he said stiffly—and his teeth rattled with the cold. “I prefer to walk.”

The man shrugged, but he looked concerned. “It’s a long way to hike in this wind,” he advised, nodding toward the dome a half mile away. “The first thing you know, you’ve took a deep breath, and then you’ve got frost in your lungs. Better ride along with the rest of us peasants.”

“If they have to pull me, I will not ride,” Hitchcock insisted staunchly.

“Who—the floppers?” the man wondered incredulously. “They grew up in this weather. They eat it for breakfast.”

“They didn’t grow up to be slaves,” Hitchcock retorted.

The man looked at him queerly. “You must be this Hitchcock we heard about,” he said. “Listen, mister—somewhere you’ve got the idea these floppers are people. They’re not. They’re just smart animals.”

“No creature in the universe was ever born to be a slave,” Hitchcock intoned.

The man made an exasperated noise. “Just take my word for it. If you walk, you’ll wish you hadn’t. Now climb aboard. We’re ready to move.”

He jerked an imperative thumb at the sled. Hitchcock eyed him for a long, stubborn moment.

Then the cold and the wind persuaded him. He went to the rear of the sled and put his baggage in the rack, all the time stamping his feet to put warmth in them. His hands were numb and blue. Shivering, he told himself the creatures could endure the climate better than himself, and that they would drag the sled whether he rode it or not. He would not add much to their burden.

But he hadn’t forgotten his mission. He raised his camera and taped the scene—first the sled and its load of huddled, windlashed passengers—then swung the lens forward to the Floppers waiting mutely in their harnesses. They had a sad, downtrodden look. Hitchcock let his camera dwell on them.

Unfortunately, they were ugly as sin.

He demanded quarters of his own, and got them. Coldly, he rejected the suggestion that a flopper could carry his luggage. Lordly, austere, he strode along the corridor to his room.

When he got there, a flopper was inside. With single-minded concentration, it went on sweeping while Hitchcock laid his bags on the bed. For all the sign it gave, it might not have noticed his entrance.

It would have been as tall as Hitchcock, but its legs were too short. Its pelt was silvery gray. Its head was revolting— a slab-shaped, almost neckless thing set on top of a shoulderless body. The big, goggling eyes were placed far apart, leaving space for the big, lipless mandible-jaws in. between them. On top, the single ear stood up like the peak of a much-too-small cowl.

The rest of the creature was equally hideous—the flexible arms as seemingly boneless as a fire hose, and the flat, big, floppy feet. It was marsupial, with a pendulous pouch that pulsed spasmodically, as if something alive was inside. But the creature was also unquestionably—almost indecently— masculine. It had a musky smell. Hitchcock stared at it with sick distaste.

It continued to work the broom with brainless absorption. It swept around Hitchcock’s feet as if he was a piece of furniture.

“Stop that!” Hitchcock commanded offendedly.

The flopper stopped. Looking up at him dumbly, it rolled its bulbous brown eyes.

“Get out of here!” Hitchcock told it.

The flopper just looked at him, dumb and trembling. Tentatively, it started sweeping again.

“No! Get out!” Hitchcock yelled.

Frantically, the flopper went on sweeping. It tried to work too fast. The broom flew out of its flipperlike hands and whacked Hitchcock’s knee. Hitchcock yowled with pain and rage.

The creature fled, bounding out the door on all fours. Hitchcock grabbed the broom and chased it as far as the hall, until it disappeared around a comer.

Slamming the door, Hitchcock went back and sat on the bed. He rolled down his hose to inspect his whacked knee. It was an angry red, but not damaged.

The stupid brute!

Someone knocked on the door. Hitchcock pulled up the hose and refastened the top to his undershorts. Smoothing down his tunic skirt, he said, “You may enter.”

A slovenly dressed man came in—ankle socks, ill-fitting kilt, and turtleneck. He had a full, untrimmed, black beard. “What’s the ruckus in here?” he asked.

“Ruckus?” Hitchcock repeated incredulously. “Here?”

“Yeah. Here,” the man insisted. “One of my cleaning boys skedaddled out of this hallway and dove in his hutch like a carload of hell was looking for him. He’d cleaned up this far, so he must’ve been here.” He glanced down at his feet. “That’s his broom.” He picked it up.

“I told it to leave,” Hitchcock said. “I refuse to be a party to its slavery.”

“Exactly how did you say it?” the man asked intently.

“I asked it please to get out of here,” Hitchcock stated primly. “I must say the creature was unpardonably stupid. I had to repeat it twice.”

The bearded man looked skeptical, but didn’t challenge the assertion. “That’s not in his vocabulary,” he told Hitchcock. “You’re new here, so I guess it isn’t your fault. But after this, if you want a Flopper to scram, say, ‘That’s all,’ and he’ll get right out. They’re real obedient if you’re proper with ‘em. But you got to give ‘em the right commands.”

“I’ll keep my own room clean,” Hitchcock announced frigidly. “Keep your slaves out of here.”

“If you want ‘em to stay out, bolt the door,” the bearded man advised. “It’ll worry the boy to have his routine monkeyed with, but it’s better than to scuttle his training.”

“Keep them away from me,” Hitchcock repeated.

The man looked him up and down. His eyes were steady; “Don’t expect ‘em to understand everything you say,” he said finally. “They don’t.”

He backed out of the room and shut the door.

Mindful of his banged knee, still seething, Hitchcock rummaged in his bags for the liniment tube he always carried. He most certainly would keep his door locked. The mere thought of that mindless creature pawing his possessions made him tremble with rage.

It was terrible, the indignities a man of good will was forced to endure!

“I hope your room is satisfactory,” Ben Reese said as they began Hitchcock’s tour of the outpost. He was a plump man, Ben Reese—almost forty, with a round face and an almost bald scalp. Hitchcock worried him.

“Adequate,” Hitchcock replied. He had a nerve-rattling way of walking—never looking where they went. Constantly, he twisted his head in one direction, then another. “Spartan, but adequate.”

“We don’t have many luxuries here,” Reese admitted. “Everything we have has to come in the supply ship.”

“Um-m-m,” Hitchcock muttered. “Tell me, Mr. Reese— what is it like to be the undisputed monarch of an entire solar system?”

Shocked speechless, Reese stopped in his tracks and. stared at the man. “I don’t think you understand,” he said finally. Hitchcock walked loftily on. Reese had to run to catch up. “All I do is... is co-ordinate our research work here,” he explained, breathless. “And ... and I estimate our supply needs. The ship only comes once a year—someone has to do it.”

But Hitchcock’s attention was on something else. Maybe he was deaf—he didn’t seem to have heard.

They followed the dome’s main hall. Their buskinned feet whispered softly on the tiles. Only a few people passed them. In the dim light, the near silence, it was like the cellars under a castle. Floppers intent on their tasks scurried past like industrious gnomes.

At the hall’s end, where it split into two out-curving corridors, Reese paused. “Would you rather see the anatomy lab first?” he asked. “Or the biochemical department?”

Hitchcock didn’t reply. Not far up one of the corridors, a flopper was belaboring the floor with a mop. A sloppy bucket sloshed by its feet. With an almost expressionless look of glee, Hitchcock turned his camera on it.

The flopper worked on, oblivious of them. After a long moment, Hitchcock stopped his camera and turned. “You said something?” he inquired.

“I asked what you wanted to see first,” Reese said.

Hitchcock glanced down at him as if he were a bug. “It makes absolutely no difference,” he assured Reese. “Before I am done here, I will expect to have seen everything.”

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.”

