Larry Niven: The Handicapped


The Handicapped
Larry Niven
Galaxy
December, 1967



 
We flew on skycycles over a red desert, under the soft red sun of Down. I let 
Jilson stay ahead. He was my guide, and I hadn't been flying a skycycle long. 
I'm a flatlander. I had spent most of my life in the cities of Earth, where any 
flying vehicle is illegal unless fully automated.
I liked flying. I wasn't good at it yet, but there was plenty of room for 
mistakes with the desert so far below.
"There," said Jilson, pointing.
"Where?"
"Down there. Follow me." His skycycle swung easily to the left and began to slow 
and drop. I followed more clumsily, over-correcting and dropping behind. 
Eventually I spotted something.
"That little cone?"
"That's it."
From up here the desert looked lifeless. It wasn't, any more than the deserts of 
most inhabited worlds are lifeless. Down there, invisible at this height, were 
spiky dry plants with water stored in their cores; flowers that bloomed after a 
rain and left their seeds to wait a year or ten years for the next rainfall; 
insect-things with four legs, unjointed; skinny warm-blooded quadrupeds from the 
size of a fox on down, who were always hungry.
There was a five-foot hairy cone with a bald, rounded top. Only its shadow made 
it visible as we dropped toward it. Its lank hair was the exact color of the 
reddish sand.
We landed next to it and got off.
I was beginning to think I'd been played for a fool. The thing didn't look like 
an animal. It looked like a big cactus. Sometimes a cactus had hair just like 
that.
"We're behind it," said Jilson. He was dark and massive and taciturn. On Down 
there was no such animal as the professional guide. I'd talked Jilson into 
taking me out into the desert for a fair fee, but it hadn't bought his 
friendship. I think he was trying to make that clear. "Come around in front," he 
said.
We circled the hairy cone, and I started to laugh.
The Grog showed just five features.
Where it touched flat rock, the base of the cone was some four feet across. 
Long, straight hair brushed the rock like a floor-length skirt. A few inches up, 
two small, widely separated paws poked through the curtain of hair the size and 
shape of a Great Dane's forepaws, but naked and pink. A yard higher two more 
paws poked through, but on these the toes were extended to curving, useless 
fingers. Finally, above the forepaws was a yard-long lipless gash of a mouth, 
half-hidden by hair, curved very slightly upward at the corners. No eyes. The 
cone looked like some Stone Age carved idol or like a cruel cartoon of a feudal 
monk.
Jilson waited patiently for me to stop laughing. "It's funny," he admitted with 
reluctance. "But it's intelligent. There's a brain under that bald top, bigger 
than yours and mine combined."
"It's never tried to communicate with you?"
"Not with me nor with anyone else."
"Does it make tools?"
"With what? Look at its hands!" He regarded me with amusement. "This is what you 
wanted to see, wasn't it?"
"Yes. I came a long way for nothing."
"Anyway, now you've seen it."
I laughed again. Eyeless, motionless, my potential customer sat like a fat lap 
dog in begging position. "Come on," I said, "let's go back."
A fool's errand. I'd spent two weeks in hyperspace to get here. The fare would 
come out of business expenses, but ultimately I'd pay it; I'd own the business 
one day.
Jilson took his check without comment, folded it twice and stuck it in his 
lighter pocket. He said, "Buy you a drink?"
"Sure."
We left our rented skycycles at the Downtown city limit and boarded a pedwalk. 
Jilson led the way from crossing to crossing until we were sliding past a great 
silver cube with a wriggling blue sign: CZILLER'S HOUSE OF IRISH COFFEE. Inside, 
the place was still a cube, a one-story building forty meters high. Padded 
horseshoe-shaped sofas covered the entire floor, so close you could hardly 
squeeze between them, each with its little disk of a table nestling in the 
centre. From the floor a tinsel abstraction rose like a great tree, spreading 
its wide, glittering arms protectively over the customers, rising forty meters 
to touch the ceiling. The bartending machinery was halfway up the tree.
"Interesting place," said Jilson. "These booths were built to float." He waited 
for me to express surprise. When I didn't, he went on: "It didn't work out. 
Lovely idea though. The chairs would swoop through the air; and if the people at 
two tables wanted to meet, they'd slide their booths together and lock them 
magnetically."
"Sounds like fun."
"It was fun. The guy who thought it up must have forgot that people come to a 
bar to get drunk. They'd crash the booths together like bumper cars. They'd go 
as high as they could and then pour out their drinks. The people underneath 
didn't like that, and maybe there'd be a fight. I remember seeing a guy get 
thrown out of a booth. He'd have been dead if that tinsel centrepiece hadn't 
caught him. I hear another guy did die; he missed the branches."
"So they grounded the booths."
"No. First they tried to make the course automatic. But you could still pour 
drinks on the people below, and there was more skill in it. It got to be a game. 
Then one night some idiot figured out how to short the autopilot, but he forgot 
the manual controls had been disconnected. His booth landed on another and 
injured three important people. Then they grounded the booths."
A floating tray served us two chilled glasses and a bottle of Blue Fire 2728. 
The bar was two-thirds empty this early, and quiet. When the freeze-distilled 
wine was half gone, I explained why they call Blue Fire the "Crashlander's 
Peacemaker": the shape of the flexible plastic bottle, narrow-necked with a 
flaring mouth, plus the weight of the fluid inside make it a dandy bludgeon.
Jilson was turning almost garrulous now that I was no longer his employer. I was 
talking a lot too. Not that I felt like it; it was just—well, hell, here I was, 
lightyears from Earth and business and the good people I knew, way out at the 
edge of human space. Down: a former Kzinti world, mostly empty, with a few 
scattered dots of civilization and a few great scars of old war, a world where 
the farmers had to use ultraviolet lamps to grow crops because of that red dwarf 
sun. Here I was. I was going to enjoy it if it killed me.
