"The Fittest" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Katherine)

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 logicalЧit 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?"