Special Aptitude
Theodore Sturgeon
From “Baby is Three”
Volume VI: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon

	As we approach the year 2300, the most popular parlor game seems to be picking the Man of the Century. Some favor Bael benGerson because he rewrote the World Constitution, and some hark back to Ikihara and his work on radiation sickness. More often than not, you'll hear Captain Riley Riggs nominated, and that comes pretty close to the mark.
	But it misses—it misses. I'm just an old space-hound, but I know what I'm talking about. I was communications officer with Riggs, remember, and even if it was all of sixty years ago I remember it as if it was last month. The Third Venus Expedition, it was, and the trip that changed the face of the Earth. That was the space voyage that brought back the Venus crystals, and made you and you into the soft and happy butterflies you are today. Things were different in the old days. We knew what it was to put in a solid five-hour workday, and we had no personal robots the way everyone has now—we had to put our clothes on by ourselves in the morning. Well, it was a tougher breed then, I guess.
	Anyway, my bid for the Man of the Century was on that ship, the old Starlure—but it wasn't Riggs.
	They were a grand crew. You couldn't want a better skipper than Riggs nor a better mate than Blackie Farrel. There was Zipperlein, the engineer, a big quiet man with little eyes, and his tube techs, Greaves and Purci—a wilder pair of fire-eaters never hit black space. And there was Lorna Bernhard, the best navigator before or since. She was my girl, too, and she was gorgeous. There were two other women aboard—a ray analyst by the name of Betty Ordway and Honey Lundquist, the damage control officer. But they were strictly from blueprints and homely to boot.
	And for comic relief we had this character Slopes. He was shipped because of some special training in the Venus crystals. I don't know why they bothered to put him aboard. Any development work on the crystals would have to be done on Earth when—if—we got back. I guess they figured there was room for him, and maybe he'd be needed to locate the crystals or something. Meanwhile, he was useless. We all thought he was and we told him about it often enough to keep him reminded.
	Not that he was a nuisance to anybody. It was just that he was funny. A natural comic. I don't mean the kind who slips an anti-gravity plaque under the tablecloth and switches it on when somebody sets down the soup, and I don't mean the life-of-the-party who sticks a brace of fluorescent tubes under his collar and pretends he's a Martian. This Slopes was just automatically funny to have around. He wasn't quite big enough, see, and though he wasn't homely, he also wasn't good-looking enough to do himself any good. His voice wasn't quite deep enough or loud enough to be completely heard…	
	I guess the best way to say it is to call him an Almost; a thoroughgoing Almost. And the difference between Almost and Altogether—at least in Slopes—was very funny to ship out with, and he had it in every department.
	None of us knew him before he came aboard, which he did two hours before blast-off in civilian clothes. That was his first mistake, though why I should call it a mistake...after all, he was a civilian technician. Even so, all the rest of us were from one or another of the Services, and we just naturally had something on him from the start. Purci, the Number Two Tube Man, was lounging in the alleyway when Slopes stepped off the cargo-lift with his gear, and he sized the man up right now. Purci was tall, loose-jointed, relaxed, deadpan. He took Slopes aft (down, that is, since the Starlure stood upright on her tail-vanes when she was aground) and showed him where to stow his gear. The locker Purci gave him happened to be the garbage port, which scavenged out automatically when we hit the ionosphere. There was no real harm in that—there was plenty of gear in the slop-chest which almost fit him, and at least he looked halfway "regulation." But he sure was funny. The look on his face when he went to that garbage port six hours out was indescribable. I have to laugh now thinking about it. And for the rest of the trip all he had to do was ask where anything was, and someone'd say, "Look in the garbage!" and the whole crew would lay back and roar.
	Probably the most fun we had was at "turnover," when we stopped accelerating and went into free fall. For Slopes's benefit the artificial gravity was left off, and all hands but Zipperlein, who was at the drive controls, gathered in the wardroom to watch. Word had passed to everyone but Slopes as to just when the gravity would cut out, and believe me, it was a tough job to keep from busting out laughing and spoiling the whole deal. We all sprawled around hard by a stanchion or a bolted-down table so we'd have something solid to grab when the time came. Slopes came in and sat by himself near the chow-chutes, innocent as a babe. Greaves sat with one hand cupping his wrist watch and his eyes on the sweep second hand. About three seconds short of turnover, he barked, "Slopes! Come over here, huh?"
	Slopes blinked at him. "Me?" He uncrossed his legs and got to his feet, timidly. He had taken about two steps when the drive cut off.
