the fittest

Katherine MacLean

AMONG THE effects of Terry Shay was found a faded snapshot. It is a scene of desolation, a wasteland of sand and rock made vague by blowing dust, and to one side huddle some dim figures. They might be Eskimos with their hoods pulled close, or they might be small brown bears.

It is the only record left of the great event, the event which came into the hands of Terry Shay.

Like all great events it started with trivial things.

A tiny item in the Agriculture budget caught the hawklike eye of a senator. He stood up. “Item, $1,200 over estimate for automatic controls of space rocket, see appropriation estimate 108, Department of Extreme Conditions, Human-Plant ecology, cultural viability liaison to UNESCO and F.A.O. of U.N.” He looked up, smiling a deadly smile. “I don’t understand much of this gobbledegook, but I know what the word rocket means. Will somebody please explain to me what qualifies the Department of Agriculture to waste our money shooting off rockets?”

A Department of Agriculture man arose, riffled through folders and read aloud the statement of the director who had requested the rocket. This caused further difficulties, for the language was technical, and nobody understood it. On the second reading they managed to catch the word “Venus.”

Venus! Headlines in eight chains of papers carried the senator’s unkind request that the committee of investigation include a psychiatrist. The ninth chain showed the initiative of a more alert reporter by carrying an interview with the director of the Department of Extreme Conditions.

It was a small, elaborate rocket, no more than twenty feet long. Doctor of Botany Ernest P. Crofts was somewhat impatient of laymen but he showed it to the reporter proudly, gesturing at it with a test tube of some odd, greenish stuff in his hand. When asked what was in the tube he became indignant.

“But I told you already. Haven’t you read any of my articles in the Journal of Paleontology? Or Jabson’s letters in the Survey of Botanical Sciences? … No? Well you must at least have heard of the new Smith-Ellington theory of atmospheric dynamics… . No? My stars! What do people read? Doesn’t anyone follow the debates? What do they think the rocket is for?”

The reporter informed him that they did not know what the rocket was for, and Crofts pulled himself together to explain.

There had been a long curiosity and debate among paleontologists and astronomers because spectroscopes had shown that the atmosphere of Venus was carbon dioxide, proving that there was no plant life on Venus, for plants convert carbon dioxide to oxygen. Venus was a desert. Yet it was supposed to be the sister planet of Earth, and the point of strangeness in the comparison was not the strangeness of Venus, for its atmosphere was chemically logical—it was the strangeness of Earth. Why did the Earth have air of free breathable oxygen? Why was there so much water? Could plants alone have worked the change, or did it require an initial oddity? The paleontologists argued bitterly.

Dr. Crofts believed that micro-organisms and plants alone had changed Earth, and he was ready to prove his belief by sending a rocket to Venus, and spraying it with a collection of molds and slimes and lichens specially bred to the old conditions. If his test worked, then some day, when space liners were available for inexpensive migration to Venus, that dry poisonous place would be green and moist with plants, and the air sweet and fit to breathe.

Congress cared little for paleontology, but it could see the advantage of transforming a million acres of wasteland into good, salable real estate. The bill passed with little discussion.

Venus was slowly approaching its nearest point to Earth, and the finishing touches were being put on the rocket.

Terry Shay was the top reporter of the Humanist press, and he was always ready to catch the government in some bureaucratic injustice or inhumanity. Even high officials of the government, who usually had hard words for ignorant prying busybodies, feared and respected the byline of Terry Shay and knew that the public interest stood behind him.

For a crusader it is hard to distinguish between genuine concern for the welfare of the people, and the need to make the readers read and the circulation grow; and perhaps Terry Shay was beginning to forget that there was a difference.

When the letter came he opened it, and then sat for a while holding it in his hand and thinking of circulation figures and the rich white light of publicity.

The letter was from the A.S.P.C.A. and it pointed out that Venus might possibly have animal life adapted to its own conditions, and to change those conditions could therefore come under the heading of cruelty and slow torture and murder of animals.

He read it over and laughed.

“What is it?” asked Patty, his secretary.

“The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the British Humane Society want to take out an injunction against the Venus seed rocket. They want me to help.” He laughed again. “I think I will.”

She was puzzled. “But what have they against the Venus rocket? What harm could it do any animal?”

He explained, grinning. ‘There might be natives on Venus.” She was startled by the idea but still puzzled.

“On Venus? How could they breathe? What would they eat? That’s not very likely, is it, Terry?”

