The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  * * * *

  4

  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.”

  * * * *

  INTERLUDE

  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 h
ad 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.