	I guess nobody ever gets really used to turnover. Your stomach gives a delicate little heave and the semicircular canals in your inner ear rebel violently. You tense yourself, all over, to the cramping point, and get no end confused because, though you know you're falling, you don't know which way—and anyhow, your reflexes expect a swift and sudden impact (because you're falling) and there just isn't any impact, so your reflexes feel foolish. Your hair drifts out every which way, and through and through, completely separated from your intense panic, is the damnedest feeling of exhilaration and well-being. They call it Welsbach's Euphoria. Psychological stuff. Anxiety relief with the gravityless state.
	But I was talking about Slopes.
	When Zipperlein cut the drive, Slopes just went adrift. His advancing foot touched and lightly scraped the floor instead of making a good solid pace. He flung his arms backward, I guess because he thought he was falling that way, and as his shoulders checked the arm motion, they were carried down while his feet went up. He did a slow-motion half-somersault and would have gone all the way around if his feet hadn't touched the overhead and stopped his rotation. He hung in midair with his head down and his feet up, with nothing to hang on to, and with the powerful feeling that, though the blood ought to be rushing to his face, it wasn't. All of a sudden, everything around him acted like up, and there wasn't any down left anywhere. He grabbed wildly toward the bulkhead, the overhead, the door—things he knew he couldn't reach. After that he subsided, trembling, and by that time the rest of us had recovered from the weird impact of turnover—after all, we'd all felt it before—and we could enjoy the fun.
	"I said, 'Come here'!" Greaves snapped.
	Slopes sort of flailed at the air and jigged with his feet. It made no never mind—he just stayed where he was, head down and helpless. We roared. He flapped his lips a couple of times, and then said, real strained, "Mmmph. Mmmph." I thought I'd die.
	"Don't be so standoffish," said the Lundquist chick, the damage control officer. "Come on down and give us a kiss."
	Slopes whispered, "Please...please."
	Betty Ordway said, "Make him say 'pretty please.'" We laughed.
	"Reckon maybe he don't like us," I piped up. "Come on down and join the crowd, Slopesy."
	Somebody said, "Hold out some garbage," and everybody laughed again.
	Zipperlein came in, hand over hand. "Looky there," he said in his big, fat, flatulent voice. "Man can fly."
	"Got his head in the clouds," said the skipper. Everybody laughed again—not because it was funny—because it was the skipper.
	"Please," said Slopes, "get me down. Somebody get me down."
	Greaves said, "I like a shipmate that can stand on his own two feet. Slopes, I asked you real polite-like to come on over and be sociable."
	Zipperlein laughed. "Oh—you want him?" He went from the door to the scuttlebutt, from the wardroom table to a lighting fixture, one hairy hand after another, until he could reach Slopes's foot. "Greaves wants you," he said, and shoved.
	Slopes spun end over end. He began to wail, "Ow-oo! Ow-oo!" as he turned. Spinning, he went from one end of the wardroom to the other toward Greaves. Greaves was ready for him, his hands firm to a banister-bar, his feet doubled up. When Slopes reached him, he planted his feet in Slopes's back and booted him, spinning no longer, upship toward the Captain. Riggs gave him a shoulder and shunted him over to me. I butted him back to Greaves. Greaves reached but missed him, and he hit the bulkhead with a crunch. Weight is one thing—you can get rid of that. Mass is something else again. Slopes's hundred and fifty-odd pounds were all with him, at high velocity, when he hit the wall. He hovered near it, whimpering.
	"Zip," said the Captain, "Turn on the grav plates. This could go on all day."
	"Aye," said the engineer, and swarmed out.
	I'd been hanging on to Lorna, partly because I knew she'd have hold of something solid, and partly because I just liked to hang on to her. "Ace," she said to me, "whose idea was this?"
	"Guess."
	"Ace," she told me, "you know what? You're a skunk."
	"Ah, climb off," I grinned. "You should see what they did to me when I was a cadet."
	She turned to look at me, and there was an expression I'd seen in her eyes only twice before. Both times she and I had been strangers. She said, "I guess you learn something new every day. Even about people you know pretty well."
	"Yep," I said, "and it's a blessing. You can look at the stars just so long on these trips, and then you can watch just so many visitape recordings. After that you need something to relieve the monotony. I think we all owe Slopes a rousing vote of thanks. He's a very funny man."
	She said something then but I didn't get it. Everyone was laughing too hard. Zipperlein had cut in the artificial gravity and Slopes had thumped to the floor, where he writhed, hugging it to him as if he loved it, which of course he did. Everyone does coming out of free fall.
	Oh, we had a time that evening. I'll never forget it.

