The Florians. Brian Stableford
all sides. The Florians understood her presence no more than I did. To them, she must, seem even younger, for although she had not yet grown into her frame she would never be tall...not even by Earthly standards. She seemed neither lively nor particularly interested in what was going on, and yet the colonists—particularly the women—seemed to feel it necessary to keep her constantly involved. Their questions were inane...though they genuinely wanted to know about Earth they could not find the right questions to ask. Not of Mariel...not even of Nathan.
I think we were all profoundly glad when the affair broke up. They asked us politely if we wished to stay in the village, though finding five beds for us would undoubtedly have proved difficult. When we expressed a preference for our bunks in the ship they offered us lanterns to light our way through the dark night. The farmer whose house was close to the ship, and whose field we had destroyed by landing on it, adopted the role of guide. His name was Joe Saccone.
We took our time walking back, and made no effort to stay in a close-knit group. I dropped back deliberately, in order to talk to Conrad Silvian. He had charge of one of the lanterns, and thus it didn’t matter how far behind we fell.
“What do you think?” I asked him.
“About things in general? Or the size of things in particular?”
“Both.”
“In general,” he said, his voice dry and slow, “things are good. Better than I saw on the first trip. This community is well established and working. They talk of towns and cities, and they have only a vague notion of the things which are going on in the far west—in the forests and the mountains The colony is big, complex...and relaxed. We found nothing like this on the first trip. The colonists on those worlds knew exactly what was going on everywhere, because the whole operation was tightly knit, geared to survival They’d never got beyond the point where any group of men could survive independent of the efforts of the whole colony Here we have a kind of cultural diffusion—the parts becoming independent of the whole. I think that’s promising....”
“But...,” I supplied.
“But,” he agreed, “something is happening here and it’s strange. The wrong way around. We came expecting to find deficiency disease, and what we find is superficiency disease. People on Earth grow to be seven feet tall and stay fit and healthy. They may make damn good sportsmen. They tend to die twenty years ahead of their three score and ten even without taking environmental effects into account, but there’s an awful lot of small men would trade years for size. So maybe this is a good sign, too. Maybe these are a better breed of men, growing big and strong in their alien Eden. They think so. But I want to know why. Rigorous natural selection for height and mass is out of the question—any subtractive selection strong enough to add a foot and more to the average height in seven generations would have decimated the colony. So...it seems that something is affecting their glandular balance, altering the control of growth. There are steroid drugs on Earth which permit the body to put on a lot of weight by acting as hormone mimics and upsetting the metabolic balance. They don’t usually add height, but they’re not usually given to growing children. If something in the alien plants that have been conscripted as food fit for humans has such an effect, it would be perpetually present, and might permanently affect the hormonal balance.”
“That’s possible,” I agreed.
“We’ll be able to find out in the lab,” he said. “But it would help us to look if we could find out about their eating habits.”
“It might also be worth asking a few simple questions about the population size, birth rates, death statistics, and so on,” I mused. “And we mustn’t overlook the possibility that this may be a local condition. We’re looking at one tight-knit group. Maybe in the towns—or in similar communities a long way away—there’s a wider range of heights. Maybe somewhere atavisms like us still survive. You know...pygmies.”
He didn’t laugh. It wasn’t funny. Anything you can’t understand is something to worry about...especially the simple things. Sometimes you can leap to the obvious conclusion and be hopelessly wrong. The history of science is the history of people belatedly realizing the obvious and still being wrong.
We lagged so far behind the others that by the time we got back to the ship there was no queue for the safety lock. The lock took two at a time, and we were able to go through together. Another advantage in being slow was that the burden of answering what’s-it-like? questions posed by Linda and Pete Rolving fell principally on other shoulders. Even so, we didn’t entirely get away with it, because Linda wanted specialist impressions as well as general ones, and Conrad and I were the natural ones to provide them. Between us, we went over most of the ground we’d covered in our earlier conversation.
I finally got to my bunk feeling utterly weary, but with my mind still in a high gear. I lay back on the sleeping bag trying to slow things down inside my head. I was just about easing back when there was a knock at the door. It was Mariel. I’m afraid that my tone as I asked her what she wanted was mildly hostile.
“I thought you ought to know,” she said. “Those people in the village. They really meant it.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“They’re honest people. They aren’t hostile. They put on a show—but it wasn’t really false.”
I hadn’t got up from the bunk. I let my head rest on the pillow while I stared at her for a few moments.
“You mean that you can tell when people are lying?” I said finally.
“Usually,” she replied.
“And they weren’t. They really were pleased to see us. They really think that everything here is going well. Unlike the people in Kilner’s colonies.”
“That’s right.”
“Why tell me? I’m just the rat-catcher. Nathan’s the contact man.”
“You seemed worried...as if you weren’t sure of them.
“And you thought you’d take the weight off my mind?”
“Yes.” I could see that the bluntness of my comments was wounding her. She was holding the door ajar, and her fingers were moving slightly as she gripped it. I felt contrite, but I couldn’t disguise the uneasiness which was constricting my voice. I hadn’t known that her talent extended to being a lie detector. I didn’t really know how far her talent extended at all, or what it consisted of. The vague notion that she might, to some extent, be able to read the thoughts behind my words was disturbing.
“I’m sorry,” I said, a little more kindly. “Thanks for telling me.”
“Do you know why they’re so big?” she asked hesitantly.
“No,” I replied, wondering whether she was asking because she didn’t know or because she did.
“Neither do they,” she told me. “They didn’t realize...it’s normal with them...they didn’t know that they were different from the original colonists...” She searched for more words, but failed to find them. She had the gift of tongues...but it was the gift of understanding, not of speaking.
“Didn’t they, now?” I said, sitting up, and feeling my mind get back into gear. I looked at her carefully. She had nothing more to say of her own accord, and was waiting rather anxiously for questions. She pulled the door open a little further, ready to go.
“How can you tell when people are lying?” I asked gently.
She shrugged slightly. “Reflexes,” she said. “Most people can’t control the little physical signs which go with their thoughts. Your pupils dilate when you look at people you like, the muscles in your face change when you react inside your head to things which happen. I...just decode the signals. I don’t know how...it’s not really conscious. But I’ve been tested. That’s how I do it. I have to see people, close to...I can’t read minds.”
I wondered what she could read from my face. I knew she knew I was wondering. Even if she couldn’t