“It’ll take new food crops to do that.”
“I’ll suggest them. What’s the object of this new complex of laboratories?”
“To learn,” Farrari said.
“That sounds like an excellent suggestion, the kind Bureau Headquarters hardly ever turns down. As concerns the olz, I’ll recommend that we learn something about them, with the added information that our local ol expert already has several laboratory programs in operation.”
“As long as you don’t identify the ol expert, that’s satisfactory with me,” Farrari said. “I’m being asked too many questions as it is.”
Jorrul pushed himself to his feet and reached for his cane.
“Come and visit us?” Farrari asked.
“I will,” Jorrul promised. “The first chance I get.”
He hobbled away.
“Are you leaving right away?” the coordinator asked.
“Yes. Unless I’m ordered, I won’t be back until the mob disperses.”
“I won’t order you unless someone orders me,” The coordinator promised. “I think I will move in here. Thanks.”
“Come and visit us?”
“As soon as I can get away.”
Farrari walked slowly along the corridor, sorting out the unrelenting blast or argument that flowed from every workroom.
“Of course the olz worship the rascz. There’s hardly a populated world in existence that doesn’t have some kind of domestic pet that worships its human masters, no matter how much those masters mistreat it.”
Rascz gave the olz a religion modeled on their own. Those burial caves. Did you know about the cave under the city of Scorv? The rascz bury their dead there.”
“Look. If the olz are animals, maybe they have a highly developed sense of smell. Maybe that’s why we lost so many ol agents. The olz could tell they weren’t olz, and then—”
“What’s wrong with the condition of the olz?” Farrari paused to listen. “Give me another example of a domestic animal that has their measure of independence. I say the rascz and the olz have achieved a unique symbiosis. Neither could exist without the other. And when, eventually, the rascz achieve industrialization, the olz can be bred to perform many routine industrial tasks.”
Farrari moved on, shaking his head slowly. He came to Isa Graan’s supply section, and Graan greeted him with a smile. “Quite a madhouse, eh?”
“Quite,” Farrari agreed.
“And no one to blame but yourself,” Graan said with a chuckle. “All the visiting brass want to make the grand tour. Jorrul’s men are complaining about being nothing but a glorified escort service, and my men are doing nothing but run platforms around Scorvif. But it can’t last forever, I keep telling myself. They’ll get tired and go home, and then we can get back to normal.”
“We’ll never get back to normal,” Farrari said.
“Are those olz really animals?” “I don’t know.”
“As long as you don’t know, couldn’t you have kept it to yourself?”
Farrari grinned, and Graan grinned back at him and slapped him on the back. “I’ve been wondering,” Graan said. “Several of us have been wondering. Couldn’t this whole gambit be something you thought up to make the IPR brass do something about the olz?”
“You don’t fool a super-specialist with a gambit,” Farrari said.
They climbed aboard a small platform and a moment later they were riding the cool night air in a rapid descent to the foot of the mountain. The platform landed; Farrari got out, softly called his thanks, and watched Graan take off.
For a moment he stood looking at the valley below, where an ol night-fire flickered. Then Farrari turned, the mountain opened before him and closed after him, and he went directly to the observation room. Liano greeted him with a smile.
“You escaped!”
He kissed her. “Base defies description. I shouldn’t have gone back, but the sector supervisor…”
“… Is fully aware of what an important man my husband is,” Liano said, laughing.
“Anything new?”
She shook her head. “They look. And keep looking. But that’s all.” Taking her hand, he sat down beside her. The screen above them showed the olz gathered around their nightfire. Farrari thought it ironic that the Bureau could do nothing for the olz as long as it thought them human—DEMOCRACY IMPOSED FROM WITHOUT, and all that—but when Farrari suggested that they might be animals, IPR set in motion the infestation of superspecialists from its highest headquarters and immediately approved an elaborate system of laboratories for observation and experiment. Whole villages were transported to the quiet, isolated valleys where IPR had trained its ol agents, and luxurious observation stations were constructed. There were even IPR agents disguised as durrlz and assistants, and the stiles were erected over the zrilm hedges each morning and taken down each night. IPR scientists were working with a village of olz, making physical, physiological, psychological and mental studies that should have been done long ago.
The olz were now believed to be loyal animals who loved their masters and preferred a sadistic beating to neglect, but they were nontheless protohuman, the almost-men whose evolution had been disrupted or—when they found this lovely, fertile land millennia before the rascz arrived—benignly arrested. To the scientists, that condition made them the most mysterious, the most critically, colossally important, the rarest life form in the galaxy, one standing midway between animal and intelligent being, whose existence had been postulated and theorized everywhere intelligent life existed but never before discovered. The olz were unique, and as a source where man could learn about himself they were beyond price.
Branoff IV would become the most important laboratory world in the galaxy, and the plague of visiting scientists would swell to a massive pollution. There would be studies and observations and experiments without number, all of them faithfully reported in an unending flow of treatises and theses and scientific papers that Farrari and Liano were determined to ignore.
They were concerned with the olz, as they had known them, and their own experiment was and would remain unreported except to a few friends who shared their interest in it. Farrari had plastered clay on a slab of rock near the nightfire, and on it he had drawn a stick-figure ol. And the olz were looking at it. While the Bureau wrestled with its moral dilemma and attempted to adjust itself to a situation the authors of its capitalized mottos had never contemplated, while the scientist awesomely probed man’s origins, Farrari and Liano would be exposing the olz to culture.
One day one of two things would happen: an ol would pick up a stick and try to draw a figure of his own; or an ol would suddenly comprehend that the drawing was of himself, and he would do what it told him to do: the dawn of creative thought from the spirit of art.
Soon, Farrari hoped.
He and Liano would be waiting.