Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  “These are specimens of your proposed control?”

  “Yes, Your Fertility,” said Zilli. She watched respectfully as the coordinator paced slowly round the huddled group of a dozen captive humans. Their number had been augmented since Zilli had on her own initiative ordered the crew to beat the bushes along the brook. Zilli was taking no chances of losing the credit for her inspiration.

  Mnigli surveyed the prisoners with shrewd old eyes, behind which her brain was making agile inferences from physical structure to probable habits and place in an environmental complex. Mnigli was not an ecological coordinator for nothing.

  “You have both males and females here? How do you tell them apart?” Zilli pointed out the differences. “Hm-m-m,” said Mnigli. “Little sexual dimorphism; a primitive trait—Disregarding the number of limbs and other superficial features, they look much like overgrown thrin.”

  Zilli agreed nervously. The thrin were arboreal carnivores of middling intelligence, whose function on Thegeth was to control the proliferation of several species of slothlike foliage-feeders. “But these,” Zilli pointed out, “build their shelters on the ground and are clearly evolved for life there. Observe their feet, Your Fertility. Also, the teeth indicate an omnivorous diet—”

  “We should have, then, to consider primarily their possible effect on the forest-floor community. As you know, Biologist Zilli”—the coordinator’s tone sharpened—“our a priori estimate of requirements envisaged something like a small carnivore, capable of entering rodents’ burrows; no doubt some such forms exist on Earth. What makes you think these hulking thrinlike creatures would make a better control—or do you?”

  “I do,” said Zilli stoutly. “The First Expedition reported this species to be the dominant one, at least on a basis of range—it being found all over the planet and thus evidently in successful competition with all other land animals. That fact bears witness to a high degree of adaptability—an invaluable characteristic in any life form to be transplanted to an alien environment. Carnivora, on the other hand, are notoriously delicate in an ecological sense, being highly specialized. Remember what happened to the wugud.”

  The coordinator remembered all too well; the incident alluded to had come close to wrecking her career along with that of several others in high places. The wugud, a flesh-eating ophidian species, had been deliberately imported from one of the worlds of Altair because it was a natural enemy of certain Altairian vermin accidentally introduced on Thegeth. The wugud, unfortunately, was possessed of an undiscriminating voracity which had led it to find cannibalism much simpler than learning to locate its natural prey in a new habitat, with the result that the end of its existence on Thegeth had resembled the fate of the lamented Kilkenny cats. The thagathla had been forced to dispatch another expensive expedition to Altair in order to locate a more suitable control agent.

  It would not do to have any more such mistakes. Fitting out the present expedition had thrown a severe strain on Thegeth’s economy; no planet could long afford the cost in energy and materials required for interstellar travel. Recognition of that fact was one reason why the Thagathlan Ecological Bureau had banned such exploration four centuries earlier—that, and belated realization of the ecological havoc such contacts with other worlds could create. The hamster plague was one such fruit of folly; a mere handful of the Terrestrial rodents, carried home with them by members of the First Earth Expedition who fancied them as exotic pets, had run wild on Thegeth and, in the absence of any natural enemies whatsoever, had bred so mightily as to threaten the bionomic stability of the whole planet. It was that problem which the Second Expedition must solve by finding and bringing back some Earthly natural enemy of the hamster. And, old Mnigli told herself, in this case there must be no error; all avenues must be thoroughly explored.

  She turned back to the cluster of humans and looked at them long and hard, as if frying to envisage in every detail their possible future as a factor in the ecology of Thegeth. They stared back at her with awed and fearful eyes, in which, perhaps, she was a god or demon. Mnigli sighed. “You may he right, Biologist Zilli; your reasoning does credit to one so young. You may proceed with the study of this species as an individual project, and prepare a report on its potential utility.”

  “Yes, Your Fertility.”

  “As conductor of a research project, you may assume the grade of senior biologist.”

  “Yes, indeed, Your Fertility!”

  The final conference was lie Id aboard the mother ship. The assembled scientists of the expedition listened silently to reports by the biologists assigned to study the possibilities of the local weasels and of a variety of hunting cat. At last Zilli’s turn came to speak, and she rose to the occasion energetically.

  “Colleagues! I am here to present the case for a species very different from and in all ways superior to those hitherto discussed—to wit, Pseudolhrin terrestris Zilli!” This was formality; at one time or another during the past weeks the others’ had all dropped by the stockade where Zilli’s research project was being carried on. “And I think you will agree with me that there is no need for long deliberation. We are all eager to return to Thegeth—”

  “Spare us the oratory,” said Mnigli dryly from the head of the council table.

  Zilli inclined her head submissively, conscious that her remark had told; those present were scientists, but they were also thagathla, and after six weeks of brawling, undisciplined Earth they were heartily homesick for the ordered peace of their native world. If any of them had ever questioned the wisdom of the interdict on interstellar exploration, personal experience had disabused them.

  “I shall produce,” said Zilli, “facts and figures to show that Pseudolhrin is far more intelligent than the wold cat, and at least as bloodthirsty as the weasel—in short, that we could comb this planet for years without uncovering a better pest-control agent.”