He grinned more widely. “No, but nobody has been there to see. There is a reasonable doubt, enough to rock those bureaucrats back on their heels with an injunction. They should have thought of the possibility. They should be more careful of who their damned lumbering machine is likely to run over next”

He got his publicity. There was a great quarrel among experts, overflowing onto the radio, television, and all the public papers. While they were arguing, the injunction went through, restraining Dr. Crofts from sending the seeds …

Patty’s motives are not known. They may have included some dream of a desert being grown over by trumpet vines and lilac bushes and birds and running streams. She may have been angry with Terry for some reason of her own.

He came in from a radio speech and found a clipping on his desk. It stated that Anton Gottlieb of the American and German Rocket Societies had finished a new spaceship to add to the fleet of five now prospecting the asteroid belt. Gottlieb stated that the new design was so economical of weight that it was theoretically capable even of landing and taking off again from a medium-sized planet without refueling. Under the clipping was a note from Patty.

“Why don’t you go to Venus and see for yourself?” the note said. “Think of the publicity!” It is impossible to say what would have been the tone of her voice if she had said it, but it sounded like a dare to Terry Shay.

The next night he went on the air to tell the world that he was going to Venus.

The country was interested. They had argued enough; now they wanted an answer. They passed the hat to raise the fortune that was needed to buy the spaceship for him, and they placed side bets with each other on what he would find on Venus.

While the collection of money went on, Terry turned up at the proving grounds to consult the designer.

“Why not?” said Gottlieb, spreading his hands and shrugging. “If crazy people want to go to Venus, I will convert the ship for Venus. It will only need a little change in fins, there, and a stronger tripod, there, so, and …” He paused and considered the spaceship meditatively, a light of speculation growing in his eyes.

“This search, it will make the test more dangerous, yes?”

“Yes.”

“You land, maybe, and take off again?” He was growing excited with some idea of his own.

“Yes.”

“Good! Then I will go with you.” He beamed.

Terry considered having “Papa” Gottlieb as a companion and stifled a grin. “But what of your responsibilities, Mr. Gottlieb?”

Gottlieb looked harassed. “That’s what Minna says. Always she wants me to stay on the ground. Always she says, think of the children—I think of the children, their father a designer who has not the faith to test his own ships! No, this time I go!”

In the archives of the newspapers of the time one can find photographs of the Department of Agriculture man nervously shaking hands with the two before the takeoff, and wishing them well in a stilted, memorized speech. In most of the photographs, Dr. Crofts and Anton Gustav Gottlieb seem embarrassed by the cameras and crowds, and Terry Shay is smiling and eager to go, but in one picture Terry Shay has already climbed into the ship and Dr. Crofts is handing Gottlieb a symbolic going-away present. It is a package of morning-glory seeds, the caption says, and they are both smiling wryly.

After they had been through the first acceleration and picked up extra fuel at the moon, Gottlieb took time for Terry’s instruction; Gottlieb was of the opinion that non-engineers were backward children and halfwits, but he kept to his task, sometimes despairing, but always inexhaustibly patient, and succeeded in drilling Terry in the care and handling of spaceships and giving him some rudiments of navigation. Terry came to know “Papa” Gottlieb very well, and tried to turn the tables on him by discussing politics. Gottlieb usually evaded the subject with a good-natured “Ach!” of despair.

Once he said, “Did I ever tell you I did not like people?”

“No.” Terry smiled; the statement was ludicrous. Gottlieb obviously liked everybody.

I don’t like people. They are very silly,” said Gottlieb soberly. “I was in five concentration camps. They were all alike.” He touched the scars on his neck. “What good is politics, Terry?’

When Terry began trying to explain, Gottlieb interrupted with a long, interminable story about the baby sayings of his youngest daughter, and pulled out his wallet to show him her picture. He carried pictures of all his children and was always ready to talk about them, but this time it came to Terry that the round-faced little engineer had deliberately changed the subject, so he left it at that.

Venus was coming very close, a great dark globe showing a narrow ribbon of sunlight around one side.

“Maybe there is life,” Gottlieb said. Terry was not prepared for what came next. “What puzzles me is why you want to save these Venusians. Why do you want to, Terry?”

The full, ruthless implications of that sank in slowly. Terry turned from the viewplate with a feeling of shock. “If I don’t, they will die,” he pointed out carefully, as if to a child.

