The Night of Hoggy Darn

The talented author of The Fishdollar Affair returns with another compelling story of a frontier world—grim New Cornwall of the Black Learning.
Red-haired Flinter Cole sipped his black coffee and looked around the chrome and white tile galley of Space Freighter Gorbals , in which he was riding down the last joint of a dogleg journey to the hermit planet of New Cornwall.
Nothing's been published about the planet for the last five hundred years, he said in a nervous, jerky voice. You people on Gorbals at least see the place, and I understand you're the only ship that does.
That's right, twice every standard year, said the cook. He was a placid, squinting man, pink in his crisp whites. But like I said, no girls, no drinks, nothing down there but hard looks and a punch in the nose for being curious. We mostly stay aboard, up in orbit. Them New Cornish are the biggest, meanest men I ever did see, Doc.
I'm not a real doctor yet, Cole said, glancing down at the scholar grays he was wearing. If I don't do a good job on New Cornwall I may never be. This is my Ph. D. trial field assignment. I should be stuffing myself with data on the ecosystem so I can ask the right questions when I get there. But there's nothing!
What's a pee aitch dee?
That's being a doctor. I'm an ecologist—that means I deal with everything alive, and the way it all works in with climate and geography. I can use any kind of data. I have only six months until Gorbals comes again to make my survey and report. If I fumble away my doctorate, and I'm twenty-three already.... Cole knitted shaggy red eyebrows in worry.
Well hell, Doc, I can tell you things like, it's got four moons and only one whopper of a continent and it's low grav, and the forest there you won't believe even when you see it—
I need to know about stompers . Bidgrass Company wants Belconti U. to save them from extinction, but they didn't say what the threat is. They sent travel directions, a visa and passage scrip for just one man. And I only had two days for packing and library research, before I had to jump to Tristan in order to catch this ship. I've been running in the dark ever since. You'd think the Bidgrass people didn't really care.