I was enjoying it. Jilson was good company, and the Blue Fire didn't hurt at 
all. We ordered another bottle. The noise level rose as cocktail hour drew near.
"Something I've been wondering," said Jilson. "Mind if we talk business?"
"No. Whose business?"
"Yours."
"Not at all. Why ask?"
"It's traditional, to us. Some people don't like giving away their tricks of the 
trade. Others like to forget work completely after hours."
"That makes sense. What's the question?"
"Why do you pronounce Handicapped as though it had a capital H?"
"Oh. Well, if I said it with a small h, you'd think I meant humans, wouldn't 
you? Potential paranoids, albino crashlanders, boosterspice allergics, people 
with missing limbs and resistance to transplants—handicapped like that."
"Whereas what I deal with are sentient beings who evolved with minds but with 
nothing that would serve as hands."
"O-oh. Like dolphins?"
"Right. Are there dolphins on Down?"
"Hell yes. Who else would run our fishing industry?"
"You know those things you pay them off in? They look like a squirt-jet 
motorboat motor with two padded metal hands attached."
"The Dolphin's Hands. Sure. We sell 'em other stuff, tools and sonic things to 
move fish around, but the Dolphin's Hands are what they mainly need."
"I make them."
Jilson's eyes jerked up. Then…I could feel him withdrawing, backing off as he 
realized that the man across from him could probably buy Down. Damn! But the 
best I could do now was ignore the fact.
"I should have said my father's company makes them. One day I'll direct Garvey 
Limited, but my great grandfather will have to die first. I doubt he ever will."
Jilson smiled, with little strain. "I know people like that."
"Yah. Some people seem to dry out as they get older. They get dryer and tougher 
instead of getting fat, until you think they'll never change again; and they 
seem to get more and more energetic, like there's a thermonuclear source inside 
them. Gee-Squared is like that. A great old man. I don't see enough of him."
"You sound proud of him. Why does he have to die?"
"It's like a custom. Dad's running the company now. If he gets in trouble, he 
can go to his father, who ran the company before him. If Gee-Prime can't handle 
it, they both go to Gee-Squared."
"Funny names."
"Not to me. That's like a tradition too."
"Sorry. What are you doing on Down?"
"We don't deal only with dolphins." The Blue Fire made me want to lecture. 
"Look, Jilson. We know of three sentient beings without hands. Right?"
"More than that. Puppeteers use their mouths. Outsiders—"
"But they build their own tools, damnit. I'm talking about beasts who can't even 
crack themselves a fist-ax or hold a lighter: dolphins, bandersnatchi, and that 
thing we saw today."
"The Grog. Well?"
"Well, don't you see that there must be Handicapped species all over the galaxy? 
Minds but no hands. I tell you, Jilson, it gives me the shivers. For as long as 
we expand to other stars, we're going to meet more and more handless, tool-less, 
helpless civilizations. Sometimes we won't even recognize them. What are we 
going to do about them?"
"Build Dolphin's Hands for them."
"Well, yes, but we can't just give them away. Once one species starts depending 
on another, they become parasites."
"How about bandersnatchi? Do you build Hands for bandersnatchi?"
"Yes. Lots bigger, of course." A bandersnatch is twice the size of a brontosaur. 
Its skeleton is flexible but has no joints; the only breaks in its smooth white 
skin are the tufts of sensory bristles on either side of its tapering blank 
head. It moves on a rippling belly foot. Bandersnatchi live in the lowlands of 
Jinx, browsing off the grey yeast along the shorelines. You'd think they were 
the most helpless things in known space…until you saw one bearing down on you 
like a charging mountain. Once I saw an ancient armored-car crushed flat across 
a lowlands rock, straddled by the broken bones of the beast that ran it down."
"Okay. How do they pay for their machines?"
"Hunting privileges."
Jilson looked horrified. "I don't believe you."
"I hardly believed it myself, but it's true." I hunched forward across the tiny 
table. "Here's how it works. The bandersnatchi have to control their population; 
there's only so much shoreline to feed on in the lowlands. They also have to 
control boredom. Can you imagine how bored they must have been before men came 
to Jinx? So what they've done is, they've made a treaty with the Jinx 
government. Now, say a man wants a bandersnatchi skeleton, he's going to build a 
trophy room under it. He goes to the Jinx government and gets a license. The 
license tells him what equipment he can take down to the lowlands, which is 
inhabited only by bandersnatchi because the atmospheric pressure is enough to 
crush a man's lungs and the temperature is enough to cook him. If he gets caught 
taking extra weapons, he goes to prison for a long time.
"Maybe he makes it back with a body; maybe he doesn't come back. His equipment 
gives him odds of about sixty-forty. But either way, the bandersnatchi get 
eighty percent of the license fee, which is a thousand stars flat. With that, 
they buy things."
"Like Hands."
"Right. Oh, one more thing. A dolphin can control his Hands with his tongue, but 
a bandersnatch can't. We have to build the control setup directly into the 
nerves, by surgery. It's not difficult."
Jilson shook his head and dialed for another bottle.
"They do other things," I said. "The Institute of Knowledge has instruments in 
the lowlands—laboratories and such. There are things the Institute wants to know 
about what happens under lowland pressures and temperatures. The bandersnatchi 
run all the experiments, using the Hands."
"So you came here for a new market."
"I was told there was a new sentient life-form on Down, one that doesn't use 
tools."
"You've changed your mind?"
"Just about. Jilson, what makes you think they're sentient?"
"The brains. They're huge."