The chubby engineer laughed. “If the amoebas had worried about that, we would still be amoebas. Only the fittest should survive. Differential breeding. How else can we have a better race, eh? Progress is built on death.”

“You talk like a fascist,” Terry pointed out, quietly, as he would have pointed out that Anton Gustav Gottlieb had leprosy. The little engineer merely looked at him soberly and picked up a book.

Terry mastered himself and thereafter avoided political topics and the subject of saving Venusians, painfully aware of the danger of making the trip intolerable with quarrels. He mentioned it just once again as they watched Venus turning under its eternal blanket of dust storms. “Give them a break,” he said. “They have as much right to live as we do.”

Gottlieb said dreamingly, “Life belongs to the future.” They looked at each other for a moment of pure antagonism.

“It belongs to nothing!” Terry snapped, and then they went into the dust cloud of Venus and were too busy to talk.

Dusty wind, rocks, high-piled flowing dust dunes, weirdly scoured mountains, black vitreous chimneys of forgotten volcanoes, sudden torrential rains that condensed in the stratosphere and then evaporated again before they reached the ground, heavier rains that reached the ground and scoured gullies in the dust without wetting it, and left the gullies to be filled again with dust in one sweep of wind, and over it all heat, a dry constant heat of 120 degrees. They were the first humans on Venus.

Terry forgot his temper.

They flew back and forth over the weirdly beautiful, sterile landscape, combing for signs of life and arguing cheerfully on which formula for a locus of chemical imbalance should be used first. The temperature was too stable and the light too dim for a radiation imbalance. They decided on the geologic formula and began to take soundings at likely ridges.

At the end of the second day, when tempers were wearing thin and eyes were beginning to blur with the strain, they found a hollow section in a water-bearing ridge, found its open end, put on space suits to give them air and keep them cool, and went in.

It was there.

First it was merely a crevice with sand and fine dust drifted in to make a level floor, but there were footprints. Then there were furry cublike creatures who fled before them, leaving the sand heaps of play fortresses and tunnels, and a trail of small footprints. And there was an aura about the place—a mood.

They turned on their helmet lights and walked onward, listening to distant shrill squeaks at the edge of audibility. “They have a double-sight system, maybe,” Gottlieb said, stooping slightly as the cleft smoothed to a small rough corridor. “Light and sound. Sound is for seeing in the dark. They are smaller than people,” he added absently, stooping lower as his helmet brushed the ceiling, but the deduction did not seem important, for they would see them soon and tell them all about Earth. Terry found himself thinking of astonishing tales to tell them about Earth.

“They are very friendly,” he said gratefully. He had never felt this form of telepathy before, a communion of feeling instead of thoughts, but it was astonishing how right it seemed, like coming home to a family after being with strangers.

“Like relatives, thought sharing with one another,” Gottlieb muttered. “Useful,” then again, “Good!” as he passed an intersection of tunnels with bracing that showed a keen understanding of structural principles. The work was done in stone, with only a few touches of some soft metal, gold or silver, that needed no smelting.

Presently the two Earthmen came upon them working in the depth of the mine, channeling and conserving a faint trickle of water. The leader one stopped work for a moment to come forward and greet them. His fur was not exactly fur, but something more like brown velvet, but otherwise he was very like a small brown bear. He looked at them with intelligent, interested brown eyes, and after hesitating a moment took their extended hands and shook them, and returned to work. They fell to and helped.

“Evolved from a water-digging animal,” said Gottlieb. “Probably a water-fueled metabolism. Carbon from the air and energy from the temperature differential of evaporation. This air is dry.”

He paused, holding a long flat slab of rock. The leader one spoke a few words of precise direction, interested by the clumsiness of the strangers.

“I beg your pardon,” Gottlieb said gently, smiling. “I don’t understand you, Mr. Teddy Bear.” The native made a gesture of apology and pointed. Gottlieb placed the slab carefully where indicated. “They have a language,” he said simply. It showed that the telepathy needed some supplement. It was as vague to the community of bears as it was to the Earthman. Terry and Gottlieb worked on for a while, and then sat down and leaned against a wall to relax, with their lights off. They could hear the natives working steadily, tapping and grinding, and sometimes lighting the dark for themselves with a supersonic beep.

“Well have to go back for more oxygen cylinders soon,” Terry said.

“Yes,” said Gottlieb.

They walked back up the long corridors to the outside and the ship. “Just like brown bears,” Terry said warmly. “I always liked those brown bears that mooch candy bars and popcorn in the parks. I’d like to take some of these back and introduce them around to the guys.”

