“Three,” Muller said, holding up fingers. “Three of ‘em so smart they scare you. And all from the same country. There’s a lot more up there, too—running loose.”
“You’re sure of that?” Reese asked. It was more than he dared to believe.
“Yeah,” Muller said grimly. “There’s been a population jump, up there, and everything else has stayed the same. How would you figure it?”
Reese nodded slowly. He sighed. Put together like that, the evidence was good enough—the conclusion was valid. He turned to Hitchcock. “Is this what he told you?”
“Substantially,” Hitchcock affirmed.
Reese turned back to Muller. A suspicion had grown in him, ugly and fearful. Now he had to destroy it—or see it confirmed.
“He tells me you showed him test records,” he said cautiously. “And photos of brain tissue. Were they authentic?”
“Sure they’re authentic,” Muller retorted. “You think I’d fake a thing like that? Look—all I did was show him around, and show him how we work, and I answered his questions and let him see everything he wanted to see. You got any objections to that?” ,
Reese shook his head. ‘To that? No,” he conceded. “But these brain tissue samples—I presume you took them from the different sections of their brains.”
“I know how to take specimens,” Muller answered defiantly.
Reese felt sick and old. “You killed them,” he decided. “All three.”
“Right,” Muller snapped. He smiled with clenched teeth, fiercely proud of himself.
“Sigurd,” Reese said reproachfully, “you’ve done a terrible thing.” He turned to Hitchcock again.
“I wish this hadn’t come out while you were here,” he confessed. “I can only say that I heard nothing about these intelligent ones until now, and that Sigurd killed them without my knowledge. If I had known, I would have stopped him. He acted against regulations and against our policies. I am grateful to you for exposing him “
Muller shot to his feet, his hands fisted. “Exposing me!” he snarled. “Why you little—”
With an effort, Reese kept his voice even. “You may go now, Sigurd,” he said. “I... I suggest that you start packing. You have”—he glanced at the clock—”thirty hours before the ship leaves. If anyone asks, tell them that you resigned, and that I accepted your resignation.”
Muller’s face turned savage with rage. He hurled the chair out of his way and walked up to the desk until it bumped his knees. “You don’t make a goat of me that easy,” he threatened through his teeth. He jerked a thumb ut Hitchcock. “What about him? You can’t shut him up. What are you going to do? Pat him on the head and tell him be good?”
Reese glanced at Hitchcock. There was a firmness of decision on the man’s hollow-jowled face—a look of holy purpose about his eyes. As he watched, the man rose to his feet with solemn dignity, a bone-lean figure clad in black.
“You’re a very clever man, Mr. Reese,” he conceded with gleeful ferocity. “But not clever enough. You cannot deny the things I have seen with my own eyes. Nor can you lay all the blame at the feet of your underlings. What this man has done”—he gestured at Muller—”has no bearing on the fundamental fact that the welfare of this planet’s natives has been willfully and shamefully ignored—and that you have refused to do anything about it. If you do not correct this situation at once, I will expose you to every civilized community in the universe!”
“But you don’t understand,” Reese protested.
“I have not yet finished,” Hitchcock snapped. “In addition, if you still refuse, we—my Society for Humane Practices and I—shall do it ourselves. We shall sponsor a public subscription. We shall send food, clothes—all the things these poor people need. As many shiploads as necessary. And we shall see that you and all your scientists are removed from this planet. Your presence here will not be tolerated.”
“Have you any idea how much it would cost?” Reese wondered.
“The cost is not important,” Hitchcock said. ‘The public will gladly pay whatever is needed.”
Reese conceded the point. The knowledge that he could not win against this man was strong in him. It paralyzed his will. He wished he were a woman, or a child, so he could retreat into the weakness of frustrated tears.
“You’ve done this sort of thing before, haven’t you?” he said bitterly, remembering what he had heard of Hitchcock’s doings on other planets.
“I have,” Hitchcock confirmed. “I have been very successful at it.” He paused, waiting for Reese to speak. Reese said nothing.
“If you have nothing more to say—” he said. He turned toward the door.
Desperately, then, Reese spoke.
“Only this,” he said with a firmness he did not feel. Hitchcock turned back and faced him. He tapped a finger on the desk. “I gather from what Sigurd has said that some floppers may be intelligent,” he said. He spoke very slowly, deliberately. “Some, but not all. In fact, speaking in terms of the entire planetary population, only a very few are intelligent. All the rest are still animals.”
Hitchcock was not impressed. “All of them need our help,” he stated. “We cannot and we shall not give it to some and deny it to others, no matter what criterion you propose. I can think of nothing so unthinkable.”
“The point I’m trying to make,” Reese persisted patiently, “is that... that the floppers are in a period of transition. Right now, only some of them are intelligent—only a few. But some day, all of them will be intelligent, because ... because they are living under arduous conditions, and the intelligent ones are better able to survive—the population increase Sigurd mentioned is evidence of that. So, comparatively speaking, a greater proportion of the intelligent ones will survive to maturity. And the mature ones will tend to live longer than... than the ordinary ones—so they will tend to produce more young. It’s a perfect example of the natural selection process. But it won’t happen if we try to help them.”
“What?” Hitchcock demanded. “Preposterous!”
“It... it’s very true,” Reese assured him. “You see, if we gave them everything they need, the intelligent ones wouldn’t have an advantage over the ordinary ones—they’d all have an equal life-expectancy. Add the ordinary ones outnumber the intelligent ones by a fantastic margin, so— even if the intelligence gene-complex is a dominant—the intelligent ones would be absorbed into the race within a few generations. There wouldn’t be anything left of them.”
Hitchcock appeared to consider the argument, but his face was set stubbornly. Bitterly, Reese wondered if the man understood a thing he’d said.
Then Hitchcock spoke. “Am I to conclude, then,” he said, “that you want the natives to suffer? To starve? To... to die? To battle each other for a scrap of food? Do you admit that this is what you want?”
He had understood part of it, Reese concluded glumly. The ugly part. “I think it is necessary,” he had to admit. “I think it is the only way the floppers can advance. Remember, something like this must have happened to our own ancestors. If it hadn’t, we would still be mindless brutes.”
“Nonsense,” Hitchcock snapped. “The fact that our ancestors had no one to help them has nothing to do with it. They would have become men no matter what happened. It was their destiny to become men—the same destiny as these poor people, here. Nothing can possibly stand in their way—no man can interfere with destiny. They are suffering and dying because you deliberately neglect their welfare. You have the power to end that suffering and you are morally bound to do it. To refuse, Mr. Reese, is to turn your back on humanity.”
Reese sat perfectly still, a feeling of blind hopelessness crushing down on him. “I think,” he said slowly. “I think I know why Sigurd helped you so much. He wants to suppress the intelligent ones. Am I right, Sigurd?”