"Nothing else?"
"No."
"Their brains might not work like ours. The nerve cells might be different."
"Look, we're about to get technical. Let's drop it for tonight." And with that, 
Jilson pushed the bottles and glasses to one side and stood up on the table. He 
peered around Cziller's House of Irish Coffee, swinging his head in a slow arc. 
"Hah! Garvey, I've spotted a cousin and one of her friends. Let's join 'em. It's 
almost dinnertime."
I thought we'd be taking them to dinner. Not at all. Sharon and Lois built our 
dinner, handmade, starting with raw materials we picked up in a special store. 
Seeing raw food for the first time, practically in the state in which it had 
emerged from the ground or been cut from a dead beast, made me a little queasy. 
I hope I didn't show it. But dinner tasted fine.
After dinner and some polite drinking and talk, back to the hotel. I went to 
sleep planning to hop a ship the next morning.
 
I woke in total darkness around oh four hundred, staring at the invisible 
ceiling and seeing a round-topped cone with reddish lank hair and a faintly 
smiling mouth. Smiling at me in gentle derision. The cone had secrets. I'd come 
that close to guessing one this afternoon; I'd seen something without noticing 
it.
Don't ask me how I knew. With a crystalline certainty that I could not doubt, I 
knew.
But I couldn't remember what I'd seen.
I got up and dialed the kitchen for some hot chocolate and a tuna sandwich.
Why should they be intelligent? Why would sedentary cones evolve a brain?
I wondered how they reproduced. Not bisexually; they couldn't get to each other. 
Unless—but of course there must be a motile stage. Those leftover paws… What 
would they eat? They couldn't find food; they'd have to wait for it to come to 
them, like any sessile animal: clams, sea anemones, or the Gummidgy "orchid" I 
keep in my living room so I can shock hell out of guests.
They had a brain. Why? What did they do with it, sit and think about all they 
were missing? I needed data. Tomorrow I'd contact Jilson.
 
At eleven the next morning we were in the Downtown Zoo.
Behind a repulsor field something snapped and snarled at us: something like an 
idiot god's attempt to make a hairy bulldog. The animal had no nose, and its 
mouth was a flat, lipless slit hiding two serrated horseshoe-shaped cutting 
surfaces. Its long, coarse hair was the color of sand lit by red sunlight. The 
forepaws had four long, spreading toes, so that they looked like chicken feet.
"I recognize those feet."
"Yah," said Jilson. "It's a young Grog. In this stage they mate. Then the female 
finds a rock and settles down. When she's big enough, she starts having 
children. That's the theory, anyway. They won't do it in captivity."
"What about the males?"
"In the next cage."
The males, two of them, were the size of Chihuahuas, with about the same 
temperament. But they had the serrated horseshoe teeth and the coarse reddish 
hair.
"Jilson, if they're intelligent, why are they in cages?"
"If you think that's bad, wait'll you see the lab. Look, Garvey, what you've got 
to keep in mind is that nobody's proven they're intelligent. Until somebody 
does, they're experimental animals."
They had an odd, almost pleasant odor, faint enough so that you stopped noticing 
it in two or three seconds. I peered in at the snapping motile-stage female. 
"What happens then? Does everyone suddenly get ashamed of himself?"
"I doubt it. Do you happen to know what humans did to dolphins while trying to 
prove they were intelligent?"
"Brain probes and imprisonment. But that was a long time ago."
"The scientists were trying to prove dolphins were intelligent, so they had to 
be treated like experimental animals. Why not? It makes sense: In the end they 
did the species a service. If their assumption had been wrong, they'd only have 
wasted time on animals. And it gave the dolphins a hell of an incentive to prove 
they were intelligent."
We reached the lab shortly after noon. It was the Laboratory for Xenobiological 
Research, a rectangular building beyond the outskirts of the city, surrounded by 
brown fields marked with rectangular arrays of ultraviolet lamps on tall poles. 
In the distance we could see the Ho River, with flocks of water skiers skimming 
across its muddy surface behind puller units.
A Dr. Fuller showed us through the lab. He was an obvious crashlander: a 
towering albino, seven feet tall, with a slender torso and tapering, almost 
skeletal, limbs. "You're interested in the Grogs? I don't blame you. They're 
very difficult to study, you know. Their behavior tells nothing. They sit. When 
something comes by, they eat it. And they bear young."
He had several presessile cones, the bulldog-sized quadrupeds, in cages. There 
was another cage containing two of the little males. They didn't bark at him, 
and he treated them with tenderness and something like love. It seemed to me 
that he was a happy man. I could sympathize with him. Down must look like 
paradise to an albino from We Made It. You can walk around outside all year, the 
soil grows things, and you don't need tannin pills under the red sun.
"They learn fast," he said earnestly, "that is, they do well in mazes. But they 
certainly aren't intelligent. About as intelligent as a dog. They grow fast, and 
they eat horrendously. Look at this one." He picked up a very fat, 
round-bottomed female. "In a few days she'll be looking for a place to anchor."
"What will you do then? Turn her loose?"
"We're going to raise her just outside the lab. We've picked her a good anchor 
rock and built a cage around it. She'll go into the cage until she changes form, 
and then we can remove the cage. We've tried this before," he added, "but it 
hasn't worked out. They die. They won't eat, even when we offer them live meat."
"What makes you think this one will live?"
"We have to keep trying. Perhaps we'll find out what we're doing wrong."
"Has a Grog ever attacked a human being?"
"To the best of my knowledge, never."
To me, that was as good an answer as No, because I was trying to find out if 
they were intelligent.
