Mutants Read online

  There was a keening. Clarinda was running and crying, and Sally Dismas had rushed out of the house and met her.

  “Clarinda, what in the world has happened?” Dr. Minden cried, rushing to his tearful wife.

  “Our baby Krios has killed himself.”

  “I told him to,” said Ginny. “I’d gotten everything I wanted from him. I’ll find better ones for the other times.”

  “Ginny!”,Her mother was horrified. “I’ll whip™”

  “Don’t punish the child, Sally,” Carinda Minden sobbed. “She’s beyond good and evil. Whatever was between her and my baby Krios, it’s better that I never know.”

  “Did I say something wrong?” Ginny asked. “The last thing I ever say, and it should be wrong? Dr. Minden, you know about things like that. What are you creatures, anyhow?”

  “People, Ginny,” Dr. Minden said miserably.

  “Funny I never saw any of you before. I sure don’t intend to get involved with people.”

  Raucous howling! Hound-dog hooting! Hissing of badgers, and the clattering giggle of geese! Shag-tooth shouting, and the roaring of baby bulls!

  And a screaming monkey leaped and tumbled up the rocks like crazy water.

  Watershed

  James Blish

  The mutations described in the other stories in this collection are either natural events—inexplicable accidents of the germ plasm—or else the unexpected consequences of atomic radiation. However, among James Blish’s many distinguished contributions to science fiction is a group of stories dealing with what he called “pantropy”—deliberate and conscious manipulation of the genes by scientists to create muiations—and the concluding story of that series serves also to bring our present book to a close. Blish’s stories, published in book form as The Seedling Stars, depict the stages in the process of transforming man so that he might colonize the stars. In “Watershed” we see the final stage: when humanity in many guises has gone forth to take possession of space, and men of altered form look homeward toward Mother Earth.

  The murmurs of discontent—Captain Gorbel, being a military man, thought of it as “disaffection”—among the crew of the R.S.S. Indefeasible had reached the point where they could no longer be ignored, well before the ship had come within fifty light-years of its objective.

  Sooner or later, Gorbel thought, sooner or later this idiotic seal-creature is going to notice them.

  Captain Gorbel wasn’t sure whether he would be sorry or glad when the Adapted Man caught on. In a way, it would make things easier. But it would be an uncomfortable moment, not only for Hoq-queah and the rest of the pantrope team, but for Gorbel himself. Maybe it would be better to keep sitting on the safety valve until Hoqqueah and the other Altarians were put off on—what was its name again? Oh yes, Earth.

  But the crew plainly wasn’t going to let Gorbel put it off that long.

  As for Hoqqueah, he didn’t appear to have a noticing center anywhere in his brain. He was as little discommoded by the emotional undertow as he was by the thin and frigid air the Rigellian crew maintained inside the battlecraft. Secure in his coat of warm blubber, his eyes brown, liquid and merry, he sat in the forward greenhouse for most of each ship’s day, watching the growth of the star Sol in the black skies ahead.

  And he talked. Gods of all stars, how he talked! Captain Gorbel already knew more about the ancient—the very ancient—history of the seeding program than he had had any desire to know, but there was still more coming. Nor was the seeding program Hoqqueah’s sole subject. The Colonization Council delegate had had a vertical education, one which cut in a narrow shaft through many different fields of specialization—in contrast to Gorbel’s own training, which had been spread horizontally over the whole subject of spaceflight without more than touching anything else.

  Hoqqueah seemed to be making a project of enlarging the Captain’s horizons, whether he wanted them enlarged or not.

  “Take agriculture,” he was saying at the moment. “This planet we’re to seed provides an excellent argument for taking the long view of farm policy. There used to be jungles there; it was very fertile. But the people began their lives as farmers with the use of fire, and they killed themselves off in the same way.”

  “How?” Gorbel said automatically. Had he remained silent, Hoqqueah would have gone on anyhow; and it didn’t pay to be impolite to the Colonization Council, even by proxy.

