“But what possible reason could we have for fighting these... these pitiful creatures?” Hitchcock protested.
“If they get smarter than we are,” Muller told him, “we better fight ‘em. And I’ve got evidence they’re going to.”
That seemed to settle that. Hitchcock shuddered with horror. For the first time, he could understand Muller’s attitude. It troubled him greatly, and he knew it was wrong. He was sure it was wrong. It had to be!
But he, too, was afraid.
The quarry’s trail turned to follow the valley. The pilot banked the skimmer sharply to turn after it. “Those tracks look new,” he observed.
“A couple of hours or less,” Muller agreed. The skimmer rocketed down the valley. Hitchcock leaned forward, peering ahead. He held his camera ready to use.
“Are they very far ahead?” he asked.
“Hard to tell,” Muller answered. “They can move pretty fast when they want to.” He pointed to a set of tracks that paralleled the tracks of the quarry. “That boy was using three legs—sort of like an ape when it’s running. They do that when they’re in a hurry—or else all four.”
“They run like animals?” Hitchcock demanded. He had a vision of the bumbling, shambling creatures bounding along on all four legs like beasts. The thought was appalling.
The skimmer skidded around the curve of a high, moundlike hill. And there they were. Still far ahead and indistinct in the sun-glare, they were nevertheless unmistakable. Floppers—eight or ten of them.
“Pull back,” Muller snapped.
The skimmer bucked and shuddered as the pilot slammed it to a stop against the windblast of its fans. Quickly, they slipped back around the curve of the hill.
“Now you’ll see how we do it,” Muller told Hitchcock. “Better get buttoned up. It’s cold out there.” He helped Hitchcock with the unfamiliar clasps of his wind mask, and made sure his parka was zipped tight.
Then he got busy in his own part of the cockpit. Hitchcock leaned forward to see. When he had his own wind mask in place, and his parka was tight, Muller opened the canopy on the side where the net lay rolled on the cowling. A blast of cold air burst into the cockpit. Hitchcock felt it even through his thick clothes. It leaked in through his mask and around the brow ridge of his goggles. Painfully, it invaded his nose as he breathed.
Muller pointed to the grommet near Hitchcock’s knee, where the net was secured. “Is it tied down good?” he asked. His mask muffled his voice. Hitchcock glanced down negligently and nodded.
Not that he cared if it was tied down properly or not. It was revolting merely to think of using a net to capture a flopper. Such things were unfair—unsportsmanlike.
But Muller accepted the answer. “Let’s go!” he barked.
The pilot leaned forward, pushing the control stick all the way front. The skimmer tilted forward. The engine surged.
They skittered around the curve of the hill, then straightened out and drove. Hitchcock felt the icy wind smash against him. Intense cold leaked through his parka’s fastenings. The wind thundered around him. He raised his camera and focused it on the place far ahead where the floppers were gathered. The skimmer hurtled forward like a boat on the crest of a wave.
Muller held a set of binoculars up against his goggles, studying the scene ahead. “They got the thing surrounded,” he announced. “One of ‘em’s got a—” He stopped. “Get that one!” he rapped out. “The first one we come to. He’s the one we want!”
Hitchcock could make them out, now. A line of Floppers was driving a sinuous, short-legged beast toward another flopper. That flopper was standing still, its back to the skimmer. It held something over its head with both of its flipperlike paws. The beast was gliding toward it like a snake.
“That’s the one we want!” Muller yelled into the wind.
Muller pushed the rolled net over the skimmer’s side. It unrolled and flapped sluggishly in the wind. The skimmer rocked.
They were very close, now, and traveling fast. A plume of wind-lifted snow blew up behind them. Hitchcock held his camera fixed on the flopper. The scene exploded into largeness before them.
At the last moment, the pilot spun the skimmer broadside, setting the net to scoop up the flopper. At that instant, Hitchcock reached down and wrenched the net’s anchor cord from the grommet near his knee.
Because he was doing that, his camera did not record what followed. The net, robbed of half its support, bunched into a bundle which clubbed the flopper from behind and tumbled it into the snow. A large, ragged, heart-shaped rock flew from its paws.
The skimmer hurtled onward from its own momentum. The pilot fought to slow it down. Hitchcock raised his camera again.
He got what happened next on the tape—the catlike pounce of the beast, the desperate struggling of the flopper, and the sudden gush of turquoise blood on the white snow.
“You see?” Hitchcock cried triumphantly “You see? That’s how you make them live! You murderers!”
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.