	There was a lot of chit-chat aboard about our mission. Now that we have Venus crystals by the hundreds of millions, it's not easy to tell you just how valuable they were sixty years ago. The Second Venus Expedition had picked up two of them, and both were destroyed in the tests that determined their characteristics. The first was shattered purposely—nobody knew at that time that it was different from any other crystal—so it could be chemically analyzed, a solution prepared, and new crystals grown. But Venus crystals just don't grow. The second crystal was subjected to some high-frequency resonance tests. Someone got a little too experimental with the frequencies and the crystal blew up. Data on the explosion showed that what we had just had in our hands, but didn't have any more, was the key to broadcast power—power so plentiful that everyone could have it practically for free. The power we already had, since the technique for fissioning copper atoms had been developed. But broadcasting it was something else again, unless a tight beam could be aimed from power plant to receiver and kept that way, even if the receiver was on an automobile or a 'copter and dodging. The Venus crystal could do that job—vibrating to power frequencies and sending back radiations that would guide in the power beam. Get enough of those crystals and we could do away with millions of miles of transmission wire, and convert it to enough fuel to power Earth for a couple of centuries. Don't forget, mankind has been laying a network of copper over the world for going on four hundred years, and there's lots of it.
	So for a fuel-hungry Earth, these crystals were top priority. And the only thing that stood in our way—aside from getting to Venus—was the Gabblers.
	The First Venus Expedition discovered the Gabblers, and left them respectfully alone. The Second Expedition discovered that the Gabblers had a stock of the precious crystals—and got chased the hell out after picking up two. It was our job to bring back a whole slew of the crystals, Gabblers or no Gabblers. Although our orders ran to a bucketful of fine detail, the essence of them was: "Treat with the Gabblers and get crystals. If the Gabblers won't play—get the crystals anyway."
	"I hope we can get them peacefully," Lorna would say. "Humans have destroyed and killed enough."
	And I'd tell her, "It don't matter one way or the other, kid. Gabblers aren't people."
	"They're civilized, aren't they? Almost?"
	"They're savages," I'd snort. "And monsters as well. Keep your sympathies for nice smooth hungry human beings like me."
	Then she'd slap my hands away and go back to her computers.
	Once Slopes asked me about the Gabblers. "Are they really humans?"
	"Humanoids," I told him shortly. He made me a little uncomfortable to talk to, somehow. I mostly enjoyed his comedy. "They walk on two legs, and they have hands with an opposed thumb, and they wear ornaments. That's all they use the crystals for. But they breathe ammonia instead of oxygen and have Lord knows what kind of metabolism. Why, Slopesy? Figuring on rootin' in their garbage?"
	"I was just asking," he replied gently. He put on his timid almost-smile and went aft. I remember laughing at the thought of him up against a couple of Gabblers—the most terrifying object in history since some ancient tale-teller dreamed up the Gryphon. All but two of the crew of the Starbound, the Expedition Two ship, had thrown down their packs and run for their lives at the very sight of a Gabbler. The other two had faced them out until the Gabblers started to scream. The psychologists had a lot to say about that noise. It was too much for any normal human being. One of the two men broke and ran, and no shame attaches to him for that. The other was cut off from the ship, and stood paralyzed with fear while the Gabblers screamed and trumpeted and pounded the earth with their scaly fists until it shook. He fired one shot in the air—he had sense enough not to risk wounding one of the enraged creatures—to frighten them off. Perhaps it did. All he remembers is a redoubled bedlam—such a gush of furious animal noise that he passed out cold on the spot.
	When he came to they'd gone. The two crystals were lying near him; he picked them up and ran blindly for the ship. It took eight months of the world's most advanced psychotherapy to straighten him out, and they say he's not quite normal yet, though he's lived to be an old man. What fantastic psychic emanations the Gabblers used as weapons was not known, but the idea of Slopes up against them really tickled me.
	The watches passed quickly enough with him aboard to keep us amused. I'll never forget the night Greaves slipped a spoonful of head-mastic, the damnedest adhesive that has ever been developed, into one of his sandwiches. Slopes bit into it and right then his upper teeth were welded to his lower teeth. He ran around in circles, whimpering, with half a sandwich sticking out of his face, flapping his hands uselessly. It was a riot. The stuff was quite harmless—it's chemically inert, and it yields readily to a little low-grade beta radiation, which breaks down the molecular cohesion. But we didn't radiate him until we were good and ready. I wish you could have seen the fun.

	We forgot about Slopes when we broke atmosphere on Venus, though I rigged the infrared view-screens for Lorna—they're a little cleaner than radar in ammonia fog—and she took us in as neat as you please. We located the spot where the Starbound had landed by feeding a photo-map of the scene into the automatic pilot and matching it to the view screen.
	Lorna threw the nose up and flipped the controls to the gyros. Tail-first we drifted down, sitting on a diminishing pillar of fire, while Lorna's eyes were glued to the echo-gauge which indicated the solidity of the footing under the ship. Once let one of these space-hoppers fall on its side and you could call yourself marooned. We didn't have antigravity drive in those days. It was real primitive stuff. All the dash and daring's gone from you young 'uns.