Consider the days when it was first suspected that the cetaceans were Earth's 
second sentient order of life. It was known, then, that dolphins had many times 
helped swimmers out of difficulty and that no dolphin had ever been known to 
attack a human being. Well, what difference did it make whether they had not 
attacked humans or whether they had done so only when there was no risk of being 
caught at it? Either statement was proof of intelligence.
"Of course, a man may simply be too big for a Grog to eat. Look at this," said 
Dr. Fuller, turning on a microscope screen. The screen showed a section of a 
nerve cell. "From a Grog's brain. We've done some work on the Grog's nervous 
system. The nerves transmit impulses more slowly than human nerves, but not much 
more. We've found that a strongly stimulated nerve can fire off the nerve next 
to it, just as in terrestrial chordates."
"Are the cones intelligent, in your opinion?"
Dr. Fuller didn't know. He took a long time saying it, but that's what it boiled 
down to. It distressed him; his ears turned red beneath the transparent skin. He 
wanted to know. Perhaps he felt he had a right to know.
"Then tell me this. Is there any evolutionary reason for them to have developed 
intelligence?"
"That's a much better question." But he hesitated over the answer. "I'll tell 
you this. There is a terrestrial marine animal which starts life as a 
free-swimming worm with a notochord. It later settles down as a sessile animal, 
and it gives up the notochord at the same time."
"Amazing! What's a notochord?"
He laughed. "Like your spinal cord. A notochord is a rope of nervous connection 
which branches into the trunk nerves of the body. More primitive forms have 
sensory connections, but arranged without order. More advanced forms wrap a 
spine around the notochord and become vertebrates."
"And this beast gives up its notochord?"
"Yes. It's retrograde development."
"But the Grogs are different."
"That's right. They don't develop their large brains until after they settle 
down. And, no, I can't imagine an evolutionary reason. They shouldn't need a 
brain. They shouldn't have a brain. All they do in life is sit and wait for 
morsels of food to hop by."
"You speak almost poetically when you turn your mind to it."
"Thank you—I think. Mr. Garvey, will you come this way? You too, Jil. I want to 
show you a Grog central nervous system. Then you'll be as confused as I am."
The brain was big, as advertised, and globular, and a strange color: almost the 
grey of human grey matter but with a yellow tinge. It might have been the 
preservative. The hindbrain was almost unnoticeable, and the spinal cord was a 
limp white string, uselessly thin, tapering almost to a thread before it ended 
in a multiple branching. What could that monstrous brain control, with 
practically no spinal cord to carry its messages?
"I gather most of the nerves to the body don't go through the spinal cord."
"I believe you're wrong, Mr. Garvey. I've tried without success to find 
supplementary nerves." He was smiling slightly. Now I had a piece of the 
problem. We could both stay awake nights.
"Is the nervous material any different from the motile form's brain?"
"No. The motile form has a smaller brain and a thicker spinal cord. As I said, 
its intelligence is about that of a dog. Its brain is somewhat larger, which is 
to be expected when you consider the slower rate of propagation of the nerve 
impulse."
"Right. Does it help you to know that you've ruined my day?"
"It does, yes." He smiled down at me. We were friends. He was flattered to know 
that I understood what he was talking about. Otherwise I wouldn't have looked so 
puzzled.
 
The big soft sun was halfway down the sky when we got out. We stopped to look at 
the anchor pen Dr. Fuller had set up outside: one big flat rock with sand heaped 
around it, all enclosed in a wide fence with a gate. A smaller pen against the 
fence housed a colony of white rabbits.
"One last question, Doctor. How do they eat? They can't just sit and wait for 
food to pop into their mouths."
"No, they have a very long, slender tongue. I wish I could see it in use 
sometime. They won't eat in captivity; they won't eat when a human being is 
anywhere near."
We said our good-byes and took our skycycles up.
"It's only fifteen ten," said Jilson. "Do you want another look at a wild Grog 
before you leave Down?"
"I think so, yes."
"We could get out into the desert and back before sunset."
And so we turned west. The Ho River slipped beneath us and then a long stretch 
of cultivated fields. Long pink clouds striped the sky. They can't be 
intelligent, I was thinking. They can't.
"What?"
"Sorry, Jilson. Was I talking out loud?"
"Yah. You saw that brain, didn't you?"
"I did."
"Then how can you say they're not intelligent?"
"They've got no use for intelligence."
"Does a dolphin? Or a sperm whale, or a bandersnatch?"
"Yes, yes, no. Think it through. A dolphin has to hunt down its food. It has to 
outwit hungry killer-whales. A sperm whale also has the killer-whale problem, or 
used to. Then there were whaling ships. The smarter they were, the longer they 
could live.
"Remember, cetaceans are mammals. They developed some brains on land. When they 
went back to the sea, they grew, and their brains grew too. The better their 
brains were, the better they could control their muscles, and the more agile 
they were in water. They needed brains, and they had a head start."
"What about bandersnatchi?"
"You know perfectly well that evolution didn't produce the bandersnatch."
A moment of silence. Then, "What?"
"You really don't know?"
"I've never heard of a life form being produced without evolution. How did it 
happen?"
I told him.
 
Once upon a time, a billion and a half years ago, there was an intelligent biped 
species. Intelligent—but not very. But they had a natural ability to control the 
minds of any sentient race they came across. Today we call them Slavers. At its 
peak the Slaver Empire included most of the galaxy.
One of their slave races had been the tnuctip, a highly advanced, highly 
intelligent species already practicing biological engineering when the Slavers 
found them. The Slavers gave them limited freedom, after they found the worth of 
those freethinking brains. In return the tnuctipun had built them biological 
tools. Air plants for their spacecraft, stage trees with shaped solid-fuel 
rocket cores, racing animals, bandersnatchi. The bandersnatch was a meat animal. 
