World in a Mirror

It was a backward world, all right—in a special and very deadly manner!
God knows I didn't want Hacker in the preliminary delegation right from the start. I wasn't thinking, either, of the screwball ways history can go about poetically repeating itself sometimes. I just knew that an uppity, smart-alecky kid of fifty could only cause trouble.
He already had.
Rayna had been our earlier landfall on the First Interstellar Expedition. It possessed a fairly intelligent form of life, even if the Raynans were oviparous and technologically retarded. Hacker had taken over the bulldozer to clear the area around our craft, Terra I , and he had been repeatedly told to stay very close to it. But no, he insisted on flattening out the peat-like top of the nearest hill too. Unfortunately that hilltop was an incubation bed for Raynan fledglings. The massacre involved not only a vast number of hatching eggs but five adult females, and we had to get away pronto while thousands of paper limbs waved threateningly at the murderers from Earth.
I'm only the Science Chronicler of this expedition but Dr. Barnes is Chief Medical Officer. His protests should have mattered where mine didn't. I'm a hundred per cent behind Johnson, he told Captain Weber. That kid's no damned good. The three of us will go into town with these Newtaneans and, sure as I'm standing here, Hacker will do something wrong.
Captain Weber, looking worried as usual, tried to explain. He'll just do the chauffeuring. But he got off that tack immediately when he saw we were not following along. Look, I know he's a pest. But this is a political matter, for the good of the Space Corps. His great-great-uncle is President of the World Council. For all I know the old man hates his guts, won't listen to a word he says, but let's not take any chances. We're going to need plenty of these expeditions. And hyper-drive craft take an awful lot out of the economy.
The upshot of the matter was that we patriotically agreed to the setup. The captain gave Hacker a good chewing-out about respecting the rights of the Newtaneans.