The Bosun-Colonel shifted over to manual and busied himself at the helm, luffing the square craft down the troughs of air. Gliding over the vast tropical oceans, he put down at a large land mass above a shallow warm sea, twenty-five degrees below the northern pole.
Too numbed for comment, the crew stared out at the alien vista. They'd heard of retarded life forms from other Missionary expeditions—of planets where the inhabitants, in extreme emergency, had been known to commit murder. But this was surely the worst, the most vicious imaginable in the galaxy.
Here, with life freshly up from the sea, freshly launched on the long climb to maturity and self-realization—was nothing but horror. With so lush a vegetation, so easily capable of supporting them side by side in abundance, the monsters were actually feeding on each other. Great lumbering beasts they were with their bristling hides and huge tails, charging between the giant tree ferns; gouging living chunks from one another while razor-toothed birds with scaly wings flapped overhead, screaming for the remnants. As the sounds of carnage came through the audio ports, the youngest Oarsman keeled over in a faint.
Even the Conductor was visibly shaken. The Bosun-Colonel turned to him with a sick expression.
"Surely it's a lost cause, Skipper. Life like this will never have a soul worth saving."
"Not in its present stage," the Old Man was forced to agree. "Still, one never knows the devious paths that evolution takes." He considered the scene for a thoughtful, shuddering interval. "Perhaps in several thousand millenniums...."
The Bosun-Colonel tried to visualize the possibility of Ethical Life ever materializing through these swamp mists, but the logic against it was too insurmountable for the imagination.
"Even so," he conceded, "granting the impossible—whatever shape it took, the only worthwhile species would still be...." He couldn't bring himself to say it.
"Meat-eaters," the Conductor supplied grimly.
On hearing this, the Oarsman who had just revived promptly fainted again.