men who tower over you by a full foot when, throughout your life, you have thought of yourself as a tall man.
Nathan Parrick, however, seemed to be in his element. It wasn’t difficult to imagine his life on Earth consisting of endless official functions and informal but incredibly important meetings with all manner of VIPs. He talked easily and quickly, with the happy gift of being able to say nothing at all in the nicest possible way.
There were speeches. Nathan’s was excellent, though lacking in dirty jokes. The ones which the farmers’ self-elected leader, Vern Harwin, attempted to deliver were by no means excellent but had a certain ring of sincerity which I found rather comforting. He didn’t tell any dirty jokes either.
They were showing off, of course. (And so were we, in return.) The food and drink which they’d provided was too abundant, and so was the spirit of fellowship. Everybody laughed too loudly, said all the things they thought they ought to say. Everyone felt the need to make an impression.
The farmers didn’t know that other colonies had failed, were in the process of failing. They didn’t know that they were, from our point of view, a great surprise. But they did know—or, at least, they believed—that they were, in their own right, a colossal success. They were proud of themselves and of their world. They loved showing off.
And they felt, somehow, superior to us. They couldn’t conceal it. We were smooth-talking visitors from the parental world (which to them could only be an awesome myth), had arrived in our great black sky-borne cylinder, representatives of a “higher” civilization. And yet they felt superior. Because they were bigger? Or because the memory of Earth that survived within their culture was a memory of a failed world...a world which had lost its way in a history controlled by fortune?
These people were cocksure. They had a wealth of pride. And that made me uneasy...for in every land of milk and honey lurks a rat, and the difference between proud people and humble ones is that the humble ones are aware of the rat before it starts picking their bones.
But they were only farmers. I told myself that. Somewhere in this world would be shrewder men. They would be afraid of us—perhaps they might hate us—but they would be able to tell us what we wanted to know.
Five of us had come to the party. Standing orders required two people to stay with the ship at all times. Rolving had insisted on being one, and somehow it had been agreed that Linda Beck should be the other. After two weeks in transit, no doubt we could all have used a sight of the sky and a breath of air, but a fortnight isn’t an eternity, by any means—which meant, among other things, that the relief at being free from the confining walls of the ship wore off fairly quickly. As the party dragged on, I watched the others wilt, nod began to count the minutes. Only Nathan maintained his front of inexhaustibility.
Conrad seemed to be maintaining himself aloof from it all. He’d drunk a fair amount but he was cold sober. He had a head like concrete—nothing ever threatened his presence of mind. He was fifty, but looked older. He was tall, by Earthly standards, but life was beginning to drain his flesh and he no longer looked strong. His hair was white, and there was something birdlike about him: perhaps the suggestion of the way he held his head to expose his neck, or his uncommonly bright eyes.
He alone, of the team who had gone out with Kilner, had elected to go out again. A five-year turn of duty followed quickly by seven: a punishing sequence. Perhaps he had expected to take Kilner’s place, although I had never detected the slightest sign of resentment in his attitude toward me.
The noise seemed simply to roll around Conrad like the ocean waves around a rock. He was unmoved by it. Karen and I endured it. Mariel, though, seemed at once to be absorbed within it and pained by it. Mariel was fourteen. I couldn’t help thinking of fourteen as being very young...I had, after all, a son some three years older. She seemed to me to have no place aboard the ship, no place in such a venture as ours. And she made me uneasy. I knew, although I had not yet seen any outward evidence of the fact, that her mind was not like mine. She seemed to me far more alien than these men of Floria—or the truly alien creatures of Floria. They fit. She did not. One expects strangers in strange lands. But not within the sanctified enclave of home.
I found myself watching her as she reacted and replied to the questions flung at her from 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.”