  She went on into technical details of her observations of captured humans and of their societies in a wild state, pointing out particularly that it had been found that they would prey on the hamster population not only for food but also for garments to protect their own hairless skins; there was no danger that their depredations would be extended to native fauna on Thegeth, in view of the same differences in protein metabolism which had prevented any native Thegethian flesh-eater from acting as a check upon the hamsters. Finally, the species was markedly intelligent; judging, in the absence of any commensurable tests, by their technological level, they would rank somewhere between the forest thrin and the agricultural zgi in that regard. Their intelligence was assurance that the thagathla could depend on them to be effective in performing their proposed ecological function.

  Mnigli said dubiously, “There is a flaw in the last argument. Intelligence is a two-edged blade—and these creatures are omnivorous.”

  Zilli met the coordinator’s gaze squarely. “You mean—what assurance do we have that they will not, instead of preying on their verminous relatives, find it easier to emulate the latter and make inroads upon the crops of the zgi—inroads which would be the more dangerous because of the cunning Pseudolhrin is capable of?”

  “That,” said Mnigli, “is the crucial question.” The other scientists rotated their heads energetically in agreement.

  “I am prepared to answer it. In the first place, though omnivorous, they definitely prefer meat to vegetable food when they can get it. Furthermore, their large size would make it possible to employ against them countermeasures which have proved ineffective against the hamster infestation. And finally”—Zilli paused impressively—“my researches have shown that Pseudolhrin has a well-developed language, of which I have already compiled a partial vocabulary. Your Fertility, colleagues—do you see what that means?”

  There was a buzz of excitement and approbation which told Zilli that she had as good as won. Swelling inwardly with triumph, she raised her voice to drive the point home:

  “It means that we have here, not an ordinary animal whose
reactions are fixed by instinct, but one whose behavior can be tailored to our needs. We can implant verbal-cultural directives, as we have done with the zgi and to a lesser extent with the thrin. Impressing these directives on a few thousand initial importees will be simple, and with a minimum of intervention on our part these will have the force of radium even when the descendants’ numbers shall have increased lo millions—”

  Morg, the hunter strode easily through the open woodland beneath fronded trees that would have seemed very strange to his great-grandfather several limes removed. The same great-grandfather would also have been surprised by the parklike, orderly look of this forest, free of tangling brush and strangling vines, but to Morg it was merely normal.

  He carried an arrow nocked, as did the two companions who followed in his footsteps, and all of them scanned the branches overhead—eagerly, not fearfully, for there were no animals here that a man armed with a bow need seriously fear.

  Morg was a splendidly-muscled savage, half a head taller than the others; while they were clad in hamster-skins crudely sewn together, he wore a garment fashioned of a single glistening-black pelt. He was a descendant of the first Morg, who had been a mighty man among those who, according to legend, had come from that Earth which some said was a country beyond the mountains and others, less credibly, claimed was up in the sky somewhere.

  The trees lightened ahead, meaning that they were approaching cleared ground, and the trio relaxed their vigilance and quickened their pace, concluding that the reports of game in this forest tract—which lay only a mile from their tribe’s village and had consequently been hunled-out—had been false.

  Then branches crackled overhead; Morg ducked a flying twig and looked up to see a six-armed striped creature swinging forty feet above them, snarling down with a flash of fangs and chattering insults—insults which Morg understood, since he had a working knowledge of the viler portions of the thrin’s rudimentary vocabulary.

  So Morg cursed fluently back and took deliberate aim, drawing the arrow slowly back to its bronze head. The thrin broke off its tirade abruptly, performed a backward somersault and went brachiating away with ludicrous haste. The man grinned and let his bowstring slack without releasing the shaft; he didn’t want to waste time looking for it or—if it should lodge in the thrin—have to climb a tree to recover it, since, as he knew from experience, even a dead thrin never let go of a branch.

  Nor did the men bother looking round to see if the creature’s tree-house was nearby; they were not hunting thrin.

  Beyond the forest’s edge lay a sunlit meadowland, and off to one side were the tawny patches of ripening grain-fields among which rose the beehive-shaped huts of the zgi, the agricultural species of Thegeth. The three hunters struck out quartering across the grassland toward the next forested area, giving the fields a wide berth. They knew that the grain which grew there was edible, but they also knew that it was taboo, as the zgi who tended it were also taboo, as it was forbidden to cut certain trees, and so on. The why of these things did not trouble them; they only knew that it had always been so. Of course there were numerous old stories about people who had broken taboo and had come to startling ends, but in real life the question of what would happen if you did so simply never came up.

  In some vague way, the thagathla were behind the traditional law—the thagathla who, it was said, had placed man in the world and had bade him be fruitful and multiply. Deep at the roots of men’s thinking lay the subtly reassuring conviction that they, together with the other living beings of forest and field, were part of a system, and that somewhere dwelt those who understood the whole, ruled and guided it with purposeful wisdom. If the thagathla had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent them.