“But these... they weren’t starved,” Reese argued. “They were probably half-starved when they were captured, of course, but they’ve been fed since then—most of them several times.”

“I cannot believe that,” Hitchcock retorted. “Those creatures were starved.”

Reese shook his head. “Their reaction was pure habit,” he said. “Food is scarce for them. It’s been scarce all their lives. Their ... their ravenousness is natural for them.”

With a look of scornful pleasure on his face, Hitchcock pounced. “May I ask why you permit them to starve?”

It came to Reese that he had made a mistake. In trying to win a small argument, he had given Hitchcock support for a much more serious—much more difficult argument.

“Why... why,” he stammered. “We’re scientists. We’re here to... to study the Floppers. It’s our whole reason for being here. You see... you see, we believe the floppers stand a very good chance of developing human-level intelligence. We’ve been watching for signs of it for nearly a thousand years, now. And if we tried to make their lives any easier, it would interfere with their development.”

“Nonsense,” Hitchcock sniffed.

“It isn’t nonsense,” Reese persisted reasonably. “It’s a logical conclusion based on the principle of natural selection. If you’d let me explain the situation here—”

“I am fully aware of the situation here,” Hitchcock replied. “I consider it disgraceful.”

Reese gritted his teeth. “This is an unusual planet,” he said earnestly, hoping the man would pause and begin to doubt. “That is, its orbit is unusual.”

“Well, certainly,” Hitchcock said. “I would expect a planet in a double-star system to have a distorted orbit.”

“It’s worse than that,” Reese persisted mildly. “When this system was explored the first time, this planet had an orbit around Alpha—it’s still in the books as Alpha II. But now it’s going around Beta.”

“What?” Hitchcock boggled. “Preposterous.”

“It’s true,” Reese said helplessly. “And not only that, we think Alpha and Beta have been passing it back and forth ever since it was formed. They have rather eccentric orbits around each other, you see, and they come rather close together every forty-five years. If the planet is in the right part of its orbit when they’re closest together, the other star captures it.”

“Does this happen very often?” Hitchcock asked sarcastically.

Reese made a helpless gesture. “It’s different every time,” he explained. “It might stay with one star for a hundred thousand years, or maybe just for a couple of hundred. Each time it’s traded, it takes up a different orbit—that is, different from any it’s ever had before. The next time it happens will be three and a half thousand years from now.”

Hitchcock sniffed. “This is very interesting, if true,” he said. “But it has nothing to do with the deplorable way you have treated the natives.”

“It has everything to do with how we treat them,” Reese insisted. “You see, every time the planet changed orbits, its climate has been drastically altered. We have a lot of geological evidence of that. I guess Alpha and Beta are more similar than most binary pairs, but there’s still quite a difference in their radiation. And the various orbits the planet took put it at different distances out from them.”

“I presume this has some significance,” Hitchcock interrupted testily.

Reese nodded. “We’re almost certain that the living things on this planet can endure great extremes of climate— if they couldn’t, they’d have died out long ago. It’s even possible that life here was wiped out completely by some of the changes—it might have happened hundreds of times before the cycle we’re seeing now got started. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know for sure.”

Hitchcock looked down at him with a fastidious expression on his face. “Never have I heard such a preposterous idea,” he declared. “As if the spark of life could be snapped off and on like an electric lamp.”

Reese had heard of people who thought like that, but he had never met one before. It was like meeting something out of the dark ages. “I was trying to emphasize how... how hardy the life-forms on this planet must be,” he explained diplomatically. “How... how adaptable. We think they have the capacity to evolve hundreds of times faster than on any other planet. So you see, being here is a wonderful opportunity to see evolution at work. And—”

“You have not yet explained,” Hitchcock reminded him again, “why you have neglected the welfare of the natives here ... why you vivisect them, and—”

So he was back where he started, Reese thought. It was discouraging, “Why, I thought it was obvious,” he explained. “The Floppers aren’t really intelligent—yet. But they do have the... the potential to become intelligent. It’s really almost inevitable in a situation like this—that is, with an unpredictably erratic environment, intelligence is almost certain to develop sometime, because intelligence is the one specialization that gives an animal the ability to live in a whole lot of different environments. You see, we’re not just studying the evolution process here—we’re ... we’re watching the development of intellect. Sooner or later, somewhere on this planet, the Floppers are almost certain to become... to become intelligent. I mean, intelligent the way a...a human being is intelligent. And we want to be here. We want to see it happen. We’ve never had the chance to see it happen in an animal before.”

Hitchcock scowled. “You speak as if men were animals,” he criticized. “As if an animal could have a mind.”

“Well, human beings are a form of animal,” Reese put in.

“That,” Hitchcock snapped, “is nonsense. Dangerous nonsense. I want to hear no more of it.” He hitched up his camera’s shoulder strap. “As for this matter of intellect, I have only your word they are not intelligent right now. I will have to have proof, Mr. Reese. I must have proof.”

Ben Reese gave up. He could not prove a thing to a man who refused to believe.

It was a good time to hunt. No wind blew loose snow on the screecher’s tracks, blotting them. No mistiness obscured the distance, and the sky’s light shimmered on the white land. Qua-orellee kept his eyes tightly lidded to lessen the glare. The tracks were new. The beast could not be very far ahead. Qua-orellee loped along, following them, but he stayed well aside of the trail for fear the snow would open under him like a mouth and devour him.

He had seen it happen, once. He and some other people were following the tracks of a bushy-tailed runner, and one of the people went close to the creature’s trail. A hole opened under him and he was gone. Qua-orellee and the other people fled instantly. Since that time, Qua-orellee had never gone closer than three body-lengths to any creature’s trail—not even his own.

The screecher’s tracks vanished over the crest of a rise. Qua-orellee veered away from the trail, to reach the crest well away from where the screecher had been. It was hard to climb the slope with only his rear legs. He dropped down and hobbled along using one of his front limbs. In the flipperlike hand of the other, he clutched his rock.

His rock was a treasure—his only possession. He would need it when he came upon the screecher and had to kill it. It was hard to find a rock of a good shape and size for killing beasts with, but a rock was wonderfully better than ice. Ice broke easily. It didn’t keep its shape. And, too, it took a much stronger blow to kill with it.

He never let the rock out of his sight, and rarely out of his hand. He clasped it to him when he slept, and he slept in his own secret place. Any other of the people would eagerly kill him—if they dared to try—to possess that rock.

He topped the rise. Below him, the screecher’s trail turned down along the valley, away from him. Qua-orellee let out a high-hacking cry, to tell the people who had joined him in the hunt that the screecher had turned in a new direction. Shrill, rasping calls came back from either side of him, repeating the news. Then another cry came from down-valley—the beast had been seen.

Qua-orellee clutched his rock against him and plunged eagerly down the slope. His big, flipper-feet and short legs made him stumble. He rolled all the way to the bottom in a cloud of snow, but he didn’t let go of his rock. No matter what happened, he would never let go of his rock.

He stood up and shook the snow out of his fur. Up-valley, two more people—not encumbered with rocks—were bounding down the hillside on all fours. They continued across the valley and up the other slope. When they reached the crest, they headed toward where the screecher had been seen. Qua-orellee stayed in the trough of the valley. He followed the trail.

The valley curved around the bulk of a massive, steep hill. As he rounded the turn, Qua-orellee saw the screecher far ahead. Three people up on the ridge had gotten abreast’ of the beast, and one of them was lolloping down into the valley to head it off. On the ridge on the other side of the valley, the two who had crossed over were rapidly catching up, running on all fours. Qua-orellee was far behind. He hurried as fast he could on his short legs and large feet.

