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, 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.