the scamperers
BY CHARLES A. STEARNS
Wellesley was ordered to check on
deviants or mutants. But the evidence
was often subtle, and he knew he
couldn't afford to take a chance....
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, June 1956.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The Earthman, Wellesley, came to Ophir in the season of aphelion, whenthe binary suns of that remote planet were cold serpent's eyes, dimlyseen above the chill mists that shrouded its fern forests and craggy,young mountains, its silent oceans and magnificent organ pipe cities oflegend.
From space one might look down upon the vista of these latterprominences and imagine a vast, exotic civilization spread over theface of the equinoctial swamps, but Wellesley knew that the gianttowers were mere calcareous shells, hollow as the expectations theyhad inspired in the first planeteers to arrive here two hundred yearsago—they were the work, in fact, of small, mindless crustaceans.
His own destination, a small, shabby, corporate plantation, was lessimpressive in appearance. Its name was Aidennsport. It consisted ofa hundred buildings, including a commissary and a hulking communalstorehouse. The primordial jungle was all about it.
To Wellesley, yellow-cheeked from too many years in space, cynical fromthe paucity of human values in his life, Aidennsport was the despisedprototype of colonial stagnation about the galactic rim. For he was adour, lanky pessimist among that immense, invaluable, but nondescriptorder of men, the Rift constabulary, whose beat is the emptinessbetween the stars, and which enforces the name of law throughout thevast reaches of the firmament beyond Sol's sprawling civilization.
Wellesley's ship was accustomed to describe an elliptical orbitwhich brought it near the system containing Ophir once every seventhside-real month. It never stopped. Its course was as inexorable as acomet's; nevertheless, he had lately received the commission of anerrand here for the omnipotent Department of Genetics and GenealogicalRecords.
And so he was forced to make landfall in a rocket tender in a meadow byAidennsport, while the ground quaked dangerously beneath the settlingblasts of the tiny vessel. He located the single course of the villagewithout difficulty. Half a dozen ragged children were playing there,and stopped to stare. Women peered at his dark uniform from behindcurtains in the stained, milk-colored bungalows. Quaintly dressed men,tending the auto-pickers in nearby fields of drug-plant, shaded theireyes to gaze with silent menace, though there was no sun.
He was able to find the house of the agent by the frayed company flagflying over it. To the right of it was the warehouse where the annualcrop of senna-like leaves of the drug-plant were stored for drying.This was Aidennsport's meagre industry. Beyond lay the swamp, and faracross its desolate surface, the multi-colored towers of the pipesfingered the sky, aloof and sinister in aspect.
A boy of no more than ten, dark eyed but with that startling,burnished-gold complexion so often found in the systems of twin ormultiple suns, sat upon the steps before the cottage. He was playingwith a furry animal not unlike a Martian ferrax, which sprang up,scarlet-eyed and bristling, at the sight of Wellesley.
"Here, boy," said Wellesley, who neither liked nor trusted children."Is this the house of Amos Sealilly, the factor of Aiden