and to further complicate this they have more sounds than any animal has ever been known to use. The specialists naturally maintain that the olz do so have a language, or they would have noticed that the language they were studying isn’t one.”
“Perhaps so,” Farrari said, “but right now a bulletin on syntax in the ol language makes rather droll reading. Either the olz are extremely intelligent animals, or they’re rather stupid humans. It isn’t my province to decide which. I merely raised the question.”
“You certainly did.”
“And just because I raised the question, these super-specialists seem to think I have some kind of obligation to answer it. I have a few questions of my own that need answers more urgently, and they won’t let me work.”
“What sort of questions?”
“For one, I wondered how the olz managed to survive, considering the treatment of them as shown in IPR records for this planet. There are hundreds of teloids showing durrlz beating olz to death and soldiers using olz for target practice, and so on, and if such scenes are as common as the teloids indicate, the olz should have become extinct long ago. Then it occurred to me that in all of my experience with the olz and as an ol, I never saw an ol mistreated. Not once. So the question is whether my experience was untypical or the records lie.”
“It deserves an answer. Have you found one?”
“Not one that I’d certify, but I think the explanation is that a durrl beating an ol to death makes a much more interesting teloid than a cube of an ol methodically cultivating tubers. Your agents don’t care to waste teloid cubes on scenes that can be had by the thousands any time anyone wants to point a camera. So they record the unusual, and in any society there’ll always be a few persons who are sadistic enough to gain pleasure from mistreating—”
“Animals? Or people?”
“Either, sir. And even a kind people may find it necessary to put their animals on a drastically reduced diet during winter.”
“What you’re saying, young man, is that IPR records of any world may present a distorted picture of that world.”
“I’d say they’re very likely to present a distorted picture, sir.”
“Headquarters won’t like that suggestion, but I agree that it should be looked into. What else?”
Two of the super-specialists burst into the room, one calling, “Farrari? Is Farrari in here?”
Farrari turned.
“Do the olz eat meat?” the specialist demanded.
“Never,” Farrari said.
“There!” the other specialist said smugly. “Clearly a case of arrested evolution. Hunting and meat-eating develop the brain, the olz never hunted, so their cortices—”
“You can’t know that until we obtain specimens for dissection. The question is whether they don’t eat meat because they won’t, or because they can’t, or because they don’t have meat to eat.”
Farrari said politely, “I doubt that the present diet of the olz is much help to either of you. They eat what the rascz give them to eat. Before the rascz came they may have eaten nothing but meat.”
“Not with those teeth!” the first specialist snapped.
“There’s no incompatibility between ol type teeth and an omnivorous diet,” the other said. “Look at your own teeth.”
“I do, frequently, and I fail to see—”
The sector supervisor said mildly, “Gentlemen—” They left, and their argument faded away down the corridor.
“You were mentioning other questions,” Ware said to Farrari.
“There are a number of them concerning the relationship of the rascz and the olz. The history section is working on them.”
“The cave carvings?”
“Those and other things. There are some baffling inconsistencies. For example, when I led an ol uprising, the rascz paid no attention to the olz. When Bran, in the guise of an ol, assassinated a few durrlz, the army turned out, slaughtered whole villages of olz, and burned their huts. Dr. Grant thinks he has the answer to that—one of those strange Branoff IV viruses causes a peculiar type of madness in laboratory animals. The most timid grass eater will run amok and attack its predators, and its bite or scratch becomes virulently infectious. Garnt thinks that on rare occasions olz acquire the disease, and that the rascz have somehow learned that when this happens the only solution is to exterminate those already exposed and burn the huts they’ve lived in. In other words, the rascz knew that there was only one circumstance under which an ol would attack a rasc: When Bran murdered those durrlz they immediately concluded that the madness had struck again, and as a public health measure they reluctantly took the action they thought urgently necessary.”
“It would seem,” Ware said slowly, “that we have humanlike animals here, and that the rascz deliberately bred them to produce the kinds of work animals they wanted. Beyond that we have a great many questions. Go and get as many answers as you can.”
The coordinator followed Farrari to the door. “Going back to your workroom?”
Farrari nodded.
“I’ll come along. Since I can’t use my own office.”
They walked side by side. Ahead of them a base specialist and a super-specialist were engaged in what was obviously a long-standing argument.
“Will you stop using that word slave? Aren’t all domestic animals slaves?”
“Listen. I’m not arguing about whether the olz are human or animal. I’m telling you the rascz think they’re human. Why else are they banned from the cities? No other animals are banned from the cities. Why else is their ownership a monopoly of the kru? All the other animals can be owned by anybody. Why else would the rascz train the olz to wear that sloppy clothing? None of the other animals wear clothing. Tell me this. Did you ever hear of a rasc eating an ol?”
Still arguing, they disappeared around a corner. The coordinator and Farrari turned toward Farrari’s workroom, and as they approached it a copy of the IPR Field Manual 1048K shot through Heber Clough’s door—the room had long since been occupied by super-specialists—struck the wall, and bounced at their feet. The coordinator halted with a scowl.
“Nothing fits!” a voice exclaimed hoarsely.
“Of course nothing fits. No society has ever existed with a deliberately-bred semi-intelligent domestic animal servant class. The Bureau’s theories and rules couldn’t possibly apply to a situation so incompatible with its previous experience.”
Farrari grinned—the second statement was an approximate quotation from a lecture he’d delivered two hours earlier—and followed the coordinator into his workroom.
They made themselves comfortable, and Farrari said, “I’m seriously thinking of going back. I can’t get any work done here—people keep interrupting me.”
“Go ahead,” the coordinator said. “You can answer questions once a day by appointment on Jorrul’s
