WORLD IN A MIRROR
BY ALBERT TEICHNER
It was a backward world, all right—in
a special and very deadly manner!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1962.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
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."