“Oxygen would be death to them,” warned Gottlieb. “They will need technology and space suits. Their science is backward because of the rock, not because of too little thinking. What use is thinking without fire, wood, or hard metal? What can intelligence do with nothing to work with but rock? One needs tools!”

“Let’s take them some,” said Terry. “This is one native minority in history that is going to get a fair break.”

The first trip, they took with them a double armload of empty plastic food cans for the natives to use as water containers. Then Gottlieb stayed behind to watch their use and learn a few words of their language, his face beaming and excited behind his faceplate. Terry returned on the second trip with Gottlieb’s tool kit and some plastic wall plates from the storeroom bulkhead. “It’s cooling,” he reported. “Pretty soon we can start.”

The leader native began to understand vaguely that the blowtorch was some sort of a tool. He touched and lifted the oddly shaped, beautifully worked object which was so strangely not stone, and not dust, and not gold, and he hooted at it supersonically to see it better, then looked up skeptically at the Earthmen. It could not be a tool. It was not a wedge, and not a hammer, but he hoped with great yearning that it would be a tool.

Amused, Terry watched his play of expressions. “Let’s show him,” he suggested.

They decided to build a cistern, with piped water.

Water dripped with tinkles and splashes into the carefully built inadequate rock of the natives storage pool. Before turning the blowtorch on, Gottlieb warned the natives away with a gesture. “Different metabolism—heat radiation might be very dangerous to them.”

The cluster of small brown bears felt his anxiety and obediently trotted off up the corridor to a safe distance, while the two Earthmen set to work in their heavy space suits to build an airtight cistern.

When they had finished the natives came and looked, and then as if by pre-arrangement drew off up the corridor again, leaving two behind.

One of the two who was left tugged at the blowtorch in Gottlieb’s hand, looking up earnestly at his face.

“He wants me to show him how to use it,” Gottlieb said, still worried.

“Go ahead,” Terry said, amused. “He knows what he’s doing.”

The volunteer’s motions seemed unsteady, but he mimicked Gottlieb’s demonstration efficiently enough. The engineer handed him the blowtorch and showed him how to turn it on. The other native stood to one side making a steady supersonic note, and watching.

The volunteer turned on the blowtorch without clumsiness, started faintly as the thin blue flame tongued out, skillfully smoothed the rough unfinished plastic corner for three minutes while they watched, then died and fell into the storage pool.

The blowtorch clanged down and flared on the floor, and Gottlieb reached it and turned it off before it did any more damage.

The group of friendly sober little bears came forward again. First there was the next-most-expendable, who had stood close to the experiment and beeped to give a side lighting of sound to what happened and measure the range of the deadly effect by being close. Then there came the main group which had stood around the bend of a corridor and watched by the distorted reflection of sound, and last there was the leader who had gone some distance away up a side corridor, out of reach of any possible danger. The logical pattern of the arrangement was clear.

It was rather horrible to Terry, for he understood how ready they had been.

They were thumping the chest of the one who had stood close, and gabbling questions at him. Gottlieb and Terry drew together watching silently.

“Why do they have to be so damned cheerful about it?’ Terry demanded.

Gottlieb was calm. “It is a good death, dying for the future. They must have hoped they could use the blowtorch. They know they need tools. He would not have had such a chance usually.”

“A chance to be killed, you mean?” Terry asked sarcastically, watching as two teddy bears picked the body up from the shallow water of the storage pool and casually carted it away. There was no doubt that he was dead. Even the two Earthmen had felt the flash of pain that preceded the dark. “Fine chance!”

“A chance to be useful,” Gottlieb protested, hurt. “He was weak. Probably he was sick and that was why they chose him.”

“Chose him!” Terry felt sick. The whole business began strangely to seem like an extension of his argument with Gottlieb, with the teddy bears unfairly taking Gottlieb’s side. He stepped forward and gripped the shoulder of the leader, and turned him around, speaking directly at the large intelligent eyes.

“You’re a sort of adviser to this bunch. Do you mean to say that you chose two who were sick to be killed, while you went and hid yourselves?’

The native’s eyes widened in the universal sign of puzzlement, and he let out an involuntary supersonic beep, unconsciously trying to make out a dim meaning by sonic reflection. Terry felt the gulf of misunderstanding between them. He shook the furry body gently, trying to convey his meaning. “But that was murder,” he said. ‘That was cowardice—sending someone else to take the danger!”