  “In their own prehistory, fifteen thousand years before their official zero date, they cleared farmland by burning it off. Then they would plant a crop, harvest it, and let the jungle return. Then they burned the jungle off and went through the cycle again. At the beginning, they wiped out the greatest abundance of game animals Earth was ever to see, just by farming that way* Furthermore the method was totally destructive to the topsoiL

  “But did they learn? No. Even after they achieved spaceflight, that method of farming was standard in most of the remaining jungle areas—even though the bare rock was showing through everywhere by that time.”

  Hoqqueah sighed. “Now, of course, there are no jungles. There are no seas, either. There’s nothing but desert, naked rock, bitter cold, and thin, oxygen-poor air—or so the people would view it, if there were any of them left. Tapa farming wasn’t solely responsible, but it helped.”

  Gorbel shot a quick glance at the hunched back of Lieutenant Averdor, his adjutant and navigator. Averdor had managed to avoid saying so much as one word to Hoqqueah or any of the other pan-tropists from the beginning of the trip. Of course he wasn’t required to assume the diplomatic burdens involved—those were Gorbel’s crosses—but the strain of dodging even normal intercourse with the seal-men was beginning to tell on him.

  Sooner or later, Averdor was going to explode. He would have nobody to blame for it but himself, but that wouldn’t prevent everybody on board from suffering from it.

  Including Gorbel, who would lose a first-class navigator and adjutant.

  Yet it was certainly beyond Gorbel’s authority to order Averdor to speak to an Adapted Man. He could only suggest that Averdor run through a few mechanical courtesies, for the good of the ship. The only response had been one of the stoniest stares Gorbel had ever seen, even from Averdor, with whom the captain had been shipping for over thirty Galactic years.

  And the worst of it was that Gorbel was, as a human being, wholly on Averdor’s side.

  “After a certain number of years, conditions change on any planet,” Hoqqueah babbled solemnly, waving a flipper-like arm to include all the points of light outside the greenhouse. He was working back to his primary obsession: the seeding program. “It’s only logical to insist that man be able to change with them—or, if he can’t do that, he must establish himself somewhere else. Suppose he had colonized only the EarthHke planets? Not even those planets remain Earthlike forever, not in the biological sense.”

  “Why would we have limited ourselves to Earthlike planets in the first place?” Gorbel said. “Not that I know much about the place, but the specs don’t make it sound like an optimum world.”

  “To be sure,” Hoqqueah said, though as usual Gorbel didn’t know which part of his own comment Hoqqueah was agreeing to. “There’s no survival value in pinning one’s race forever to one set of specs. It’s only sensible to go on evolving with the universe, so as to stay independent of such things as the aging of worlds, or the explosions of their stars. And look at the results! Man exists now in so many forms that there’s always a refuge somewhere for any threatened people. That’s a great achievement—compared to it, what price the old arguments about sovereignty of form?”

  “What, indeed?” Gorbel said, but inside his skull his other self was saying: Ah-ha, he smells the hostility after all. Once an Adapted Man, always an Adapted Man—and always fighting for equality with the basic human form. But it’s no good, you seal-snouted bureaucrat. You can argue for the rest of your life, but your whiskers will always wiggle when you talk.

  And obviously you’ll never stop t
alking.

  “And as a military man yourself, you’d be the first to appreciate the military advantages, Captain,” Hoqqueah added earnestly. “Using pantropy, man has seized thousands of worlds that would have been inaccessible to him otherwise. It’s enormously increased our chances to become masters of the galaxy, to take most of it under occupation without stealing anyone else’s planet in the process. An occupation without dispossession—let alone without bloodshed. Yet if some race other than man should develop imperial ambitions, and try to annex our planets, it will find itself enormously outnumbered.”

  “That’s true,” Captain Gorbel said, interested in spite of himself. “It’s probably just as well that we worked fast, way back there in the beginning. Before somebody else thought up the method, I mean. But, how come it was us? Seems to me that the first race to invent it should’ve been a race that had it—if you follow me.”

  “Not quite, Captain. If you will give me an example—?”

  “Well, we scouted a system once where there was a race that occupied two different planets, not both at the same time, but back and forth,” Gorbel said. “They had a life-cycle that had three different forms. In the first form they’d winter over on the outermost of the two worlds. Then they’d change to another form that could cross space, mother-naked, without ships, and spend the rest of the year on the inner planet in the third form. Then they’d change back into the second form and cross back to the colder planet.

