The Renegade E-Book

Lester Del Rey

• Herausgeber: Wildside Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 32

Beschreibung

Evolution can play strange tricks—and when playboy Lane fled society for the African jungle in the yeras before World War II, he discovered a very different tribe of gorillas, who thought and acted better than the men he had known in America.

Leseprobe

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 1943, 1971 by Lester del Rey.

Originally published in Astounding, July 1943, under the pseudonym “Marion Henry.”

Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.

Published by Wildside Press LLC.

wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

Table of Contents

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

THE RENEGADE, by Lester del Rey

THE RENEGADE,by Lester del Rey

Harvey Lane squatted just inside the door of the chief’s thatched hut, his outward attention divided between the chief’s laborious attempts to sew on a button belonging to Lane’s only pair of shorts and the life in the village itself. Outwardly, it was little different from that of any other inland African community, though the cleanliness and the absence of a constant confused babble were strange, as was the lack of yapping cur dogs underfoot. But to anyone else, the huge females busy at their gardening or making the crude artifacts possible with the material at hand, the playing young, and the bulky guards squatting in the lower branches of the trees would have been distinctly not normal.

Lane was used to it. In eight years, a man can become completely accustomed to anything, even the sight of some hundreds of gorillas busy at work that would normally be man’s. He knew every one of the hairy, heavily muscled apes out there, so well that he no longer saw their faces as ugly things, but as the individual countenances of friends and students. Now he leaned further back, brushing against a muscular shoulder, while one of the bulls in the hut flicked a fan back and forth to keep the flies off his hairless hide until the chief finished the sewing and he could put on his tattered shorts again.

Ajub, the chief, had been thinking; now he picked up the conversation again, his voice thick and slow, and the consonants sometimes distorted; but his speech in the English for which they had so gladly exchanged their own primitive, unexpressive tongue was no worse than could be found in parts of the larger man-cities. “It was about fifty years ago, I think, when we decided to come here and build a village away from all the Africans men; we’d been trying to learn from them before that for maybe a hundred years, but all they showed for us was hatred, fear, and a desire to kill us and eat us, so we gave it up as hopeless. The harder we tried, the more afraid they became. And the one white man we’d seen before you came hadn’t been exactly friendly. He killed several of our tribe before we were forced to eliminate him and his group. Beyond that, our memory and our poor speech give no clue. Are these mutations really common, Lane?”

“Fairly, though I think they’re a hit-or-miss proposition, Ajub; it’s a matter of blind luck when one is useful and dominant enough to be passed on.” Lane reached toward the basket of dried fruits, and one of the gorillas handed it to him, plucking an insect from the man’s shirt carefully. “There must have been a lot of mutations running around the tribe before they all concentrated in the one offspring, and he passed them down, with his children spreading the combination further. Even then, it’s hard to realize that you changed from a bunch of savage beasts like the other gorillas into a race at least as intelligent as man in less than five hundred years! Wish I knew more about the subject of mutations.”