Gottlieb laid a hand on his arm. “Please, Terry. You are not fair to him. He is a superior type, with better genes. He must be careful of himself.”

Terry felt the familiar rage rising in him and tried to check it in a mental pause, making his mind blank. In the brief silence came a feeling of peace., The natives were going back to work, but they were disturbed by the disturbance of his feelings and trying to soothe him as they would soothe a fretful child, wanting him to feel that—everything was all right, everything was all right, single deaths, individual hurts cannot matter to life in the long run, everything was the way it should be… . It was like a lullaby, a song of reassurance and strength, the enfolding protecting arms of time and fate …

“They are hellish persuasive,” said Terry. Gottlieb was tugging at his arm.

“We must go back now and make ready for the return. Come on, Terry.”

They went back through the long corridors, leaving their heavy alien footprints in the fine overtracked sand, and the children scattered excitedly back from the entrance as they reached it, then drew in again to watch them work. After a time the leader and some of the other adults came shyly out of the caves to help.

“Remember what I told you,” remonstrated Gottlieb’s voice in Terry’s earphones.

“You didn’t waste those lessons.” Terry grinned, looking around the storage compartment, and understanding its construction from remembered lessons. He had emptied it of the surplus emergency equipment, and now he began dismantling a fuel compartment, stripping its surplus weight from the spaceship for the return trip. He unbolted a heavy plate, slid it to a hatch door and looked down before throwing it out.

There was nothing in sight but the usual barren drifting sand and the comically foreshortened figure of Anton Gustav Gottlieb below and to one side, happily pow-wowing with a gang of small, square, interested teddy bears.

Terry grinned and released the wide metal plate. As it slid from his hands a sudden dusty gust of wind slewed it in the direction of the group. It looked as if it would fall too close.

“Look out!” he called. The plate sliced through the air, turning at an angle directly toward the leader native.

“Look out!” Only Gottlieb could hear the call in his earphones, only Gottlieb looked up and saw the whole thing. There was no time for the engineer to do anything. It was too late to reach the native.

Very clearly, as in a nightmare, Terry saw the foreshortened space-suited figure step deliberately into the path of the plate, and try to catch it with his hands. The sound of impact came clearly. First through his earphones, then like an echo a fractional instant later through the air, sounding very far away. Terry took a deep breath and went for a first-aid kit.

As he reached the ground and passed through the ring of natives towards the still figure in the space suit he could hear Gottlieb whispering something.

Hoping for word of what to do, Terry bent closer, tuning up his earphones, listening.

“Survival of the fittest—the fittest—the fittest,” whispered Anton Gustav Gottlieb, and died.

Terry touched his shoulder, but there was no sound of breathing, and a swirl of dust came and settled on the glass of the faceplate.

He understood suddenly.

“Papa” Gottlieb. He had not been very smart in some things. His table manners may not have been perfect, but he was a man. He had seen some hard things and he had not liked the way life was lived on Earth; he had wanted to have it done better, and he didn’t care by whom—by men, or by calm, enduring, intelligent teddy bears… .

“You damned fool.” Terry raised his face to the dusty sky and tried not to think for a while.

It was easy. Soothing thoughts came from somewhere—that there were many other people left on Earth, many to be friends if one only came to know them—many to spare—no great loss—we all die eventually—no matter—no reason for shock—everything normal—everything all right.

Terry choked and looked around at the concerned ring of small brown bears. “Everything is not all right, dammit!”

They said nothing, but they were contradicting him with their calm and strength and certainty of the future—the long future and the stars which be knew about and they could not yet foresee…

“—the fittest—” he said wildly. The leader one climbed up on Gottlieb’s chest, and peered worriedly into Terry’s face with brown intelligent eyes. His ears were flattened back to his head to keep out the dust, and he looked almost like a man.

“Oh no,” Terry said determinedly, backing, seeing what Gottlieb had seen. “You don’t fight, do you. You wouldn’t have any wars—would you.” His shoulders touched the ship’s ladder and he reached into his knapsack and brought out something. It was the packet of morning glory seeds. Slowly he tore the envelope open and scattered the seeds into the dusty wind, then climbed up into the ship, sat at the controls and lifted her up for Earth.

Terry Shay never told.

You won’t find it in the histories, but it is written among the great lost choices… It could have been different. It might have been a partnership.

But it might not.

Table of Contents

Start