The Astounding-Analog Reader: Volume 2 by Harry Harrison & Brian W. Aldiss

Author:Harry Harrison & Brian W. Aldiss [Harrison, Harry & Aldiss, Brian W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 038502732X
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 1973-04-01T21:00:00+00:00

Her Fertility Mnigli was eight hundred years old; she had outlived twenty generations of the short-lived males of her species, and her title-of-address had become purely honorific. Her skin hung loose and her crest was green with age. She was an ecological coordinator, the Thagathlan equivalent of a senator, an elector, and a cardinal archbishop; so her tone with Zilli, a mere junior biologist, was abrupt.

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.

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