The other people closed down into the trough of the valley, forming a wide-spaced crescent-circle line in front of the screecher. They had picked up chunks of ice and ice-spears. They confronted the beast.

The screecher stopped. It hunched down, as if to leap. They advanced toward it, ice weapons brandished. For a long moment, the screecher did not move. Then, with a snarl, it turned and retreated up the valley toward Qua-orellee.

Qua-orellee rushed to meet it. It saw him and veered away —started up the side of the valley. One of the people, galloping along in pursuit, headed it off. It swung back down into the valley, toward Qua-orellee. Qua-orellee stopped and stood erect, holding his rock high above him in both hands.

The beast charged. Its muscles pulsed and slackened rhythmically. It screamed its rage and savagery. Unflinching, Qua-orellee tensed himself to smash his rock down on the beast’s skull. He watched the beast surge toward him, screeching.

Fearlessly, he waited.

Ahead, the land loomed in the cold mist, a high mass of darkness rising out of the gray, frosty sea. Hitchcock cringed from it as it rushed overwhelmingly toward him, but then the pilot sent the skimmer sailing toward the crest. Hitchcock looked down dizzily at the crumbling, ice-crusted cliff. Sudden gusts of wind slammed into the small craft. It bucked and jolted, and the pilot fought silently. The engine surged.

Then they were over the land. The winds fell away. Hitchcock saw spread before him a desolate plain of ice and crumbling stone, and beyond, towering high, the white mountains.

But not one living thing.

The pilot twisted around and looked to the man in the midship seat. “Want to check the traps?” he asked. His parka hood was pushed back, and the wind mask dangled from his throat like a bib.

“Yeah,” Muller said. He had a snarling voice. “Check ‘em. He—” He meant Hitchcock. “He wants to see how we work. But they won’t have caught anything.”

The pilot nodded, shrugged, and turned front again. The skimmer leaped forward.

Hitchcock lifted his camera. The utter lifelessness of the rock-littered plain was oppressive. It was something the people back home ought to see. This scene, more than any words he could say to them, would impress on them how dreadful Xi Scorpii was.

Muller twisted around to face him. Reluctantly, Hitchcock put down the camera and waited for him to speak.

“We’ll see if our traps’ve caught anything,” Muller said. “If they haven’t, we’ll have to go catch our own.”

“What? Do you hunt them?” Hitchcock demanded. The mere idea was appalling.

“We got to get specimens somehow,” Muller told him.

The skimmer settled down close to the ground and streaked over the plain. The weathered boulders sprawled kaleidoscopically across their path, momentarily slashing at them, then vanished in the distance behind. Ahead, the glacier-choked mountains rose into high, wispy clouds.

“How’s it look?” Muller asked. “Pretty bare, huh?” He chuckled. “Wait a couple of months. Right now, it’s the tail end of summer.”

“Summer?” Hitchcock wondered incredulously. Here and there, a few hardy plants dug their roots into chinks in the rock, clinging to existence. Their segmented limbs and stems were frost-burst and coated with rime. Their fleshy, gray-green spines were spread in plaintive supplication to the distant sun.

Tentatively, Hitchcock raised his camera.

“Yeah, summer,” Muller repeated. “We get about a whole year of it—one out of four. We’re closer to the sun, then. Sometimes the temperature gets up as high as fifteen, here in the tropics—sometimes for weeks at a stretch.”

“Only fifteen?” Hitchcock gestured at the rock-strewn, snowless plain. “Why isn’t the snow—”

“Fifteen centigrade,” Muller explained shortly. “But it just thaws out close to the ocean. The other side of these mountains, there’s plenty of snow. You’ll see.”

The mountains bulked massively over them. The snow-sheathed slopes and bare rock cliffs reared steeply upward like a titan’s wall. For several minutes, the skimmer cruised along that wall, then swung directly toward it where a glacier oozed from a narrow valley down onto the plain.

The glacier’s front was like a cliff, sheer and awesome, leaning outward. Berg-sized fragments, broken from it, lay in rubble at its feet. Engine snarling, the skimmer rose before the pebble-pocked wall.

Strong, battering bursts of wind hit the craft as it cleared the edge. Its engine screamed as it forced its way forward into the cold air flowing down from the mountains. Yawning fissures and dark, rippling veins of embedded pebbles streaked past beneath them.

Hitchcock lifted his camera again. The glacier imprinted itself on his tape. “Where are we going?” he asked.

“The other side of the mountains,” Muller said. “Where the floppers are.”

Hitchcock looked up at the mountains. The valley had curved. Mountains rose skyward all around them.

“But aren’t floppers—” How he hated that silly word! “Don’t floppers live back there?”

“Not many,” Muller said. “That section of coast is cut off from the rest, and there’s nothing to live on in winter. Mostly, they stick to the snow country.”

“Snow country?” It sounded ominous. “How can they live?”

“They get along,” Muller said.

The glacier swelled upward steeply where it squeezed between two mountain shoulders. The skimmer sailed loftily over the crest—flew on into the heart of the mountains.

“How?” Hitchcock demanded. “What do they live on?”

‘They take in each other’s wash,” Muller said.

“I don’t understand,” Hitchcock said blankly.

“They gnaw each other’s bones. Put it that way.”

The skimmer descended from the mountains to a land of low hills smothered in snow. The sky was cloudlessly blue, and sunlight shimmered blindingly on the frozen, white wasteland. Hitchcock adjusted his camera to minimum sensitivity, to compensate for the glare.

“There it is,” Muller said. “Flopper country.”

Hitchcock thought of a baron showing off his domain from a castle’s wall. “Where are they?” he asked.

Muller snorted. “Oh, they’re out there. But it’s a lot of land, and not many floppers. Our last census put it at about one for every twenty square miles. And without a body heat spotter, half the time you don’t see ‘em.” He handed Hitchcock a pair of sun goggles.

The skimmer struck out across the rolling land. It stayed high over the hills. “The traps don’t signal,” the pilot announced. “Check ‘em anyway?”

“Naw. Skip it,” Muller grumbled. “Just waste our time.”

He twisted around to speak to Hitchcock. ‘Traps don’t catch much, these days,” he said. “They’re getting too smart to get caught.”

“Oh?” Hitchcock asked, interested.

“We use pit traps,” Muller explained. “Any other kind’d be no good in this kind of country. They caught a lot of ‘em, a couple hundred years ago. Not any more.”

“I see,” Hitchcock said. He was almost delighted. At least the creatures weren’t completely at the mercy of these men.

“You know what I think?” Muller confided. “I think all we ever caught was dumb ones—the smart ones knew enough not to get caught. Now the dumb ones’ve died out— there’s nothing but smart ones left. So we don’t catch ‘em. Not with traps, anyhow.”

“But you catch them?” Hitchcock inferred.

“Yeah. Sometimes,” Muller said. He called forward to the pilot. “Head for that place we found all the tracks last week. Maybe they’ll still be around.”

“How?” Hitchcock asked. “How do you catch them?”

“You’ll see,” Muller answered. He rummaged in a compartment under his feet and brought out a net. He unfolded it and laid it in a long, narrow roll on the cowling beside himself and Hitchcock, up against the cockpit’s transparent canopy. He hooked lanyards from the exposed corners to grommets inside the cockpit, just under the rim.

“Dr. Muller,” Hitchcock said, almost pleading, “haven’t you done anything to help these poor creatures? Do you simply let them live in this horrible country? And starve? Freeze? Die—?”

”Why not?” Muller wondered. “They’re just a bunch of animals.”

“Why... why it’s your human duty,” Hitchcock protested, shuddering.

