The Scamperers

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....
The Earthman, Wellesley, came to Ophir in the season of aphelion, when the binary suns of that remote planet were cold serpent's eyes, dimly seen above the chill mists that shrouded its fern forests and craggy, young mountains, its silent oceans and magnificent organ pipe cities of legend.
From space one might look down upon the vista of these latter prominences and imagine a vast, exotic civilization spread over the face of the equinoctial swamps, but Wellesley knew that the giant towers were mere calcareous shells, hollow as the expectations they had inspired in the first planeteers to arrive here two hundred years ago—they were the work, in fact, of small, mindless crustaceans.
His own destination, a small, shabby, corporate plantation, was less impressive in appearance. Its name was Aidennsport. It consisted of a hundred buildings, including a commissary and a hulking communal storehouse. The primordial jungle was all about it.
To Wellesley, yellow-cheeked from too many years in space, cynical from the paucity of human values in his life, Aidennsport was the despised prototype of colonial stagnation about the galactic rim. For he was a dour, lanky pessimist among that immense, invaluable, but nondescript order of men, the Rift constabulary, whose beat is the emptiness between the stars, and which enforces the name of law throughout the vast reaches of the firmament beyond Sol's sprawling civilization.
Wellesley's ship was accustomed to describe an elliptical orbit which brought it near the system containing Ophir once every seventh side-real month. It never stopped. Its course was as inexorable as a comet's; nevertheless, he had lately received the commission of an errand here for the omnipotent Department of Genetics and Genealogical Records.
And so he was forced to make landfall in a rocket tender in a meadow by Aidennsport, while the ground quaked dangerously beneath the settling blasts of the tiny vessel. He located the single course of the village without difficulty. Half a dozen ragged children were playing there, and stopped to stare. Women peered at his dark uniform from behind curtains in the stained, milk-colored bungalows. Quaintly dressed men, tending the auto-pickers in nearby fields of drug-plant, shaded their eyes to gaze with silent menace, though there was no sun.