The Second Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack by Mark Clifton

Author:Mark Clifton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction, sci-fi, pulp fiction, classic, short stories
ISBN: 9781479402946
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2014-09-08T16:00:00+00:00

WHAT NOW, LITTLE MAN? (1959)

The mystery of what made the goonie tick tormented me for twenty years.

Why, when that first party of big game hunters came to Libo, why didn’t the goonies run away and hide, or fight back? Why did they instantly, immediately, almost seem to say, “You want us to die, Man? For you we will do it gladly!” Didn’t they have any sense of survival at all? How could a species survive if it lacked that sense?

“Even when one of the hunters, furious at being denied the thrill of the chase, turned a machine gun on the drove of them,” I said to Paul Tyler, “they just stood there and let him mow them down.”

Paul started to say something in quick protest, then simply looked sick.

“Oh, yes,” I assured him. “One of them did just that. There was a hassle over it. Somebody reminded him that the machine gun was designed just to kill human beings, that it wasn’t sporting to turn it on game. The hassle sort of took the edge off their fun, so they piled into their space yacht and took off for some other place where they could count on a chase before the kill.”

I felt his sharp stare, but I pretended to be engrossed in measuring the height of Libo’s second sun above the mountain range in the west. Down below us, from where we sat and smoked on Sentinel Rock, down in my valley and along the sides of the river, we could see the goonie herds gathering under their groves of pal trees before night fell.

Paul didn’t take issue, or feed me that line about harvesting the game like crops, or this time even kid me about my contempt for Earthers. He was beginning to realize that all the old-timer Liboans felt as I did, and that there was reasonable justification for doing so. In fact, Paul was fast becoming Liboan himself. I probably wouldn’t have told him the yarn about that first hunting party if I hadn’t sensed it, seen the way he handled his own goonies, the affection he felt for them.

“Why were our animals ever called goonies, Jim?” he asked. “They’re … Well, you know the goonie.”

I smiled to myself at his use of the possessive pronoun, but I didn’t comment on it.

“That, too,” I said, and knocked the dottle out of my pipe. “That came out of the first hunting party.” I stood up and stretched to get a kink out of my left leg, and looked back toward the house to see if my wife had sent a goonie to call us in to dinner. It was a little early, but I stood a moment to watch Paul’s team of goonies up in the yard, still folding their harness beside his rickshaw. I’d sold them to him, as yearlings, a couple years before, as soon as their second pelt showed they’d be a matched pair. Now they were mature young males, and as handsome a team as could be found anywhere on Libo.

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