“Look,” Muller said with a firm, inflexible patience. “We’re scientists. We’re here to study these critters—watch ‘em and see if they evolve. If we tried to help ‘em, we’d mess things up. We couldn’t tell what happened naturally and what happened because we made it happen. Anyway, they’re no worse off than if we hadn’t discovered this planet.”

“Dr. Muller,” Hitchcock said, condemnation in his tone, “you haven’t one spark of humanity in you.”

Muller laughed. “Good thing I don’t, or I’d be no good here,” he said. “Look, mister. These critters have it hard— they’ve got to live in this country, or they die. And if they live, it’s because they’ve adapted. And if they adapt, it’s because they’re evolving. Do you want to get in the way of that? Do you?”

“It’s indecent!” Hitchcock sputtered. “Criminal! You’d let these poor creatures die and... and suffer without lifting a hand! Why, they have the same right to live that you do. I will see them granted that right.”

“Go ahead,” Muller sneered. “Just don’t interfere with our work. This here’s the biggest project in the universe.”

“Tracks,” the pilot reported.

Hitchcock looked out. Far below, a thin trail threaded across the crest of a low hill and down a steep slope. The skimmer paused and settled groundwards. The trail became the dragging tracks of a clumsy, struggling animal—the flattish footprints close-spaced and scuffed, as if the feet had not been lifted clear of the snow.

“It’s a flopper, all right,” Muller decided. “Cruise around —let’s see if there’s more.”

The pilot kept them low. They followed the low ridge and crossed several more trails, all of them headed in the same direction. “Looks like a hunting pack to me,” the pilot judged.

“That’s what it is,” Muller confirmed. And to Hitchcock, “They just started hunting like this about forty years ago. Most of ‘em still hunt by themselves, but every once in a while we find signs of ‘em working together—like this.”

Hitchcock let his camera scan the pattern of tracks in the snow. “Is it significant?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Muller said. “They’re not gregarious critters. Like I said, most of ‘em hunt by themselves. This is the first sign we’ve had of ‘em getting together—they’re developing a social sense.”

“Civilization?” Hitchcock wondered, awed.

“It’s the start of it,” Muller said. “Right here.”

The pilot had turned the skimmer to follow the hunting pack. Muller pointed down at one of the trails in the snow. “That’s the tracks of the thing they’re after.”

It looked very much like the other trails—slightly messier, with the footprints overlapping in a complicated pattern. Hitchcock gave his camera a long, careful look while the skimmer swept up the slope of the low hill and down the other side into the deep valley.

“It’s just another sign they’re turning smart,” Muller said. ‘Them hunting in packs, I mean. That’s evolution working. It takes brains to stay alive in a country like this.”

“Do you mean to tell me,” Hitchcock wondered, “that this is why you refuse to help them—so you can watch their desperate struggles? To... satisfy your own curiosity?”

“Sure,” Muller said. He sounded very satisfied with himself. “Can you think of a better reason? Besides, we may have to fight ‘em some day. It’ll be a good idea to know all we can about ‘em.”

“But what possible reason could we have for fighting these... these pitiful creatures?” Hitchcock protested.

“If they get smarter than we are,” Muller told him, “we better fight ‘em. And I’ve got evidence they’re going to.”

That seemed to settle that. Hitchcock shuddered with horror. For the first time, he could understand Muller’s attitude. It troubled him greatly, and he knew it was wrong. He was sure it was wrong. It had to be!

But he, too, was afraid.

The quarry’s trail turned to follow the valley. The pilot banked the skimmer sharply to turn after it. “Those tracks look new,” he observed.

“A couple of hours or less,” Muller agreed. The skimmer rocketed down the valley. Hitchcock leaned forward, peering ahead. He held his camera ready to use.

“Are they very far ahead?” he asked.

“Hard to tell,” Muller answered. “They can move pretty fast when they want to.” He pointed to a set of tracks that paralleled the tracks of the quarry. “That boy was using three legs—sort of like an ape when it’s running. They do that when they’re in a hurry—or else all four.”

“They run like animals?” Hitchcock demanded. He had a vision of the bumbling, shambling creatures bounding along on all four legs like beasts. The thought was appalling.

The skimmer skidded around the curve of a high, moundlike hill. And there they were. Still far ahead and indistinct in the sun-glare, they were nevertheless unmistakable. Floppers—eight or ten of them.

“Pull back,” Muller snapped.

The skimmer bucked and shuddered as the pilot slammed it to a stop against the windblast of its fans. Quickly, they slipped back around the curve of the hill.

“Now you’ll see how we do it,” Muller told Hitchcock. “Better get buttoned up. It’s cold out there.” He helped Hitchcock with the unfamiliar clasps of his wind mask, and made sure his parka was zipped tight.

Then he got busy in his own part of the cockpit. Hitchcock leaned forward to see. When he had his own wind mask in place, and his parka was tight, Muller opened the canopy on the side where the net lay rolled on the cowling. A blast of cold air burst into the cockpit. Hitchcock felt it even through his thick clothes. It leaked in through his mask and around the brow ridge of his goggles. Painfully, it invaded his nose as he breathed.

Muller pointed to the grommet near Hitchcock’s knee, where the net was secured. “Is it tied down good?” he asked. His mask muffled his voice. Hitchcock glanced down negligently and nodded.

Not that he cared if it was tied down properly or not. It was revolting merely to think of using a net to capture a flopper. Such things were unfair—unsportsmanlike.

But Muller accepted the answer. “Let’s go!” he barked.

The pilot leaned forward, pushing the control stick all the way front. The skimmer tilted forward. The engine surged.

They skittered around the curve of the hill, then straightened out and drove. Hitchcock felt the icy wind smash against him. Intense cold leaked through his parka’s fastenings. The wind thundered around him. He raised his camera and focused it on the place far ahead where the floppers were gathered. The skimmer hurtled forward like a boat on the crest of a wave.

Muller held a set of binoculars up against his goggles, studying the scene ahead. “They got the thing surrounded,” he announced. “One of ‘em’s got a—” He stopped. “Get that one!” he rapped out. “The first one we come to. He’s the one we want!”

Hitchcock could make them out, now. A line of Floppers was driving a sinuous, short-legged beast toward another flopper. That flopper was standing still, its back to the skimmer. It held something over its head with both of its flipperlike paws. The beast was gliding toward it like a snake.

“That’s the one we want!” Muller yelled into the wind.

Muller pushed the rolled net over the skimmer’s side. It unrolled and flapped sluggishly in the wind. The skimmer rocked.

They were very close, now, and traveling fast. A plume of wind-lifted snow blew up behind them. Hitchcock held his camera fixed on the flopper. The scene exploded into largeness before them.

At the last moment, the pilot spun the skimmer broadside, setting the net to scoop up the flopper. At that instant, Hitchcock reached down and wrenched the net’s anchor cord from the grommet near his knee.

Because he was doing that, his camera did not record what followed. The net, robbed of half its support, bunched into a bundle which clubbed the flopper from behind and tumbled it into the snow. A large, ragged, heart-shaped rock flew from its paws.

The skimmer hurtled onward from its own momentum. The pilot fought to slow it down. Hitchcock raised his camera again.

He got what happened next on the tape—the catlike pounce of the beast, the desperate struggling of the flopper, and the sudden gush of turquoise blood on the white snow.

“You see?” Hitchcock cried triumphantly “You see? That’s how you make them live! You murderers!”

It was days later that Hitchcock commanded Muller to show how he measured the floppers’ intelligence.