It would eat anything, and everything but its skeleton was edible.
There had come a day, a billion and a half years ago, when the Slavers found 
that most of the tnuctip gifts were traps. The rebellion had been a long time 
building, and the Slavers had underestimated their slaves. To win that war they 
had been forced to use a weapon which exterminated not only the tnuctipun, but 
every other sentient species then in the galaxy. Then, without slaves, the 
Slavers too had died.
Scattered through known space, on odd worlds and between stars, were the relics 
of the Slaver Empire. Some were Slaver artifacts, protected against time by 
stasis fields. Others were more or less mutated tnuctip creations: sunflowers, 
stage trees, ships' air plants floating naked in space in cellophane bubbles; 
and bandersnatchi.
The bandersnatch had been a tnuctip trap. It had been built sentient so that it 
could be used as a spy. Somehow the tnuctipun had made it immune to the Slaver 
power. Thus it had lived through the revolution.
For what?
The Jinxian bandersnatchi spent their lives in a soupy, pressurized fog, 
browsing off the ancient food yeast that still covered the ocean a foot deep in 
cheesy grey scum. No data reached their senses but for the taste of yeast and 
the everlasting grey mist. They had brains to think with but nothing to think 
about…until the coming of man.
"And it can't mutate," I concluded. "So you can forget the bandersnatch. He's 
the exception that proves the rule. All other known Handicapped needed brains 
before their brains developed."
"And they're all cetaceans from Earth's oceans."
"Well—"
Jilson made a razzing noise. Hell, he was right. They were all cetaceans.
We'd left the plowed lands far behind. Gradually the plains became a desert. I 
was beginning to feel more comfortable with the beast under me—this platform 
with a saddle, and an oversized lift-belt motor, an air pump, and a force-field, 
generator to stop the wind. Feeling less likely to make a mistake, I could fly 
lower, with less room to correct before I hit sand. From this close the desert 
was alive. There, rolling before the wind, was a wild cousin to the tumbleweeds 
I'd seen in the Zoo of Earth. There, a straight stalk with orange leaves around 
the base, fleshy leaves with knife-sharp edges to discourage herbivores. There, 
another, and a fox-sized herbivore cleverly eating out the centre of a leaf. It 
looked up, saw us, and disappeared into motion. There, a vivid flash of scarlet, 
some desert plant which had picked an odd time to bloom.
The soft red sun made everything look like the decor in a nightclub I know. It's 
decorated as Mars ought to be, as Mars was before space flight. A distance 
illusion: red sand; straight canals running with improbably clear, pure water; 
crystal towers reaching high, high, toward big fat crescent moons. Suddenly I 
wanted a drink.
I dug in my saddlebags, hoping to find a flask. It was there, and it was heavy 
with fluid. I pinched the top open, tilted it to my lips—and almost choked. 
Martini! A halfpint martini, a little too sweet, but far colder than ice cold. I 
sipped at it, twice, and put it away. "I like Downers," I said.
"Good. Why?"
"No flatlander would think to put a martini in a rental skycycle unless he was 
asked to."
"Harry's a nice guy. Woop, there's a cone."
I looked down and right, searching for sand-colored hair against sand. The cone 
was in its own shadow; it practically jumped at me. And equally suddenly, I knew 
what had awakened me in the dark morning.
"What's wrong?" asked Jilson. I realized that I'd gasped.
"Nothing. Jilson, I don't know all I should about Downer animals. Do they 
excrete solids?"
"Do they—? Hey, that was nicely put. Yes, they do." He tilted his vehicle down 
toward the cone.
It sat firmly on a tilted flat rock, which lifted one edge out of the sand. The 
rock was absolutely clean.
"Then Grogs do too."
"Right." Jilson landed.
I drifted in beside him, dropping the skycycle joltingly hard. The Grog sat 
facing us, faintly smiling.
"Well, where's the evidence? Who cleans up after this thing?"
Jilson scratched his head. He walked around the base of the Grog and came back, 
looking puzzled. "Funny, I never thought of that. Scavengers?"
"Maybe."
"Is it important?"
"Maybe. Most sessile animals live in water. The water carries everything away."
"There's a sessile thing from Gummidgy—"
"I've got one. But the orchid-thing lives in trees. It attaches itself to a nice 
thick horizontal tree-branch, with its tail hanging over the edge."
"Mmm." He seemed uninterested. No doubt he was right; some scavenger cleaned up 
after the Grog. But it didn't sound right. Why would the parasite animal do such 
a good job?
The Grog and I faced each other.
As a rule the Handicapped seem to suffer from sensory deprivation. Cetaceans 
live underwater; bandersnatchi live in heated, pressurized fog. Maybe it's too 
early to make such rules, but it's for sure that a Handicapped will have trouble 
experimenting with his environment. Experiments generally require tools.
But the Grog had real troubles. Blind, numb in all its extremities—due to the 
nearly useless spinal cord—unable even to move to a different location, what 
could be its picture of the universe?
Somehow I found myself staring at its hands.
Hands. Useless, of course, but still hands. Four fingers with tiny claws set 
around the tiny palm like the fingers of a mechanical grab.
"It didn't evolve at all. It devolved!"
Jilson looked up. He was using his skycycle as the only convenient thing to sit 
on for miles around. "What are you talking about?"
"The Grog. It's got vestigial hands. Once it must have been a higher form of 
life."
"Or a climbing animal, like a monkey."
"I don't think so. I think it had a brain and hands and mobility. Then something 
happened, and it lost its civilization. Now it's lost its mobility and its 
hands."
"Why would it stop moving?"
"Maybe there was a shortage of food. Not moving conserved energy." And because 
that was the sheerest guesswork, I added, "Or maybe it got in the habit of 
watching too much tridee. I know people who don't move for weeks."
