Salmonella Men on Planet Porno

“Surely Hamilton’s claims are meant as a rebuttal of the ‘black superiority’ of evolutionists who regard the human race as the ultimate product of evolution, the highest natural creation in the cosmos. You see-”

“Not all evolutionists are discrimination theorists, you know!” yelled Mogamigawa. “Even among humanoids, there are some telepaths, like all of the Newdopians on this planet, but only a fraction of humans on earth. Now that intelligent humanoid beings of a higher order than earth humans, in a sense, are being discovered on different planets, evolutionists who maintain such an antiquated approach-”

“Er, sorry to interrupt, gentlemen,” Yohachi said sardonically from the rear. “We’re in the jungle, in case you hadn’t noticed. Hadn’t we better be careful? Just now there was a huge spider dangling above your heads, wondering which of you to go for!”

Darkness had suddenly fallen around us, and I’d assumed that the suns had retreated behind clouds. In fact, we were already inside the jungle, a tertiary mixed forest.

“Ah. That was probably a nursery spider,” I said as I continued along an animal trail. “Please be careful, Dr Mogamigawa. This area is full of itchy scratchy trees. We may have to edge past them sideways.” Already starting to itch under their influence, I was beginning to feel irritated myself. That sensation of shuddering just before having sex started to creep up my spine, and I sneezed twice in quick succession.

“Aaaaaaaargh!”

Mogamigawa had become horribly entangled in mistress bine, which had bound him fast to the trunk of an itchy scratchy tree and instantly covered his body with bluish-green lichen. “Quick, man! Get the knife out, quick!” he screamed at Yohachi with a half-crazed expression, panting with increasing ferocity. “Aaargh! Aaargh!” A look of sheer rapture started to spread over his features.

Yohachi grinned as he slowly pulled a knife from his pocket; then, waiting for the perfect moment when Mogamigawa’s frenzied screams reached their gasping climax and his body slumped down limply, brandished the knife and cut the mistress bine into pieces.

“Why didn’t you cut it sooner, man?!” Crumpled in a heap on the ground, Mogamigawa glared up at Yohachi reproachfully. “You did that deliberately, didn’t you!”

“Come, did you?” Yohachi let out his vulgar laugh.

“Shut up!” Mogamigawa clambered to his feet with renewed vigour, as if to show that he hadn’t just ejaculated, and shouted loudly again. “Come on then! Let’s be off, quam celerrime! Otherwise we’ll still be in this obscene jungle when it gets dark!”

It was obvious to see that he was merely putting on a show. Even I was cringing at the thought of the abominable creatures that lay in wait for us ahead.

“Yes. Let’s make haste!” I called in falsely high spirits, quite at odds with the quaking in my heart. But no sooner had I started off than I screamed loudly and fell flat on my back. A gigantic nursery spider had slid down from the trees in front of my eyes, brought its weird lemur-like face close to mine, then gripped my face tenderly with its folded, hairy front legs and seemed about to kiss me.

“Chase it away, for Christ’s sake!” I shrieked, virtually foaming at the mouth as I lay prostrate on the ground.

“It’s gone,” said Yohachi. “You scared it off when you screamed.”

“Was that really a spider?” asked Mogamigawa behind me when we’d started off in trepidation once more. “It had four legs, did it not. More like a cross between a lemur and a spider monkey, I’d say.”

“It is almost certainly not a spider. After all, one characteristic of this planet is that there are hardly any insects at all, except for those screeching cicadas,” I answered as I waded through the undergrowth. “I can’t say anything for sure until we catch one, but I think they’re either mammals or something close to that. Its hands were warm.”

“So what’s behind the name, then?”

“Nursery spider? It was named by a chap called Hatsumi, a member of the First Expedition. He loved making puns, and it was he who named most of the species on this planet. But he came across so many bizarre life forms that, when quizzed about the names back on earth, he often couldn’t remember why he’d named them.”

“How thoroughly irresponsible.”

“Indeed. But there must be some meaning behind the name.”

We heard a flapping, rustling noise of something violently beating the leaves of the trees above us. A flying creature skimmed over our heads, its large warm body smacking against my instinctively raised hand.

“Graarrghh!” the thing squawked, then fell to the ground and scuttled off into the undergrowth.

“A penisparrow!” Yohachi shouted in amazement. “A whopping great penisparrow! The size of a cat! The king of all penisparrows!”

“No. That wasn’t a penisparrow,” I said, still somewhat stunned. “It had fur, and its call was different too. It either glides by stretching the skin on its sides like a flying squirrel, or else it has membrane wings like a chiropteran, I’d say.”

“I don’t believe it,” Mogamigawa muttered grumpily. “We keep seeing creatures that do nothing but support your famous regression theory!”

I was little inclined to go over the whole regression theory again. On the other hand, if we had something to debate, perhaps we could distract our minds from our mounting terror. So I started again. “The regression theory is difficult to establish because it assumes that humans suddenly appeared out of nothing. But let’s say the Newdopians are intelligent humanoid beings that came here from some other planet. By that I don’t mean some major species migration, but something like, well, you remember back in the Second Green Revolution on earth, when all those obnoxious hippies were herded onto spaceships and banished beyond our galaxy. The Newdopians could be their descendants.”

“Based on what, pray?”

“Based on the fact that they haven’t spread all over this planet but are limited to one location. Perhaps they knew about their ancestors, and for that very reason predicted that, sooner or later, intelligent life forms similar to themselves would visit them from another planet. That’s why they created a proper country as they have done here. They did refuse us entry, after all. And we may not be the first beings to have visited Newdopia from another planet.”

“And you’re saying that all the mammals on this planet could have regressed from them?”

“That’s right. I mean, look at those!” I indicated a group of three gaping hooters sitting in line on a nearby tree, flaring their exposed nostrils as they looked down at us. “Give them noses, and they’d look just like Newdopians, don’t you think?”

“Well, I’ve only seen the natives on photographs. But hold on – what about the flora then? Are you saying they existed on this planet from the beginning?”

“Yes, at least the algae. And there were probably also fauna, up to about the stage of multi-cell protozoa. It’s conceivable that the original ancestors of the Newdopians carried food provisions in the form of chlorella or such like. They must also have brought parasites with them. That would explain the discontinuity between higher-and lower-order fauna, and the fact that there are many gymnosperms but only two or three species of angiosperm among the flora. In other words, the fauna have not yet regressed as far as reptiles or fish, while the flora have yet to evolve as far as angiosperms.”

“I’m sorry, but it doesn’t explain anything of the sort,” said Mogamigawa. “Otherwise how can you accommodate the screeching cicada, an insect? Also, considering your adaptive radiation of gymnosperms, it’s abnormal for there to be so few species of higher order vertebrates. If they’re all mating so heterogeneously, I would have expected new species equipped with genetic plasticity to be crawling all over the place. And there’s also the puzzle of how the fecundity of the Newdopians and higher vertebrates is kept in check, inter alia.”

“Actually, the screeching cicada is merely an extremely primitive form of insect, despite the name. On earth it would be about the equivalent of the protoblattaria or primitive cockroaches that appeared in the Carboniferous period. Whether it evolved from a crustacean, or from one of the earliest arthropods like the trilobite, it must have subdivided into various forms when it came up on dry land. As such, we should see other types of insects here. I don’t know why that’s not so, but I’d say the most plausible explanation is that all the other primitive insects died out, for some reason, leaving only the screeching cicadas to adapt and survive. It may sound ridiculous, but their cry so resembles the shrieking voices of young women that it sounds highly erotic, and this may have helped them adapt to the overriding ambience of eroticism on this planet. Their cry so intensely stimulates sexual urges, you