Consistently, as his investigation progressed, he had heard their intelligence disparaged. It was a lie and a conspiracy, of course, but he was gradually forced to the realization that the ultimate success or failure of his mission would depend on whether he could turn up evidence to prove they were intelligent.

Muller smiled and took him into the laboratory.

At first, what he saw was not encouraging. The problem tests were fantastically simple. In fact, when he tried them, their solutions were practically obvious. But he did force Muller to concede that the floppers could do them, too.

“Yeah, they do ‘em,” Muller said sneeringly. “They do ‘em almost as good as you do.”

Then they came to some problems not so easy. Problems like the fire-moat, in which—to reach a scrap of food— the flopper had to cross a wide bed of flame-bright coals.

Baffled, Hitchcock paced back and forth along the edge, his hollow-jowled face made ruddy by the heat. There wasn’t any way he could do it. No way at all. Finally, he gave up. “This is impossible,” he protested.

“Yeah?” Muller smiled. He walked over, picked up a mat from the floor, and threw it across the hot coals.

“How should I have known it was fireproof?” Hitchcock protested. He was using his camera again, recording the problem and its solution.

“How did you know it wasn’t?” Muller answered. “You should have tried it, to find out.”

“But you can’t expect an... an untrained savage to think of that,” Hitchcock argued.

Muller shrugged. “It’s a tough trick, all right,” he admitted. “But we’ve had a few floppers do it.”

“Impossible,” Hitchcock snapped.

“Not those floppers,” Muller snorted. “They were smart.”

“What?” Hitchcock wondered. He wasn’t sure he’d heard right. “Not really!”

Muller shrugged and smiled. “We have had a few smart ones,” he admitted.

Hitchcock paused, inwardly jubilant, but he pretended not to be especially impressed. Like a hunter catching sight of his prey, he decided to wait—to bide his time and hope that Muller, unsuspecting, would make further revelations.

The man had the proof he—Hitchcock—needed. That was all he had to know.

There were more problems, most of them even more difficult. Hitchcock managed to solve very few of them, in spite of his heightened vigilance. Muller didn’t explain how he expected floppers to solve them, when even a man was baffled. He just smiled.

Hitchcock used his camera to record the ones that stopped him. If the floppers were considered stupid on the basis of tests like these, it was good proof that they were intelligent.

Then they came to the maze problems. Hitchcock blundered through the first few simple ones and came out pleased with his own accomplishment, but annoyed because he couldn’t use them for evidence.

“Well, at least these are simple enough,” he snapped.

“We just use those to give ‘em an idea what a maze is,” Muller told him. He conducted Hitchcock into another room, where a gigantic panel of signal lights covered a whole wall. He opened a door and motioned Hitchcock inside. Confidently, Hitchcock walked in.

The door clicked behind him. When he turned, there wasn’t a sign of where the door had been.

An awful, trapped feeling seized him. He pounded on the wall and shouted. No one answered. The tunnels around him swallowed the sounds without an echo.

He started to run.

Half a minute later, out of breath, he stopped.

This wasn’t like the other ones. This one was hard.

He looked around. Nothing looked familiar. He couldn’t even be sure which way he’d come. He was lost.

Appalled and fearful, he started to search. It was useless. The passageways branched and intersected endlessly. They curved and zigzagged and circled back on themselves. He lost all sense of direction—all sense of distance and time. Trying to trace back his steps, he took a wrong turn. Blank walls stopped him. A down-spiraling tunnel descended to a pool of black, utterly motionless water. Wearily, he turned around and climbed up again.

Then he stopped, breathing hard from the climb. The tunnel forked and other tunnels led off from it. Any one of them could be the right one. Or none of them. Blank-minded, frustrated, Hitchcock lifted his camera and slowly swung it in a full circle.

Let the people back home see this, he thought.. Let them see the endless convolutions—the total formlessness of this maze. Let them judge for themselves how well it measured a person’s intelligence.

And it was because of things like this they said the floppers were animal stupid! It was ridiculous. Why, even a man as intelligent as himself couldn’t find his way through. The most brilliant man alive couldn’t do it.

“Had enough, Hitchcock?” Muller’s voice asked.

Startled, Hitchcock whirled. He was completely alone. “Where are you?” he demanded. “Show yourself.”

“Had enough?” Muller asked again tauntingly.

The tunnels twisted around him crazily, shapelessly. A man was a fool to keep trying. He might spend days in this place. Why, he could starve! “Yes! YES!” Hitchcock cried. “Where are you?”

“Wait there,” Muller told him. “I’ll come get you.”

Legs aching with fatigue, Hitchcock slouched against the smooth wall. Why, it was outrageous! The silly rabbit warren didn’t even have a place to sit down!

Sigurd Muller came strolling along the passageway less than two minutes later. “How was it?” he asked, smiling raffishly.

Hitchcock straightened up. “How can you believe that this... this silly game gives the slightest indication of a person’s intelligence? It’s absolutely foolish.”

Muller chuckled. “I don’t know,” he said easily. “It gave me a good look at yours.”

Hitchcock sputtered. “Young man, no person could possibly find his way out.”

“Yeah?” Muller wondered. “Follow me.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, turned, and walked off.

“But you know the way out,” Hitchcock protested. He had to scurry to catch up with Muller.

Muller didn’t look back. “It isn’t easy,” he admitted, walking along almost jauntily. “But some people do it the first time through. We’ve even had some Floppers do it.”

“Chance,” Hitchcock declared, breathing hard to match Muller’s pace. “Pure chance.”

Muller shook his head. “It wasn’t chance,” he said. He was very sure. “You don’t get through a thing this tricky just with luck. Not fast, you don’t. You either just hunt till you hit it, or you think up a method. If you hunt, you’re a good long time getting out. But if you’re real smart, you think up a method. Those floppers were smart.”

“I was told,” Hitchcock said pointedly, “that these natives are not intelligent.”

“You were, huh?” Muller growled. He shrugged. “They must’ve been talking about the tame ones that do our muscle work for us. They are dumb. So are a lot of the wild ones, but there’s been some smart ones, too. There’s even been a few so smart none of these tests showed their limits. And that is smart. I get scared when I think about ‘em.”

Then suddenly, they emerged from the maze. Hitchcock stopped and looked around. They were in the same room he had entered the maze from. The door he had gone through was there in the opposite wall.

“Want to try it again?” Muller asked.

“No thank you,” Hitchcock snapped. “I’ve had quite enough of these childish games.”

Wryly, carelessly, Muller smiled. “Anything else you want to see?”

“Yes,” Hitchcock said firmly. “I want you to show me proof of these intelligent floppers.”

Muller nodded cockily. “I figured you would,” he said. “I got it all ready for you.”

He led Hitchcock from the testing rooms to a small, file-jammed office. The files were a primitive type, as if the scientists here had never heard of memory crystals. Muller bent over the librarian’s console and punched out a combination. A folder dropped into the delivery slot.

Muller passed it to Hitchcock, and motioned him to the desk. Hitchcock sat down and spread out the folder’s contents. It wasn’t an impressive display. The data-tables were meaningless. The multi-colored photo plates were nothing but abstract designs. Nevertheless, Hitchcock held his camera over them and recorded them slowly, page by page.

Then Muller’s shadow fell across the desk. His finger prodded the stacked data pages. “This is how they went through the tests,” he said. With a twist of the hand he fanned the sheets out and pulled free a set of seven pages. He laid them on top of the others. “These are how a scientist-candidate scored—I put ‘em in to compare with.”