"During the Interworld Playoffs my cousin Bernie—Hell with it! You think that's 
the answer, do you?"
"Yes. It's in a trap. No eyes, no sensory input, no way to do anything with what 
it does think about. It's like a blind, deaf, and dumb baby with glove 
anesthesia."
"It's still got the brain."
"Like our appendix. It'll lose that too."
"You're the one who was worried about the Handicapped. Can't you do anything for 
it?"
"Euthanasia, maybe. No, not even that. Let's go back to Downtown." I walked 
through sand toward my cycle sick with discouragement. Bandersnatchi had needed 
me to tell them about the stars. But what could you tell a hairy cone?
No, it was back to Downtown for me, and then back to Earth. There are people no 
doctor and no psychiatrist can help, and there are species equally beyond aid. 
With the Grogs there was no place to start.
A few feet from the cycle I sat down cross-legged in the sand. Jilson got down 
beside me. We faced the Grog, waiting.
By and by Jilson said, "What are we waiting for?"
I shrugged. I didn't know. But Jilson didn't move, and neither did I. I knew 
with a crystalline certainty that we were doing the right thing.
Simultaneously, we turned from the Grog to look into the desert.
Something the size of a rat came hopping toward us, kicking up dust. Behind it, 
another and another. They hopped laboriously across the sand, springing high, 
and stopped in an arc facing the Grog.
The Grog turned toward them—not the way you'd turn your neck, but turning all 
over. It looked sightlessly at the sand rats, and the sand rats perched on their 
hind legs and looked back.
The Grog's mouth opened. It was a cavern, and the tongue was coiled on its pink 
floor. The tongue moved like a lash, invisibly fast, flick, flick. Two of the 
rats were gone. The mouth (not too small for a man) dropped shut, smiling 
gently.
The third rat was there on its hind legs. None of them had tried to run. They 
might just as well have—Again the Grog's mouth dropped open. The last sand rat 
took a running leap and landed on the coiled tongue. The mouth closed for the 
last time, and the cone turned back to face us.
I had the answers all at once, intuitively, with the same force of conviction 
that now had me sitting cross-legged on the sand.
The Grog was psychic or something similar. It could control minds, even minds as 
insignificant as a sand rat's.
That was the purpose of the Grog's large brain. Its intelligence was a side 
effect of its power. For aeons the Grogs had called their food to them. They did 
not hunt after childhood. Once the brain had developed, they never needed to 
move again.
They didn't need eyes; they had little need of other sensory perceptions. They 
used the senses of other animals.
They directed the scavengers who cleaned their rocks, and their pelts too, when 
necessary. Their mind control brought meat animals to their presessile female 
young, directed their breeding habits, and guided them to proper anchor rocks.
They were now feeding information directly into my brain.
I said, "But why me?"
I knew, with a crystalline certainty I was learning to recognize. The Grogs were 
aware of what they were missing. They had read the minds of passers-by: first 
Kzinti warriors, then human miners, explorers, sightseers. And my business was 
the Handicapped. They had learned of the Dolphin's Hands, They had primed Jilson 
and others to know, without evidence, that the Grogs were sentient, and to say 
so when the right person should appear.
Without evidence: that was important. They had to know what they were getting 
into before they committed themselves. Men like Dr. Fuller could investigate if 
they liked; it would look suspicious if they were prevented. But something kept 
them from noticing the handlike appearance of those tiny forepaws, the lack of 
biological wastes around a wild Grog.
Could I help them?
The question was suddenly an obsession. I shook my head to fight it off. "I 
don't know. Why did you wait so long to show yourselves?"
Fear.
"Why? Are we that terrifying?"
I waited for an answer. None came. There was no sudden, utterly convincing bit 
of information in my brain.
Then they feared even me. Me, helpless before a flicking tongue and an iron 
mind. Why?
I was sure that the Grogs had devolved from some higher, bipedal form of life. 
The tiny hands, like mechanical grabs, were characteristic. As was that eerie 
mental control…
I tried to stand up, to run. My legs wouldn't lift me. I tried to blank my 
thoughts, to hide what I'd guessed, but that was useless. They could read my 
mind. They knew.
"It's the Slaver power. Your ancestors were Slavers." And here I sat, with my 
mind wide open and helpless.
Soothingly, with characteristic crystal certainty, I realized:
That the Grogs knew nothing of Slavers. That as far as they knew, they had been 
there forever.
That the Grogs couldn't be idiot enough to try for a takeover bid. They were 
sessile. They couldn't move. Their leftover Slaver power could reach less than 
halfway around the world, with all the Grog individuals working together. How 
could they dream of attacking a species who controlled all space in a 
thirty-light-year-diameter sphere? Fear alone had kept them from letting mankind 
know what they were—fear of extermination.
"You could be lying about how far you can reach. I'd never know."
Nothing. Nothing touched my mind. I stood up. Jilson watched me, then got up and 
mechanically brushed himself off. He looked at the Grog, opened his mouth, 
closed it, gulped, and said, "Garvey! What did it do to us?"
"Didn't it tell you?" In the same moment I was certain it hadn't.
"It made me sit down; it put on a show with sand rats…you saw it too, didn't 
you?"
"Yes."
"Then it left us sitting awhile. You talked to it. Then suddenly we could get 
up."
"That's right. But it talked to me, too."
"I told you it was intelligent!"
"Jilson, can you find your way back here in the morning?"
"Absolutely not. But I'll set your skycycle to record your course so you can get 
back. If you're sure you want to."
"I'm not. But I want the choice."
The sun was a smoky red glow in the west, fading over a blue-black horizon.