  “It’s a hard thing to describe. But the point is, this wasn’t anything they’d worked out; it was natural to them. They’d evolved that way.” He looked at Averdor again. “The navigation was tricky around there during the swarming season.”

  Averdor failed to rise to the bait.

  “I see; the point is well taken,” Hoqqueah said, nodding with grotesque thoughtfulness. “But let me point out to you, Captain, that being already able to do a thing doesn’t aid you in thinking of it as something that needs to be perfected. Oh, I’ve seen races like the one you describe, too—races with polymorphism, sexual alteration of generation, metamorphosis of the insect life-history type, and so on. There’s a planet named Lithia, about forty light-years from here, where the dominant race undergoes complete evolutionary recapitulation after birth—not before it, as men do. But why should any of them think of form-changing as something extraordinary, and to be striven for? It’s one of the commonplaces of their lives, after all.”

  A small bell chimed in the greenhouse. Hoqqueah got up at once, his movements precise and almost graceful despite his tubbiness. “Thus endeth the day,” he said cheerfully. “Thank you for your courtesy, Captain.”

  He waddled out. He would, of course, be back tomorrow.

  And the day after that.

  And the next day—unless the crewmen hadn’t tarred and feathered the whole bunch by then.

  If only, Gorbel thought distractedly, if only the damned Adapts weren’t so quick to abuse their privileges! As a delegate of the Colonization Council, Hoqqueah was a person of some importance, and could not be barred from entering the greenhouse except in an emergency. But didn’t the man know that he shouldn’t use the privilege each and every day, on a ship manned by basic-form human beings, most of whom could not enter the greenhouse at all without a direct order?

  And the rest of the pantropists were just as bad. As passengers with the technical status of human beings, they could go almost anywhere in the ship that the crew could go—and they did, persistently and unapologetically, as though moving among equals. Legally, that was what they were—but didn’t they know by this time that there was such a thing as prejudice? And that among common spacemen the prejudice against their k nd—and against any Adapted Man—always hovered near the borderli le of bigotry?

  There was a slight hum as Averdor’s power chair swung around to face the captain. Liko most Rigellian men, the lieutenant’s face was lean and harsh, aim Dst like that of an ancient religious fanatic, and the starlight in the greenhouse did nothing to soften it; but to Captain Gorbel, to whom it was familiar down to its last line, it looked especially forbidding nov.

  “Well?” he said.

  “I’d think you’d be fe I to the teeth with that freak by this time,” Averdor said without preamble. “Something’s got to be done, Captain, before the crew get j so surly that we have to start handing out brig sentences.”

  “I don’t like know-it-alls any better than you do,” Gorbel said grimly. “Especially when they talk nonsense—and half of what this one says about space flight is nonsense, that much I’m sure of. But the man’s a delegate of the Council. He’s got a right to be up here if he wants to.”

  “You can bar anybody from the greenhouse in an emergency—even the ship’s officers.”

  “I fail to see any emergency,” Gorbel said stiffly.

  “This is a hazardous part of the galaxy—potentially, anyhow. It hasn’t been visited for millennia. That star up ahead has nine planets besides the one we’re supposed to land on, and I don’t know how many satellites of planetary size. Suppose somebody on one of them lost his head and took a crack at us as we went by?”

  Gorbel frowned. “That’s reaching for trouble. Besides, the area’s been surveyed recently at least once—otherwise we wouldn’t be here.”

  “A sketch job. It’s still sensible to take precautions. If there should be any trouble, there’s many a Board of Review that would call it risky to have unreliable second-class human types in the greenhouse when it breaks out.”

  “You’re talking nonsense.”

  “Dammit, Captain, read between the lines a minute,” Averdor said harshly. “I know as well as you do that there’s going to be no trouble that we can’t handle. And that no reviewing board would pull a complaint like that on you if there were. I’m just trying to give you an excuse to use on the seals.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Good. The Indefeasible is the tightest ship in the Rigellian navy her record’s clean, and the crew’s morale is almost a legend. We can’t afford to start gigging the mtn for their personal prejudices—which is what it will amount to, if 1 hose seals drive them to breaking discipline. Besides, they’ve got a right to do their work without a lot of seal snouts poking continually«>ver their shoulders.”