Hitchcock separated the four sets of papers and laid them on the desk—the one of the scientist-candidate and three containing the scores Floppers had made. He tried to compare the records, glancing randomly from one set to another. But all four were confusingly similar, and the complex mass of numbers, plus and minus signs, and symbols meant nothing to him.

Muller brushed Hitchcock’s hands out of the way. He traced a fingertip across the laid-out sequence of the scientist-candidate’s scores. Three-quarters of the way through the record, he paused.

“Up to here,” he said, “he was even with ‘em. They missed a few and he missed a few—they came out even. But from here on—”

His finger traced to the end of the record, then transferred to the corresponding section of the record of one of the floppers. Instantly, Hitchcock saw that the two were radically different.

“From here on,” Muller continued, “they were way ahead of him—faster and slicker. They didn’t miss hardly one. And those jobs were tough. Just to give you an idea—” He pointed to a spot not quite halfway through the test sequence. “Here’s where you pegged out.”

Astonished, Hitchcock looked down at the expanse of records. The scientist-candidate must have been a genius to score so far above him. And those floppers—he could not comprehend such intelligence. It didn’t matter that he didn’t understand the notations or the things they made reference to. Now that it had been pointed out to him, the meaning of those tabulations was plain. He held his camera up and recorded them again.

Muller slapped the photo plates down on top of the papers. “As for these—” he said. “These are brain tissue.” He indicated three sheets of eight photos each. ‘These came from the floppers—the smart ones. And these”—he tapped another set—”are a man’s brain. I figured you’d want to compare them, but don’t trust it too far—Floppers’ brains aren’t made the same. This one’s”—he pointed to the fifth set of photos—”from a normal flopper—one of the boys we keep around to do the work for us.”

Hitchcock tried to study the photo plates—tried to discover the similarities and the differences in them. But his eye was not trained—he didn’t know what to look for. The plates were as meaningless as the data sheets had been. Again, Sigurd Muller helped him.

“We use a variable intensity dye,” he explained. “Where it’s thin, it shows up red—where it’s heavy, it’s blue. We put it in one cell on each plate.”

He tapped one of the photo plates—the human one— where a blue splotch lay against a pale green-yellow background. Rootlike arms spread out from the splotch in all directions, branching and rebranching into countless red filaments thinner than hairs.

“That’s one brain cell,” he said. “Those”—he indicated the arms and the red filaments—”are how it makes connections with the other cells. Put a lot of ‘em together and you’ve got a whole network of connections. This one’s different from the others, but all of ‘em have connections like that. That’s what makes for intelligence—connections.”

Hitchcock frowned. These things were difficult to grasp. “Repeat that,” he requested.

“Take it this way,” Muller said. “Intelligence depends on a lot of units being tied up together in a network of communication—a lot of connections and a lot of channels of contact. The smarter you are, the more interconnections you’ve got, and it goes the same the other way around. So there’s two ways you can be smart, if you’ve got a big enough brain case to start with. You can have ordinary-size brain cells with a lot of these connecting threads, or you can have a lot of cells smaller than normal. Now— look what we’ve got here.”

He tapped the plate with the human brain cells on it. “Here we’ve got normal-size cells with a whole mess of connections.” He moved his finger on to the samples from the normal flopper. “This boy was dumb—these pictures are the same scale. The cells are almost as big, and they don’t have anywhere near as many contacts.”

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.”

“That,” Hitchcock accused, “is a lie! I have definite proof that they are even more intelligent than men. Any men. I say you are deliberately suppressing them because you fear what they could become!”

Gesturing helplessly, Reese said softly, “I have not seen this evidence.”

“Another lie!” Hitchcock accused. He shook his fist. “Do you expect me to believe,” he stormed, “that one of your men could have this evidence and you did not know of it? The whole idea is preposterous.”

“But I don’t know of it,” Reese insisted. He sounded almost reasonable. “What proof? Where did you get it?”

“Your man in charge of intelligence testing showed me some of his records,” Hitchcock stated. “And some photographs of brain tissue. They prove conclusively that the floppers...that the natives of this planet have minds as good as yours or mine.”

Ben Reese was like a man stunned. “I know nothing about this,” he protested blankly. “Are you... are you sure the evidence really proves that? I mean, perhaps you didn’t understand—”

“If Dr. Muller had not helped me,” Hitchcock replied, “the evidence would have meant nothing at all.”

Reese shook his head. “This is hard to believe,” he confessed. “Did he say why he showed you these things?”

“He showed them to me,” Hitchcock said, “because I asked him to. He was very co-operative, in spite of his contempt for them, which... he made absolutely no attempt to conceal. He said—almost in so many words—that you are doing everything you can to suppress them. He was proud of it!”

Reese looked worried. His idle hands, unnoticed, were nervously tearing notepad paper into progressively smaller and smaller bits. A pile of confetti-sized fragments collected on his blotter.

Hitchcock felt a wonderful exhilaration. He had the man totally helpless.

He was about to rise, repeat his ultimatum, and walk out, when Reese turned to the phone at his elbow, saying, “Excuse me a moment. Please.”

Without waiting for a reply, he punched out a number. The phone’s light blinked. A voice rasped from the speaker.

“Brains department. Muller speaking.”

“Sigurd?” Reese asked. “This is Ben. Would you mind coming down here? Something has come up.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

“I’d much rather you came down,” Reese said mildly. “It’s rather complicated.”

Muller made an annoyed sound, but then he said, “I’ll come.” The phone’s light went out.

Reese turned back to Hitchcock. “We’ll wait till he gets here,” he proposed. “All right?”

Reluctantly, Hitchcock sat back and folded his arms. Scowling, he waited.

This was something he hadn’t expected.

Not that it made any difference, of course. Reese was caught in an impossible position. All he could possibly do was try to justify himself.

Hitchcock settled back to wait. He was supremely confident. Just let him try to justify himself. Just let him try!

He could not do it.

Ben Reese was deeply troubled. Adam Hitchcock was a well-intentioned fool, and his ability to understand was limited, but Sigurd must have shown him something. Whatever else had happened—whatever else he had been told—Hitchcock must have seen something. Ben Reese tried to imagine what it could have been. He couldn’t. He would have to wait. Sigurd Muller would have to explain.

Reese pretended to be busy with his papers. It was all the excuse he could think of not to talk to Hitchcock while they waited. But he couldn’t work. There was a lot that still had to be gone over before the Wayfarer went back to Lambda Serpentis, but until Muller came and the matter was settled, he could not put his mind to it. ‘

Then Muller walked in, his pointed beard jutting like a prow. He glanced around quickly, noticed Hitchcock, but didn’t even pause. “What’s up?” he asked jauntily. He grabbed a chair, whirled it around, and straddled it.

Reese put his papers aside. “Mr. Hitchcock tells me the floppers are intelligent,” he explained. “That you showed him proof it.”

Muller’s eyes shifted from Reese to Hitchcock, then back again. “He did, huh?” he said neutrally.

“This was the first I’d heard of it,” Reese said pointedly.

Muller shrugged. “So what?” he said. “If you’d look at the reports I turn in—” He gestured at the papers on the desk.

“I have read your reports,” Reese said. “I studied them carefully. You did not mention this development.”

“Yeah?” Muller challenged. “Who’re you saying that for? Me or him?” He jerked a thumb at Hitchcock.

Reese didn’t let himself be steered off. “Do you confirm it?” he persisted.

Muller glanced at Hitchcock again before he answered. “Yeah,” he admitted. “There’s been a few smart ones turn up.”

So it was true! Reese wanted to shout with excitement. “How many?” he asked breathlessly.

“Three,” Muller said, holding up fingers. “Three of ‘em so smart they scare you. And all from the same country. There’s a lot more up there, too—running loose.”

