Muller slapped the photo plates down on top of the papers. “As for these—” he said. “These are brain tissue.” He indicated three sheets of eight photos each. ‘These came from the floppers—the smart ones. And these”—he tapped another set—”are a man’s brain. I figured you’d want to compare them, but don’t trust it too far—Floppers’ brains aren’t made the same. This one’s”—he pointed to the fifth set of photos—”from a normal flopper—one of the boys we keep around to do the work for us.”
Hitchcock tried to study the photo plates—tried to discover the similarities and the differences in them. But his eye was not trained—he didn’t know what to look for. The plates were as meaningless as the data sheets had been. Again, Sigurd Muller helped him.
“We use a variable intensity dye,” he explained. “Where it’s thin, it shows up red—where it’s heavy, it’s blue. We put it in one cell on each plate.”
He tapped one of the photo plates—the human one— where a blue splotch lay against a pale green-yellow background. Rootlike arms spread out from the splotch in all directions, branching and rebranching into countless red filaments thinner than hairs.
“That’s one brain cell,” he said. “Those”—he indicated the arms and the red filaments—”are how it makes connections with the other cells. Put a lot of ‘em together and you’ve got a whole network of connections. This one’s different from the others, but all of ‘em have connections like that. That’s what makes for intelligence—connections.”
Hitchcock frowned. These things were difficult to grasp. “Repeat that,” he requested.
“Take it this way,” Muller said. “Intelligence depends on a lot of units being tied up together in a network of communication—a lot of connections and a lot of channels of contact. The smarter you are, the more interconnections you’ve got, and it goes the same the other way around. So there’s two ways you can be smart, if you’ve got a big enough brain case to start with. You can have ordinary-size brain cells with a lot of these connecting threads, or you can have a lot of cells smaller than normal. Now— look what we’ve got here.”
He tapped the plate with the human brain cells on it. “Here we’ve got normal-size cells with a whole mess of connections.” He moved his finger on to the samples from the normal flopper. “This boy was dumb—these pictures are the same scale. The cells are almost as big, and they don’t have anywhere near as many contacts.”
Hitchcock was using his camera where Muller pointed. He could see that everything was exactly as Muller described it. Muller shifted to the three sets taken from the intelligent floppers. “Now look at these,” he was saying.
The cells were much smaller—not half the size of the cells from the normal flopper—and connecting filaments radiated out from them, proliferating endlessly. They looked like spiderwebs.
Hitchcock caught his breath. Why, minds built of cells like these would be incalculably powerful.
Muller smiled at him “You catch on easy,” he said.
“Why, they... how magnificent!” Hitchcock exclaimed.
This was the proof he wanted—proof that he was told a lie when he was told the floppers were mindless, dumb animals. Proof—undeniable proof—that the floppers were people, and that therefore they were entitled to the fundamental rights of all human beings.
But then an unsettling question—a moment of doubt— came into his thoughts. “How... how did you obtain these ... these wonderful specimens?”
Muller snorted. “How do you think? You don’t think we’d let ‘em run around loose, do you?”
Hitchcock was aghast. “You killed them!”
“Sure,” Muller said. “So what? They’re only animals.”
The deadfall had mashed the small animal practically flat, but some of its springy bones flexed back into shape when Kosh-korrozasch levered the ice block off it. He could see what it had looked like.
What he saw astonished him. It was unlike any creature he knew. He tore off a hind leg. A strip of flank peeled off with it. He squatted in the shelter of a rock ledge and gobbled it, bones and all. Then he tore off the other hind leg.
His hunger subsided then. He paused to examine the carcass more slowly. He had thought he knew all the creatures in the world—their shape, their habits, what they could do, and how they tasted. But this was not one of them.
It made him wonder.
A cold wind-gust blasted him, ruffing his pelt. He hardly noticed. He pondered how it was possible an animal could exist anywhere in the world, and he had not seen it till now. Never, till now, had he seen an animal he did not recognize—not since cubhood, when he was freshly come from his parent’s pouch.
From his high vantage, here in a cleft where the land reached a narrow white tendril up into the mountains, Kosh-korrozasch looked out at the world. The white, featureless land spread wide and far in the seven directions, and the mountains that surrounded the land were rough and massive—dark, and patched with white on their slopes. And there, out in the middle of the land where no mountain belonged, the great, lonely peak rose jaggedly to a flat crest. It was as if one of the monsters that lurked underground had been frozen at the moment it was smashing its way up to freedom.
Kosh-korrozasch had been everywhere in that world— had trod every part of the white, cold land—had searched all the tendrils of land that probed into the mountains— searched all the way to their ends, to where the mountains themselves blocked his way. And he had struggled nearly to the top of the great, lonely peak, there in the middle of the land; he had scraped the scale-food from the rocks up there, on the side where the wind rarely came.
He had learned where there was food in the world, and where there was none. He had learned how to find it, to trap it, to stalk it, and kill it. He knew all he needed to know about the world, and all the animals in it.
.... Except this one dead thing his trap had killed. He wrenched the rearward half of the body from the rest of it, and ate it slowly. It was good tasting food. It filled him with a sense of well-being—of having eaten. Eating was too rare a pleasure. Kosh-korrozasch had been part-starved all his life.
But the creature’s strangeness still nagged him. He crumbled the thing’s foreleg in his maw, and pondered. It was only then that the thought came to him.
It was a strange thought—strange and frightening. But it excited him, and his paws trembled while he ate the rest of the carcass. He ate slowly, savoring the pleasure of food, feeling the thrill and the wonder of his new thought.
Perhaps there was something beyond the edge of the world. Perhaps the creature had come from there.
Life was hard, here in this world. A being starved all his life, and died of hunger. A person spent all his life seeking food, building traps, while the dull ache of hunger gnawed his belly, driving him endlessly on, never satisfied.
Kosh-korrozasch paused when he had finished eating. Using the turquoise blood-dribble of his eating for a bait, he rebuilt the ice-block deadfall. He might never come back here—he knew that—but he might. And if he came back, he might be needing desperately the food it might kill while he was gone.
When it was built, he went away. Climbing upslope, he followed the tendril of land that reached up into the mountains toward the edge of the world. If an animal could enter from outside, perhaps he could leave it the same way.
A person searched for food all his life. Slowly, Kosh-korrozasch climbed toward the edge of the world.