the

carnivore

By G. A. MORRIS

Illustrated by BURCHARD

The beings stood around
my bed in air suits like ski suits,
with globes over their
heads like upside-down fishbowls.
It was all like a masquerade, with
odd costumes and funny masks.

I know that the masks are
their faces, but I argue with them
and find I think as if I am arguing
with humans behind the
masks. They are people. I recognize
people and whether I am
going to like this person or that
person by something in the way
they move and how they get excited
when they talk; and I know
that I like these people in a
motherly sort of way. You have
to feel motherly toward them, I
guess.

They all remind me of Ronny,
a medical student I knew once.
He was small and round and
eager. You had to like him, but
you couldn't take him very seriously.
He was a pacifist; he wrote
poetry and pulled it out to read
aloud at ill-timed moments; and
he stuttered when he talked too
fast.

They are like that, all fright
and gentleness.

I am not the only survivor—they
have explained that—but
I am the first they found,
and the least damaged, the one
they have chosen to represent the
human race to them. They stand
around my bed and answer questions,
and are nice to me when I
argue with them.

All in a group they look half-way
between a delegation of nations
and an ark, one of each, big
and small, thick and thin, four
arms or wings, all shapes and
colors in fur and skin and feathers.

I can picture them in their
UN of the Universe, making
speeches in their different languages,
listening patiently without
understanding each other's
different problems, boring each
other and being too polite to
yawn.

They are polite, so polite I almost
feel they are afraid of me,
and I want to reassure them.

But I talk as if I were angry.
I can't help it, because if things
had only been a little different ... "Why
couldn't you have come
sooner? Why couldn't you have
tried to stop it before it happened,
or at least come sooner, afterward...?"

If they had come sooner to
where the workers of the Nevada
power pile starved slowly behind
their protecting walls of lead—if
they had looked sooner for
survivors of the dust with which
the nations of the world had slain
each other—George Craig would
be alive. He died before they
came. He was my co-worker, and
I loved him.

We had gone down together,
passing door by door the automatic
safeguards of the plant,
which were supposed to protect
the people on the outside from
the radioactive danger from the
inside—but the danger of a
failure of politics was far more
real than the danger of failure
in the science of the power pile,
and that had not been calculated
by the builders. We were far underground
when the first radioactivity
in the air outside had
shut all the heavy, lead-shielded
automatic doors between us and
the outside.

We were safe. And we starved
there.

"Why didn't you come sooner?"
I wonder if they know or guess
how I feel. My questions are not
questions, but I have to ask them.
He is dead. I don't mean to reproach
them—they look well
meaning and kindly—but I feel
as if, somehow, knowing why it
happened could make it stop,
could let me turn the clock back
and make it happen differently. If
I could have signaled them, so
they would have come just a little
sooner.

They look at one another, turning
their funny-face heads uneasily,
moving back and forth,
but no one will answer.

The world is dead.... George
is dead, that thin, pathetic creature
with the bones showing
through his skin that he was when
we sat still at the last with our
hands touching, thinking there
were people outside who had forgotten
us, hoping they would remember.
We didn't guess that
the world was dead, blanketed in
radiating dust outside. Politics
had killed it.

These beings around me, they
had been watching, seeing what
was going to happen to our world,
listening to our radios from their
small settlements on the other
planets of the Solar System. They
had seen the doom of war coming.
They represented stellar civilizations
of great power and technology,
and with populations that
would have made ours seem a
small village; they were stronger
than we were, and yet they had
done nothing.

"Why didn't you stop us? You
could have stopped us."

A rabbity one who is closer
than the others backs away,
gesturing politely that he is giving
room for someone else to
speak, but he looks guilty and
will not look at me with his big
round eyes. I still feel weak and
dizzy. It is hard to think, but I
feel as if they are hiding a secret.

A doelike one hesitates and
comes closer to my bed. "We discussed
it ... we voted...." It
talks through a microphone in
its helmet with a soft lisping accent
that I think comes from the
shape of its mouth. It has a muzzle
and very soft, dainty, long
nibbling lips like a deer that nibbles
on twigs and buds.

"We were afraid," adds one
who looks like a bear.

"To us the future was very terrible,"
says one who looks as if it
might have descended from some
sort of large bird like a penguin.
"So much— Your weapons were
very terrible."

Now they all talk at once,
crowding about my bed, apologizing.
"So much killing. It hurt
to know about. But your people
didn't seem to mind."

"We were afraid."

"And in your fiction," the doelike
one lisped, "I saw plays from
your amusement machines which
said that the discovery of beings
in space would save you from
war, not because you would let
us bring friendship and teach
peace, but because the human
race would unite in hatred of the
outsiders. They would forget their
hatred of each other only in a
new and more terrible war with
us." Its voice breaks in a squeak
and it turns its face away from
me.