“You’re sure of that?” Reese asked. It was more than he dared to believe.

“Yeah,” Muller said grimly. “There’s been a population jump, up there, and everything else has stayed the same. How would you figure it?”

Reese nodded slowly. He sighed. Put together like that, the evidence was good enough—the conclusion was valid. He turned to Hitchcock. “Is this what he told you?”

“Substantially,” Hitchcock affirmed.

Reese turned back to Muller. A suspicion had grown in him, ugly and fearful. Now he had to destroy it—or see it confirmed.

“He tells me you showed him test records,” he said cautiously. “And photos of brain tissue. Were they authentic?”

“Sure they’re authentic,” Muller retorted. “You think I’d fake a thing like that? Look—all I did was show him around, and show him how we work, and I answered his questions and let him see everything he wanted to see. You got any objections to that?” ,

Reese shook his head. ‘To that? No,” he conceded. “But these brain tissue samples—I presume you took them from the different sections of their brains.”

“I know how to take specimens,” Muller answered defiantly.

Reese felt sick and old. “You killed them,” he decided. “All three.”

“Right,” Muller snapped. He smiled with clenched teeth, fiercely proud of himself.

“Sigurd,” Reese said reproachfully, “you’ve done a terrible thing.” He turned to Hitchcock again.

“I wish this hadn’t come out while you were here,” he confessed. “I can only say that I heard nothing about these intelligent ones until now, and that Sigurd killed them without my knowledge. If I had known, I would have stopped him. He acted against regulations and against our policies. I am grateful to you for exposing him “

Muller shot to his feet, his hands fisted. “Exposing me!” he snarled. “Why you little—”

With an effort, Reese kept his voice even. “You may go now, Sigurd,” he said. “I... I suggest that you start packing. You have”—he glanced at the clock—”thirty hours before the ship leaves. If anyone asks, tell them that you resigned, and that I accepted your resignation.”

Muller’s face turned savage with rage. He hurled the chair out of his way and walked up to the desk until it bumped his knees. “You don’t make a goat of me that easy,” he threatened through his teeth. He jerked a thumb ut Hitchcock. “What about him? You can’t shut him up. What are you going to do? Pat him on the head and tell him be good?”

Reese glanced at Hitchcock. There was a firmness of decision on the man’s hollow-jowled face—a look of holy purpose about his eyes. As he watched, the man rose to his feet with solemn dignity, a bone-lean figure clad in black.

“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.”

Muller snorted disgustedly. “You’re doing a lot of supposing,” he said. “Suppose you’re wrong? It’s the whole future of the human race you’re talking about, you know. That’s ... that’s us!”

Reese nodded. “I know,” he admitted placidly. “Whatever we do—whatever we decide—it will be thousands of years before the consequences come. I rather imagine we’ll have been forgotten. That puts a terrible responsibility on us. We must try to do what is right.”

“And on that basis you refuse to help them?” Hitchcock demanded. “Mr. Reese, I have never heard such a preposterous—!”

So all his arguments and efforts at persuasion had failed. Reese slumped in his chair, his arms on the rests. He wondered what to do. Muller’s careful half-truths—Hitchcock’s stubborn ignorance—together they were too much to fight. He could do nothing. He was helpless. Defeat and frustration wearied him, and he felt a sick pity for all the intelligent floppers who would now never be born.

It wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t fair.

But he did not say it. Thinking it to himself, he realized how futile it was to speak of fairness to these men. And besides, by what right could he ask for fairness—an ideal— from the real world?

Of course it wasn’t fair. Nothing was ever completely fair in the real world, because the real world conformed to the physical laws, not the rules of sportsmanship and fair play. It was a hard, bitter thought to accept, but Ben Reese accepted it. As a scientist, he had to accept it no matter how he felt about it.

And in that recognition, he saw, was the key—the way he could protect the floppers from both these men.

He turned to his phone again. “You will excuse me, won’t you?” he requested politely as he punched the number combination. His hand trembled.

Before either Hitchcock or Muller could nod their assent, someone answered the phone. “Clinic,” he said.

“Nick?” Reese guessed. “This is Ben. Could you send up a couple of your boys?”

“Sure,” the one identified as Nick consented. “But what—?”

“Never mind,” Reese said quickly. “Just send them.” He broke the connection.

“What’s the matter?” Muller wanted to know. “You feel sick?”

Reese ignored the question. “I’ve changed my mind, Sigurd,” he said. “You can stay here.”

Muller backed up a step. “Well, now, I don’t know,” he said warily. He scratched his beard. “I’ve been here a long time—”

“But, Sigurd,” Reese urged. “We’re going to need you here—at least for the next year. All the information you’ve held back—”

“It’s in my files,” Muller said. “You’ll find it, if you want it bad enough.” He moved toward the door. “I’m going to pack.” In a moment, he was gone.

Reese smiled a complacent smile. “There’ll be no room for him in the ship,” he confided to no one in particular. He leaned forward. “As for you, Mr. Hitchcock... sit down, please. There’s one thing more I want to say.”

Hitchcock paused uncertainly, then resumed his chair. “Let it never be said,” he declared, “that I will not hear all arguments.”

Reese nodded, pleased. Everything would be all right if he could keep Hitchcock in his office until the boys came from the clinic. “Mr. Hitchcock,” he said, “in a sense, I’m very glad you came.”

Hitchcock scowled.

“For one thing,” Reese went on, “it was you who ... who brought out the fact that the floppers are developing intelligence. If you hadn’t come, Sigurd might have concealed it for years. Of course, Sigurd was hoping you’d help him to ... to wipe out the intelligent ones, but that is beside the point.”

“Mr. Reese,” Hitchcock said sternly. “You cannot convince me that black is white.”

“Oh, of course,” Reese agreed willingly. “But there are hundreds of shades of gray. The other reason I’m glad you came...” He spoke earnestly. “You’ve forced me to reexamine what we’re doing here—to ... to question the rightness of our doing nothing about the conditions in which the floppers live. It’s not an easy thing to be sure of.”

“So you admit it!” Hitchcock pounced triumphantly. “You admit—”

Reese silenced him with a gesture. “No,” he said firmly, “I do not admit it. I have come to the same conclusions I have always held. But now—because of you—I know why it is right.”

“Impossible,” Hitchcock objected. “It is not right.”

Ben Reese was very patient with him. He could afford to be patient—it used up time, while the boys from the clinic were coming.

“You’re a very moral man, Mr. Hitchcock,” he said. “I’d be the first to admit it. But—unfortunately—a high moral sense isn’t enough. You see, Nature isn’t moral—it doesn’t conform to our concepts of right and wrong, and it isn’t limited to conditions where the right and wrong of a matter are easy to decide. There are times when an act that seems morally right can lead to... to something horrible. You cannot say a thing is morally right or wrong until you’ve considered the context in which it happens. And that, Mr. Hitchcock, is where your moral sense fails you.”

“I do not need a scientist to tell me the difference between right and wrong,” Hitchcock stated stubbornly.

Reese nodded pleasantly. “I expected you’d say that,” he admitted. “But you’re wrong. Until you know the consequences of an act, you cannot tell whether or not it is moral. And there are times—such as now—when a layman such as yourself does not understand the forces involved. When that happens, you cannot predict the consequences of an act.. Therefore, you cannot decide whether it is right or wrong.”

“You’re wrong!” Hitchcock insisted. “The end never justifies the means! Never!”