 
I'd laughed.
The hotel rooms didn't have sleeping plates. If you slept at all, you slept on a 
flat, cushiony surface, and liked it. I'd slept all right last night, until the 
Grog's call came to wake me in the small hours. But how could I sleep now?
Unbeknownst to yours truly, Sharon and Lois had been expecting us for dinner. 
Jilson had phoned them before we set out for the zoo. Tonight we'd eaten some 
kind, of small bird, one each. Delicious. You didn't dare touch anything 
afterward, not until you'd wiped your hands on hot towels.
And we'd talked about the Grogs. The cone had left Jilson's mind practically 
untouched, so that he'd have something like an unbiased opinion. His unbiased 
opinion was that he wasn't going back there for anything, and I shouldn't 
either. The girls agreed. I'd laughed at the Grog. Who wouldn't?
Dolphins, bandersnatchi, Grogs—you laugh at them, the Handicapped. You laugh 
with a dolphin, really; he's the greatest clown in known space. You laugh the 
first time you see a bandersnatch. He looks like something God forgot to finish; 
there's no detail, just that white shape. But you're laughing partly out of 
nervousness, because that moving white mound would no more notice you than a 
land tank would notice a snail under its treads. And you laugh at a Grog. No 
nervousness there. A Grog is a cartoon.
Like a doctor using a stomach pump in reverse, the Grog had shoved its 
information down my throat. I could feel the bits of cold certainty floating in 
my mind like icebergs in dark water.
I could doubt what I had been told. I could doubt, for instance, that all the 
Grogs on Down could not reach out to twist the minds of humans on, say, Jinx. I 
could doubt their terror, their utter helplessness, their need for my help. But 
I had to keep remembering to doubt. Otherwise the doubt would go, and the cold 
bits of certainty remained.
Not funny.
We ought to exterminate them. Now. Get all men off Down, then do something to 
the sun. Or bring in an old STL ramscoop-fusion ship and land it somewhere, 
leave the ramscoop running, twist every vertebrate on the planet inside out. 
But: They had come to me. To me!
They were so secretive, so mortally afraid of being treated like savage, 
resurrected Slavers. Dr. Fuller could have been told half the truth, and he 
would have stopped his experimenting; or he could have been stopped in his 
tracks by the reaching Grog minds. But, no; they preferred to starve, to keep 
their secrets.
Yet they'd come to me at the first opportunity.
The Grogs were eager. Man, what a chance they'd taken! But they needed 
something. Something only mankind could provide. I wasn't sure what, but of one 
thing I was sure: It was a seller's market. They wanted to do business. It was 
no guarantee of their good faith; but if I could think of such guarantees, I 
could force them through.
Then I felt those crystalline certainties again, floating in my mind. I didn't 
want any more of those.
I got up and ordered a peanut-butter, bacon, tomato, and lettuce sandwich. It 
arrived without mayonnaise. I tried to order mayonnaise, but the kitchen 
dispenser had never heard of it.
A good thing the Grogs hadn't revealed themselves to the Kzinti, back when they 
owned the planet. The Kzinti would have wiped them out or, worse, used them as 
allies against human space. Had the Kzinti used Grogs for food? If they had, 
then…But no. The Grogs would make poor prey. They couldn't run.
My eyes were still seeing red light, so that the stars beyond the porch seemed 
blue and bright above a black plain. I thought of going down to the port and 
renting a room on some grounded ship, so that at least I could float between 
sleeping plates. Nuts.
I could not face a Grog. Not when it had to talk to me by—
That was at least part of the answer. I phoned the desk computer and told it 
what I wanted.
By and by other parts of the answer came. There was a mutated alfalfa grass 
which would grow under red sunlight; the seeds had been in the cargo hold of the 
ship that brought me. It was part of Down's agricultural program. Well…
 
I flew back to the desert the next morning, alone. The guy who owned the 
skycycles had set mine aside, with the course record intact so I could find my 
way back.
The Grog was there. Or I'd found another by accident. I couldn't tell, and it 
didn't matter. I grounded the skycycle and got off, tensing for the feel of 
little tendrils probing at my mind. There was nothing. I was sure it was reading 
my mind, but I couldn't feel it.
With crystalline certainty there came the knowledge that I was welcome. I said, 
"Get out of there. Get out and stay out."
The Grog did nothing. Like the knowledge I'd gained yesterday afternoon, the 
conviction stayed: I was welcome, welcome, welcome. Great.
I dug in my saddlebags and pulled out a heavy oblong. "I had a lot of trouble 
finding this," I told the Grog. "It's a museum piece. If Downers weren't so 
hell-bent on doing everything with their hands, I'd never have found one at 
all."
I opened it a few feet from the Grog's mouth, inserted a piece of paper in the 
rollers, and plugged the cord into a hand battery. "My mind will tell you how to 
work this. Let's see how good your tongue is." I looked for a good seat, finally 
settling my back against the Grog, under its mouth. I could read the print from 
there. There was no feeling of lese majesty. If the Grog wanted me, I was 
doomed—period.
The tongue lashed out, invisibly fast. PLEASE KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE TYPEWRITER, 
it printed. OTHERWISE I CANNOT SEE IT. WOULD YOU MOVE THE MACHINE FARTHER AWAY.
I did. "How's that?"
GOOD ENOUGH. YOU ARE OVER-CONCERNED WITH PRIVACY.
"Maybe. This seems to work. Now, before we begin, would you read my mind about 
ramscoop motors?"
I SEE. CONSIDER THE POINT MADE.
"Then I will. What can you offer us in trade?
