INSTINCT
BY GEORGE O. SMITH
Illustrated by Martinez
t was 047-63-10 whenhe opened the door.Before his superiorcould chew him forprepunctuality, Huvanesaid as the chief looked up andopened his mouth to start:
“Sorry, but you should know.Terra is at it again.”
Chelan’s jaw snapped shut. Hepassed a hand over his face andasked in a tone of pure exasperation.“The same?” and as Huvanenodded, Chelan went on, “Whycan’t they make a mistake and blowthemselves out of our hair? Howfar did they get this time?”
“All the way.”
“And out?”
Huvane sat down shaking hishead slowly. “Not yet, but they’reover the hump, you know.” Huvane’sface brightened ever so slightly. “Ican’t be criticized for not countingthem, chief. But I’ll estimate thatthere must be at least a couple ofhundred atoms of 109 already. Andyou know that nobody could make109 if they hadn’t already evolvedmethods of measuring the propertiesof individual atoms. So as soon asthey find that their boom-sampledoesn’t behave like the standard messout of a bombardment chamber, theywon’t rest until they find out why.They’ll find out. Then it’ll be 109,109, 109 until we’re forced to clobberthem again.”
Bitterly Chelan looked up. “I don’tthink I need the lecture. I admiretheir tenacity. I admire their ambition.I admire their blasphemous,consignatory, obscenity attitude ofacting as if the Great Creator hadconcocted the whole glorious Universefor their own playground.Yes,” said the chief wearily, “singlythey aren’t bad traits. Boiled downinto the self-esteem of a single race,I don’t admire them any more. I’msimply scared.”
“Yeah. Well, we’ve got time.”
“Not much. What’s their spacepotential this time?”
“Still scragged on the mass-inertia-relativitybarrier. Tailburners ... er,chemical reaction engines. Mannedand unmanned orbital flights. Half adozen landings on their sister planet.No,” said Huvane as he saw thechief’s puzzlement, “I don’t meanNumber Two ... the one they callVenus this time. I mean their co-orbitalcompanion. The Moon. Theystill call it that.”
The chief looked up wonderingly.“Do you suppose,” he asked solemnly,“that there is really somethingcalled a ‘racial memory’?”
“It’s against all the theory,” objectedHuvane. “But there seems tobe—” his voice trailed off absently.It returned after some thought: “I’vetried to sort it out, just as if I wereone of them. The recurrence of their... er ... ‘names of antiquity’ asthey call them, seem to recur andrecur. Their Planet Two, now calledVenus, was called Astarte last time,and before that it was Ishtar.”
“Other way around.”
“No matter. The names are stillbeing used and, according to theirbelief, merely parallel names culledout of local pagan religious beliefs.”
The chief nodded. “That’s onlypart of the parallelism. The bigthing is the way they follow the samepattern. Savage, agrarian, urban,right on up the ladder according tothe rules of civic science but squabblingand battling all the way righton up and out into space. Hell,Huvane,