  “I can hear myself explaining that to Hoqqueah.”

  “You don’t need to,” Aver for said doggedly. “You can tell him, instead, that you’re going to 1 ave to declare the ship on emergency status until we land. That me* ns that the pantrope team, as passengers, will have to stick to their q uarters. It’s simple enough.”

  It was simple enough, all rigt t. And decidedly tempting.

  “I don’t like it,” Gorbel said, “Besides, Hoqqueah may be a know-it-all, but he’s not entirely a fo >1. He’ll see through it easily enough.”

  Averdor shrugged. “It’s your command,” he said. “But I don’t see what he could do about it even if he did see through it. It’d be all on the log and according to regs. A [1 he could report to the Council would be a suspicion—and they’d prcbably discount it. Everybody knows that these second-class types ai e quick to think they’re being persecuted. It’s my theory that that’s why they are persecuted, a lot of the time at least.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “The man I shipped under b jfore I came on board the Indefeasible/’ Averdor said, “was one cf those people who don’t even trust themselves. They expect everybody they meet to slip a knife into them when their backs are turned. And there are always other people who make it almost a point of honor to knife a man like that, just because he seems to be asking: or it. He didn’t hold that command long.”

  “I see what you mean,” GorbeJ said. “Well, I’ll think about it.”

  But by the next ship’s day, wt en Hoqqueah returned to the greenhouse, Gorbel still had not made up his mind. The very fact that his own feelings were on the side cf Averdor and the crew made him suspicious of Averdor’s “easy” solution. The plan
was tempting enough to blind a tempted man 1 o flaws that might otherwise be obvious.

  The Adapted Man settled hinself comfortably and looked out through the transparent metal. “Ah,” he said. “Our target is sensibly bigger now, eh, Captain? Think of it: in just a few days now, we will be—in the historical sense—hoi ne again.”

  And now it was riddles! “What do you mean?” Gorbel said.

  “I’m sorry; I thought } ou knew. Earth is the home planet of the human race, Captain. The e is where the basic form evolved.”

  Gorbel considered this unexpected bit of information cautiously. Even assuming that it was true—and it probably was, that would be the kind of thing Hoqqueah ’ould know about a planet to which he was assigned—it didn’t seem t d make any special difference in the situation. But Hoqqueah had )bviously brought it out for a reason. Well, he’d be trotting out the reason, too, soon enough; nobody would ever accuse the Altarian o: being taciturn.

  Nevertheless, he consk ered turning on the screen for a close look at the planet. Up to now h > had felt not the slightest interest in it.

  “Yes, there’s where it all began,” Hoqqueah said. “Of course at first it never occurred to those people that they might produce pre-adapted children. They ent to all kinds of extremes to adapt their environment instead, or 1 o carry it along with them. But they finally realized that with the pla lets, that won’t work. You can’t spend your life in a spacesuit, or unde r a dome, either.

  “Besides, they had hsd form trouble in their society from their earliest days. For centures they were absurdly touchy over minute differences in coloring aid shape, and even in thinking. They had regime after regime that‘ried to impose its own concept of the standard citizen on everybocy, and enslaved those who didn’t fit the specs.”

  Abruptly, Hoqqueah’s chatter began to make Gorbel uncomfortable. It was becoming ea rier and easier to sympathize with Averdor’s determination to ignore tl Le Adapted Man’s existence entirely.

  “It was only after the]’d painfully taught themselves that such differences really don’t mat er that they could go on to pantropy,” Hoqqueah said. “It was ths logical conclusion. Of course, a certain continuity of form had tc i be maintained, and has been maintained to this day. You cannot toi ally change the form without totally changing the thought processes. If you give a man the form of a cockroach, as one ancient writer fo: esaw, he will wind up thinking like a cockroach, not like a human being. We recognized that. On worlds where only extreme modificatic ns of the human form would make it suitable—for instance, a planet of the gas giant type—no seeding is attempted. The Council maintains that such worlds are the potential property of other races than the human, races whose psychotypes would not have to undei go radical change in order to survive there.”