"You were about to come out
into space. We were wondering
how to hide!" That is a quick-talking
one, as small as a child.
He looks as if he might have
descended from a bat—gray
silken fur on his pointed face, big
night-seeing eyes, and big sensitive
ears, with a humped shape
on the back of his air suit which
might be folded wings. "We were
trying to conceal where we had
built, so that humans would not
guess we were near and look for
us."

They are ashamed of their fear,
for because of it they broke all
the kindly laws of their civilizations,
restrained all the pity and
gentleness I see in them, and let
us destroy ourselves.

I am beginning to feel more
awake and to see more clearly.
And I am beginning to feel sorry
for them, for I can see why they
are afraid.

They are herbivores. I remember
the meaning of shapes. In the
paths of evolution there are grass
eaters and berry eaters and root
diggers. Each has its functional
shape of face and neck—and its
wide, startled-looking eyes to see
and run away from the hunters.
In all their racial history they
have never killed to eat. They
have been killed and eaten, or
run away, and they evolved to
intelligence by selection. Those
lived who succeeded in running
away from carnivores like lions,
hawks, and men.

I look up, and they turn their
eyes and heads in quick embarrassed
motion, not meeting my
eye. The rabbity one is nearest
and I reach out to touch him,
pleased because I am growing
strong enough now to move my
arms. He looks at me and I ask
the question: "Are there any
carnivores—flesh eaters—among
you?"

He hesitates, moving his lips
as if searching for tactful words.
"We have never found any that
were civilized. We have frequently
found them in caves and tents
fighting each other. Sometimes
we find them fighting each other
with the ruins of cities around
them, but they are always savages."

The bearlike one said heavily,
"It might be that carnivores
evolve more rapidly and tend
toward intelligence more often,
for we find radioactive planets
without life, and places like the
place you call your asteroid belt,
where a planet should be—but
there are only scattered fragments
of planet, pieces that look as if a
planet had been blown apart. We
think that usually ..." He looked
at me uncertainly, beginning to
fumble his words. "We think ..."

"Yours is the only carnivorous
race we have found that was—civilized,
that had a science and
was going to come out into
space," the doelike one interrupted
softly. "We were afraid."

They seem to be apologizing.

The rabbity one, who seems to
be chosen as the leader in speaking
to me, says, "We will give you
anything you want. Anything we
are able to give you."

They mean it. We survivors
will be privileged people, with a
key to all the cities, everything
free. Their sincerity is wonderful,
but puzzling. Are they trying to
atone for the thing they feel was
a crime; that they allowed humanity
to murder itself, and lost
to the Galaxy the richness of a
race? Is this why they are so
generous?

Perhaps then they will help the
race to get started again. The
records are not lost. The few survivors
can eventually repopulate
Earth. Under the tutelage of
these peaceable races, without the
stress of division into nations, we
will flower as a race. No children
of mine to the furthest descendant
will ever make war again. This
much of a lesson we have learned.

These timid beings do not realize
how much humanity has
wanted peace. They do not know
how reluctantly we were forced
and trapped by old institutions
and warped tangles of politics to
which we could see no answer.
We are not naturally savage. We
are not savage when approached
as individuals. Perhaps they
know this, but are afraid anyhow,
instinctive fear rising up from the
blood of their hunted, frightened
forebears.

The human race will be a good
partner to these races. Even
recovering from starvation as I
am, I can feel in myself an energy
they do not have. The savage in
me and my race is a creative
thing, for in those who have been
educated as I was it is a controlled
savagery which attacks
and destroys only problems and
obstacles, never people. Any human
raised outside of the political
traditions that the race
inherited from its bloodstained
childhood would be as friendly
and ready for friendship as I am
toward these beings. I could never
hurt these pleasant, overgrown
bunnies and squirrels.

"We will do everything we can
to make up for ... we will try to
help," says the bunny, stumbling
over the English, but civilized
and cordial and kind.

I sit up suddenly, reaching out
impulsively to shake his hand.
Suddenly frightened he leaps
back. All of them step back,
glancing behind them as though
making sure of the avenue of
escape. Their big luminous eyes
widen and glance rapidly from
me to the doors, frightened.

They must think I am about to
leap out of bed and pounce on
them and eat them. I am about
to laugh and reassure them, about
to say that all I want from them
is friendship, when I feel a twinge
in my abdomen from the sudden
motion. I touch it with one hand
under the bedclothes.

There is the scar of an incision
there, almost healed. An operation.
The weakness I am recovering
from is more than the weakness
of starvation.

For only half a second I do not
understand; then I see why they
looked ashamed.

They voted the murder of a
race.

All the human survivors found
have been made sterile. There
will be no more humans after
we die.

I am frozen, one hand still extended
to grasp the hand of the
rabbity one, my eyes still searching
his expression, reassuring
words still half formed.

There will be time for anger
or grief later, for now, in this instant,
I can understand. They are
probably quite right.

We were carnivores.

I know, because, at this moment
of hatred, I could kill them
all.

—G. A. MORRIS

Transcriber's Note:

This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1953.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note.