  Halfway across the meadow Morg spied a hamster sitting by its burrow’s entrance, and nailed it with a well-aimed arrow. As he ran to retrieve it, a great shadow swept suddenly over the grass with frightening speed, and the other hunters cried out. Morg looked up sharply, and saw before him a thing like an immense painted bird with immobile wings, settling silently to the ground.

  Morg stood frozen. He heard behind him the frantic noise of his comrades’ flight, and he still stood. A door opened in the aircraft’s side, and a thegethli emerged and looked down at Morg.

  Morg had never doubted that the thagathla existed—one saw their airships passing overhead, and from a mountain top one could see the white towers of their city far away—but being face to face with one was a different matter. He dropped to one knee and laid his bow crosswise on the ground before him—but he kept a firm grip on the weapon, and though he bowed his head humbly his eyes were slit led and wary. If necessary, he could shoot very quickly from a kneeling position.

  The thegethli was not so impressive-looking as he had imagined. He was struck most of all by its close similarity to the zgi—like a more graceful and refined version of the same animal, and with a larger skull. Morg would have had no doubts of his ability to worst this creature in hand-to-hand combat—but something, flash of intuition or echo of tradition, told him that the thagathla could not be met on terms of prowess.

  The thegethli came down a flight of steps that seemed to grow out of the great bird’s side. In the doorway above appeared another, whose arms cradled a gleaming metal tube.

  The first one said in human speech, “Stand up, man. What is your name?”

  “I am Morg,” said the hunter. He stood upright, hands loose at his sides, deceptively relaxed, facing the avatar at only a few yards’ distance. Thethegethli involuntarily straightened her erect forebody so as to be taller than he.

  “I have been looking for you, Morg,” said the thegethli somewhat inexactly. “My name is Zilli.”

  “I have heard your name.”

  “Indeed?” said Zilli, not displeased. She recollected that five human generations—roughly equivalent to those of the males of her own kind—had passed since she had had any immediate contact with this community. Since then she had achieved the grade of ecologist and had, naturally enough, become the right-hand assistant of the coordinator specially charged with human affairs; it was gratifying to know that her reputation extended even among the lesser species.

  “But perhaps you are not the same one,” said Morg cautiously. “According to the old men, the Zilli is twenty feet, tall, with eyes like fiery coals, and—”

  “I am the Zilli,” said Zilli stiffly. “And, speaking of fiery coals, it is about that that I want you to carry a message to your people. Some weeks ago a valuable tract of timberland to the west of here was completely burned over.”

  Morg bowed, without taking his eyes off the thegethli. “I understand. I will tell them that unless they are more careful with fire they will all be stricken with boils, rheumatism and lightning.”

  “Well—” Zilli hesitated, remembering the language in which her superior had recalled that one Zilli had authored—the original proposal for introducing a fire-using animal as a pest control. “Yes, you had better make it strong.”

  She eyed the man critically up and down, and said, “That is one matter. There is another: What is that garment you are wearing?”

  Morg looked down at the sleek black pelt, tastefully secured at shoulder and hip with bronze fibulae. He said with a touch of pride, “It is a yuruk skin. I myself slew the beast.”

  “How is it that you are able to wear the hide?”

  Morg blinked uneasily, scenting a trap. He said carefully, “If one wears a raw yuruk skin, true, it will make his own skin red and itching; and its meat will outrage a man’s belly. For that reason, in my father’s Lime we did not hunt the yuruk; but now it is known that if the hide and the flesh are soaked for a time in salt water—”

  “I see,” said Zilli. She had the simple explanation for what had been a puzzling development on the census records of the Bureau of Ecology: the fact that, in certain of the areas inhabited by humans, the slothlike herbivorous yuruk had fallen off inexplicably in numbers, and with them I he t
hrin which preyed largely upon them and had—until recently at least—served as the principal check upon the yuruk’s excessive multiplication.

  Well, her report on this might produce a minor stir in the Bureau; but it was of small consequence balanced against the showing which, as the same recent censuses indicated, Pseudothrin terrestris Zilli was making in its intended role of counteragent for the rodent plague. She had not missed noticing the hamster which lay a little to one side, transfixed by Morg’s arrow, Curious—in naming these creatures, Zilli had wrought better than she knew; now, in addition to their own ecological function, they were usurping that of the genuine thrin.

  Zilli looked at the skin-clad hunter almost with affection; after all, he and his kind were her project. She said, “Very well. Oil the whole I am well pleased with your people, Morg. But do not forget to warn them about carelessness with fires.”

  Morg bowed again. The guard stood aside to let Zilli enter the flier; the door clicked shut behind them, and the craft rose steeply.

  Morg stood watching it dwindle into the blue; when it was out of sight, he turned and strolled unhurriedly back to the edge of the woods. His two companions were crouched in the shelter of a thicket there; they met him with awed glances.

  “What—” one of them faltered, “did the thegethli tell you, Morg?”

  “Many things,” said Morg mysteriously. “Many things.” He was already turning over in his mind certain innovations which he had long thought about, but had feared to present to the elders as his own ideas. Now, his fellow-hunters were witnesses that he had truly talked with a thegethli; and he already savored in advance the looks the chief men of the tribe would wear when he, Morg, spoke to them as one conveying the will of the thagathla.