The Florians by Brian Stableford Read Free Book Online

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....”
    â€œBut...,” I supplied.
    â€œBut,” 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.”
    â€œThat’s possible,” I agreed.
    â€œWe’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.”
    â€œIt 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