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Biggest, his Stranger gets up and starts to run. Biggest whacks his ass with
the branch, roaring and laughing.
Me, I got my skill. Special. I pick up rocks. I'm the best thrower, better
than Biggest even.
Rocks are for Strangers. My buddies, them I'll scrap with, but never use
rocks. Strangers, though, they deserve
to get rocks in the face. I love to bust a Stranger that way.
I throw one clean and smooth. Catch the Stranger on the leg. He stumbles. I
smack him good with a sharp-edged rock in the back.
He runs fast then. I can see he's bleeding. Big red drops in the dust.
Biggest laughs and slaps me and I know I'm in good with him.
Hunker is clubbing his Stranger. Biggest takes my club and joins in. The blood
all over the Stranger sings warm in my nose and I jump up and down on him. We
keep at it like that a long time. Not worried about the other Stranger coming
back. Strangers are brave sometimes, but they know when they have lost.
The Stranger stops moving. I give him one more kick.
No reaction. Dead maybe.
We scream and dance and holler out our joy.
5.
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Hari shook his head to clear it. That helped a little. "You were that big
one?" Dors asked. "I was the female, over by the trees. " "Sorry, I couldn't
tell. " "It was... different, wasn't it?" He laughed dryly. "Murder usually
is. " "When you went off with the, well, leader " "My pan thinks of him as
'Biggest. ' We killed another pan. "
They were in the plush reception room of the immersion facility. Hari stood
and felt the world tilt a little and then right itself. "I think I'll stick to
historical research for a while. "
Dors smiled sheepishly. "I... I rather liked it. "
He thought a moment, blinked. "So did I, " he said, surprising himself.
"Not the murder "
"No, of course not. But... the feel. "
She grinned. "Can't get that on Trantor, Professor. "
He spent two days coasting through cool lattices of data in the formidable
station library. It was well equipped and allowed interfaces with several
senses. He patrolled through cool digital labyrinths.
Some data was encrusted with age, quite literally. In the vector spaces
portrayed on huge screens, the research data of millennia ago were covered
with thick, bulky protocols and scabs of security precautions. All were easily
broken or averted, of course, by present methods. But the chunky abstracts,
reports, summaries, and crudely processed statistics still resisted easy
interpretation. Occasionally some facets of pan behavior were carefully hidden
away in appendices and sidebar notes, as though the biologists in the lonely
outpost were embarrassed by it. Some was embarrassing: mating behavior,
especially. How could he use this?
He navigated through the 3D maze and cobbled together his ideas. Could he
follow a strategy of analogy?
Pans shared nearly all their genes with humans, so pan dynamics should be a
simpler version of human dynamics.
Could he then analyze pan troop interactions as a reduced case of
psychohistory?
Security Chief Yakani opened confidential files which implied that pans had
been genetically modified about ten thousand years before. To what end Hari
could not tell. There were other altered creatures, "raboons" particularly.
Yakani took such an interest in his work that he became suspicious she was
keeping an eye on him for the Potentate.
At sunset of the second day he sat with Dors watching bloodred shafts spike
through orange-tinged clouds. This world was gaudy beyond good taste, and he
liked it. The food was tangy, too. His stomach rumbled, anticipating dinner.
He remarked to Dors, "It's tempting, using pans to build a sort of toy model
of psychohistory. "
"But you have doubts. "
"They're like us but they have, well, uh... "
"Base, animalistic ways?" She smirked, then kissed him. "My prudish Hari. "
"We have our share of beastly behaviors, I know. But we're a lot smarter, too.
"
Her eyelids dipped in a manner he knew by now suggested polite doubt. They
live intensely, you'll have to give them that. "
"Maybe we're smarter than we need to be anyway?'
'What?* This surprised her.
"I've been rearing up on evolution. Not a front rank field anymore, everybody
thinks we understand it. "
"And in a galaxy filed with humans and little else, there isn't much fresh
material. "
He had not thought of it that way before, but she was right. Biology was a
backwater science. All the academic sophisticates were pursuing something
called "integrative sociometrics. "
He went on, laving out his thoughts. Plainly, the human brain was an
evolutionary overshoot. Brains were far more capable than a competent hunter-
gatherer needed. To get the better of animals, it would have been enough to
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master fire and simple stone tools. Such talents alone would have made people
the lords of creation, removing selection pressure to change. Instead, all
evidence from the brain itself said that change accelerated. The human
cere-btal cortex added mass, stacking new circuiry atop older wiring. That
mass spread over the lesser areas like a thick new skin. So said the ancient
studies, their data from museums long lost.
"From this came musicians and engineers, saints and savants, " he finished
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