Reese didn’t deny it. He said, reasonably, “On the other hand, there are times when no other test applies—when all the possible courses of action look equally bad. And even when you can do something which seems absolutely right, you still have to think of the consequences. If the consequences are bad, the act itself must be bad. Or suppose there is a... a morally imperative goal which you can achieve only by doing things which any moral code would condemn.”

Hitchcock was incredulous. “Such a thing could not happen,” he objected.

“I am talking,” Reese said firmly, “about now. About the situation here. That is the problem we have been dealing with here, ever since this outpost was built—whether to help them—give them comfort and security—and destroy for all time their hope of ever becoming more than animals —or whether we should let nature take its course—allow many to die, and many more to suffer, so that some day their descendants can stand before us as equals.”

He shrugged expressively. “We can do only one thing. We must balance the wrong which we know we are doing against the goal we are morally obliged to support. We must go ahead and... and try not to let our consciences upset us too much.”

“If you must rationalize a thing,” Hitchcock stated, “it’s wrong. Good does not come from evil!”

Reese shrugged helplessly. “We must do what we think is right,” he said practically. “And if our judgments are different from someone else’s, we must follow our own. We—”

He broke off as the door opened. Two Floppers came in, wheeling a stretcher. Each one had a big red cross dyed in the fur on its chest.

Reese pointed at Hitchcock. “That man is sick.”

The Floppers advanced, their resilient feet rustling softly on the floor. Hitchcock, taken aback by Reese’s abrupt statement, thumbed his chest. “Me?” he wondered incredulously.

The floppers came up, one on each side of him. They grabbed his arms close to the shoulder. Hitchcock yipped with surprise, turned his head, and found the solicitous, repulsive face of a flopper only inches from his own.

With a strangled, terrified cry, he lunged from the chair. The floppers kept him from falling headlong on the floor. Wild-eyed, he struggled to get loose from them, but they held on. He kicked at them desperately. They dragged him backwards. His feet flailed the air.

“Make them let me go!” he begged. “Make these filthy monsters let me go!”

Reese sat back and relaxed. He was sorry he had to do this to the man, but it did somehow give him a pleasant feeling.

It wasn’t, after all, as if Hitchcock was a really good man,

“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” he apologized. “They’ve been taught to take a sick man to the clinic. I couldn’t stop them now if I wanted to.” He spread his hands helplessly. “As I’ve said before, they’re rather stupid.”

One of the floppers moved behind Hitchcock and held both his arms. The other flopper took an ampule from the pouch on its harness. Hitchcock stared at the shiny needle with the fascination of sheer terror. “Don’t let him!” he screamed. “Don’t let him! It’s murder!”

The flopper peeled Hitchcock’s sleeve up and stabbed the needle into the fleshy part of his arm. Hitchcock uttered a faltering cry, shuddered, and sagged.

“Oh, it’s only a mild sedative,” Reese assured him cheerfully. “We wouldn’t dare trust them with anything stronger. But you shouldn’t have struggled so much.”

Hitchcock hung laxly in the flopper’s arms. His eyes had a glassy look. The floppers wrapped a blanket tightly around him. His mouth moved as if he was trying to speak, but no Words came out.

“The ship is going to leave without you,” Ben Reese said. “I’m sorry about that, because I don’t think I’m going to enjoy your company for the next year. We’ll tell them... I think we’ll tell them you’re sick. A... a local disease—one we don’t want to spread on other planets. There aren’t any diseases like that, of course, but that doesn’t matter.”

He was very apologetic about the whole thing.

Hitchcock was making apoplectic noises now. “Outrage! Criminal! I’ll have the law on you!” For a man of firm moral fiber, some of his comments were remarkably unprintable.

Ben Reese shrugged. “I’m afraid there isn’t any law here,” he apologized. “We didn’t need any, till you came along. I ... I’m sorry we have to do this to you, but—well, we can’t let you go back to Earth. You’d agitate to have our charter revoked and... and then you’d organize this gigantic interstellar aid program, and destroy the floppers’ only hope of ever being anything more than animals. We... we just can’t let you do that.”

By this time, Hitchcock was wrapped in the blanket like a mummy. Gently, the floppers lifted him and laid him in the cradlelike stretcher. “You won’t get away with this!” he threatened wrathfully.

The floppers fumbled deftly with the straps, securing him. Their digitless hands were remarkably dexterous. All Hitchcock could move was his head and his mouth.

“Oh, we’ll have to let you go next year, of course,” Reese admitted. He wasn’t disturbed by the thought. “But that is a whole year away. We’ll have plenty of time to prepare the public for you. If we give them the whole truth now, I rather doubt they’ll be much impressed with your partial truths later on. I’ll send instructions about that to our business office on Lambda. Just to announce that the floppers are beginning to evolve should be a good start, and—”

He smiled. He felt wonderful. Perhaps treating Hitchcock this way was lousy and unethical, but even Hitchcock himself would have to admit that—when everything was considered—it was definitely a moral act.

The floppers began to wheel Hitchcock out of the room. Hitchcock was raving.

“You can’t do this to me!” he protested. “You can’t!”

“Really?” Ben Reese wondered innocently. He knew it was cruel, but the temptation was too strong.

“Really, Mr. Hitchcock,” he said, “I must have proof.”

Slowly, the procession marched past the bier of the Dead One, who was nameless because he was dead, and who had been their leader. Each one, as he came to the bier, crouched low in obeisance, then moved on. The shaman stood over the bier, his pelt stained green to signify that he personified the Dead One. He acknowledged each obeisance by raising his arms.

Shokk-elorrisch stood beside the bier, and he also acknowledged the obeisances, for he was the new leader in the Dead One’s stead. Already, he held the tool-stone in his hand, and he chanted the four harsh syllables: “My eyes shall find the path for your feet; my hand shall feed you and my pelt shall warm you; I am all of you; I give you my self.”

This he spoke to each one who made obeisance to him, and each one responded: “Show me the path!”

The procession shuffled on, and formed ranks beyond the bier. And when the last one made his obeisance, the three eldest-born from the Dead One’s body came forward. They lifted the vine-woven sling which cradled the Dead One. Flanked by Shokk-elorrisch on one side and the shaman on the other—all of them chanting: “You are all of us; your eyes saw the path; your hand fed us; your pelt warmed our bodies. We are grateful; we honor you; we sanctify the memory of you; we give you back to yourself!”

Chanting this, their tread matched to the chant, they advanced to the edge of the cliff. There they stopped, and the cadenced rhythm of their chant broke with the cry, “We cast you out!” and they hurled the Dead One into the foaming sea. And the sons of the Dead One and the shaman turned to Shokk-elorrisch. They made obeisance to him, and they said: “Show us the path!”

But Shokk-elorrisch did not answer, nor did he show them any sign that he heard. Standing at the cliff edge, the wind rippling his pelt and the waves crashing on rocks far below, he faced out to sea and made obeisance to the Olympians who lived on the round mountain, there on the island that rose from the horizon—the Olympians, who never had to migrate in search of new hunting ground, and who watched from the boulder that floated like a cloud in the wind—who watched but took no part in the things they witnessed.

And he wondered, even as he made obeisance to them, why they kept themselves aloof, and what was the source of their powers, and whether his people, too, could achieve those powers—to become the equals of those strange and enigmatic beings.

And he wondered, too, would they teach him? Would they teach him if he went to that mountain—out there in the ocean? Would they permit him to learn the secret of their powers?

He wondered how to cross those tattered waves—how to climb that shore and ascend to the crest of that mountain.

Thinking thus, Shokk-elorrisch knew what his path would be. And the path of his people.

Toward greatness. Toward the mastery of Nature.

Toward glory.