JUST WHAT YOU THINK. WE WILL HERD YOUR CATTLE. IN TIME THERE MAY BE OTHER THINGS 
WE CAN DO. WE COULD MONITOR THE HEALTH OF ZOO ANIMALS AND BE EXHIBITS AT THE 
SAME TIME. WE CAN DO POLICE WORK. WE WILL GUARD DOWN. AN ENEMY COULD DESTROY 
DOWN, BUT NO ENEMY COULD INVADE DOWN.
Despite the speed of its flicking tongue, the Grog typed as slowly as a 
one-finger typer.
"Okay. You wouldn't object to our seeding your property with mutated grass?"
NO, NOR TO YOUR MOVING CATTLE INTO OUR TERRITORY. WE WILL NEED SOME OF THE 
CATTLE FOR FOOD, AND WE WOULD PREFER THAT THE PRESENT DESERT ANIMALS REMAIN. WE 
DO NOT WISH TO LOSE ANY OF OUR PRESENT TERRITORY.
"Will you need new land?"
NO. PLANNED PARENTHOOD IS EASY FOR US, WE NEED ONLY RESTRICT THE PRESESSILES.
"We don't trust you, you know. We'll be taking steps to see that you don't 
control human minds. I'm going to get myself checked over very carefully when I 
go home."
NATURALLY. YOU WILL BE HAPPY TO KNOW THAT WE CANNOT LEAVE THIS WORLD WITHOUT 
SPECIAL PROTECTION. ULTRAVIOLET WOULD KILL US. IF YOU WISH A GROG IN THE ZOO OF 
EARTH.
"We can take care of that. It's a good idea, too. Now, what can we do for you? 
How about some modified Dolphin's Hands?"
NO, THANK YOU. A DESERT ANIMAL WITH SOMETHING LIKE HANDS WOULD BE BETTER. WHAT 
WE REQUIRE IS KNOWLEDGE. A TAPE ENCYCLOPEDIA, ACCESS TO HUMAN LIBRARIES. BETTER 
YET, HUMAN GUEST LECTURERS WHO DO NOT MIND HAVING THEIR MINDS READ.
"Guest lecturers. That'll be expensive."
HOW EXPENSIVE? HOW MUCH ARE OUR SERVICES WORTH AS HERDERS?
"Good point." I settled myself more comfortably against the Grog's hairy side. 
"Okay. Let's talk business."
 
It was a year before I touched Down again. By then, Garvey Limited was almost 
ready to show a profit.
I'd driven through the roughest deal I could think of. As far as the planet Down 
was concerned, Garvey Limited had a monopoly on Grogs. They couldn't have bought 
a pack of tabac sticks except through us. We paid fat taxes to the Downer human 
government, but that expense was almost minor.
We'd had major expenses.
The worst was publicity. I hadn't tried to keep the secret of the Grog power. 
That would have been futile. And that power was scary. Our only defense against 
a panic that could have covered human space like a blanket was the Grogs 
themselves.
Grogs were funny.
I'd kept pushing, pushing, pushing pictures: Grogs operating typewriters, Grogs 
guiding Down's expanding herds of cattle, Grogs in a spacecraft cabin, a Grog 
standing by during a tricky operation on a sick Kodiak bear. The Grog always 
looked just the same. To see one was to laugh, and never to fear…unless there 
were unnatural crystalline certainties poking into the crevices of your brain.
The really important jobs for Grogs were just coming into existence. Already 
Wunderland had changed its laws to allow Grogs to testify in a courtroom, as 
expert lie-detectors. A Grog would be present at the next summit meeting between 
human and Kzinti space. Ships venturing into unknown space would probably carry 
Grogs, in case they met aliens and needed a translator.
Fuzzy Grog dolls were being sold in the toy stores. We didn't make a dime on 
that.
I took a day to rest up after landing, to say hi to Jilson and Sharon and Lois. 
Next morning I flew out into the desert. Now there was grass covering a lot of 
what had been barren land. I found a circle of white far below, and on a hunch, 
I dropped.
The white was a flock of sheep. In the center of the circle nestled a Grog. She 
boomed up at me in an amplified voice: "Welcome, Garvey."
"Thanks," I said, not trying to shout. She would be reading my mind, and 
answering through the nerve-implanted vocal equipment we'd started manufacturing 
in quantity two months ago. That had been another major expense, and a necessary 
one.
"What's all this about dolls?"
"We can't make any money on that. It's not as if there was a copyright on the 
Grog form." I circled the skycycle, landed, and got off.
We talked of things other than business. She wanted a Grog doll, for instance, 
and I promised her one. We went through a list of "lecturers," arranging them in 
order of priority. Getting them here would involve nothing more than paying 
their way and paying them for their time. None of them would have to make any 
kind of speech.
Neither one of us mentioned the ramscoop.
It was not on Down. Put a weapon on Down and the Grogs could simply have made it 
their own; it would be no defense. We'd put it in close orbit around the Downer 
sun, closer than Mercury would have been. If the Grogs ever became a threat, the 
electromagnetic ramscoop-field would go on, and Down's sun would begin behaving 
very strangely.
Neither of us mentioned it. What for? She knew my reasons.
It was not that I feared the Grogs. I feared myself. The ramscoop was there to 
prove that I had been allowed to act against the Grogs' best interests, that I 
was my own man.
And I still wasn't sure. Could the last man aboard have sabotaged the motor? 
Could the Grogs reach that far? There was no way to find out. If it was true, 
then anyone who boarded the old ship would report that it was A-okay, ready to 
fire, don't worry about it, Garvey. Forget it. Sleep easy.
Maybe I will. It's easy enough to believe that the Grogs are innocuous, helpful, 
desperate for friendship.
I wonder what we'll meet next.
 



MNQ/2007.09.30
8,550 words