	There's not much to tell about Venus. It was as unappetizing and useless then as it is now—except that somewhere out there were the crystals we had come for. Through the ports we could see nothing but fog. Through the radar and infrared screens we saw rolling country, crags, pale blue vegetation, and an occasional treelike growth far larger than such things ought to be.
	We had to sit tight for twelve hours or so while the ground under us cooled and the chemical mish-mash of fixed and unfixed nitrogen, nitric acid, ammonium nitrate, ozone, and water stirred up by our landing worked itself out. Most of us slept. I don't think Slopes did, though. He traveled from the infrared to the radar apparatus, fore, aft, left, above, and below screens. He even haunted the blank, fog-frosted portholes, peering into the swirl of heat and chemical reaction, straining his eyes and his heartbeat for little glimpses of that meaningless Venusian landscape. And it was Slopes who roused us.
	"Gabblers!" he jittered. "Come look! Captain Riggs! Captain Riggs!"
	He was as excited as a ten-year-old, and I've got to admit it was catching. We crowded around the screens.
	Out among the rocks and pale blue bushes two hundred meters from the ship were moving things which, in spite of our careful indoctrination, made us gasp and turn away. They were bigger than men—I hadn't figured on that, for some reason. They were much bigger. As for the rest...I have a vision of yellow fangs, angry red eyes, and gray-green scales that is vivid enough—I'd as soon not talk much about it.
	"Let's have some sound," said the skipper. I went into the communications shack and cranked up an amplifier. I switched in an exterior microphone and plugged the output into the intercom. The ship filled with background noises of an alien planet—a hollow wind-sound, startling because the fog seemed so still; birdlike squeaks and screams, distant and different; and over it all, the repulsive chatter and back-chatter of the Gabblers—the sound that had given them their name. It was an insane sound, hoarse and seemingly uncontrolled. It ranged harshly up and down the scale, and it differed rather horribly from the yammering of apes in that it seemed to carry consistent intelligence.
	"Tubes!" barked the Captain. "Break out the suit stores and walkie gear. Sparks, stand by your shack. I want separate recordings of each suit transmitter. Navigator, tend the screens. Four volunteers here by the exit port. Jump."
	Now, I don't want to run down the courage of the Space Service. It might be nice to say that everyone aboard clicked his heels and said, "At your command, sire!" On the other hand, when I was telling you about the Starbound men who broke and ran when they saw the Gabblers, I think I made it clear that under the circumstances they carried no shame with them. Riggs asked for four volunteers; he got two: Purci, who, without dramatics, genuinely did not give a damn, and Honey Lundquist, who I suppose wanted to be noteworthy for something besides being as homely as a blue mud fence. Me, I was glad I'd been assigned to my communications equipment and had no decision to make. As for the rest who didn't volunteer, I don't blame them. Not even Slopes, though I still thought it was a fine idea for him to face up a couple of hungry Gabblers, just for the comedy of contrast.
	Riggs made no comment. He just stripped and got into space harness, the other two following. The rest of us helped them pull on the skin-tight rig and clamp down the globular transparent helmets. They tested their air and their communications, and then went to the inside gate of the airlock. I opened it for them.
	"We're going to make contact," said Riggs stonily. His voice came from the intercom speakers rather than directly from him. It was eerie. "We'll try to make it peaceful first. So no side arms. I'm taking a pencil gun, just in case. You two stay close together and behind me. We'll stay hard by the ship, and under no circumstances let ourselves get cut off. Check communications."
	"Check!" yelped Purci.
	"Check!" whispered Honey Lundquist.
	The skipper marched into the lock with the other two close behind him. I rumbled the gate shut behind them, and opened the outer lock with the remote control. All hands left aboard dived for the view-screens.
	The Gabblers, twenty or thirty of them, stuck close to the bush. Although we could not see the skipper and his volunteers yet, it was immediately evident that they had been seen. The Gabblers came out with a rush, and a more terrifying spectacle these old eyes have not seen. In the intercom, I heard Purci say, "Ugh!" and Honey say, "Eeek!" The Captain said, "Steady," in an unsteady voice. Behind me, there was a faint thunk as Betty Ordway passed out. I let her lie and went back to my screen.
	As if by common agreement, the bulk of Gabblers halted at the crest of the gentle slope between us and the brush, and three of them came forward together, one ahead and two behind. The rest set up such a roaring that the giant trees visibly quivered. It was just about then that the skipper moved far enough out to be visible, with Honey and Purci close behind him. They stopped, and the three advancing Gabblers stopped, and, incredibly, the crowd at the top of the hill doubled its noise. I couldn't help it—I turned down the gain control on the outside mike. I couldn't stand it. Lorna thanked me. Slopes wiped his face, working the handkerchief around his eyes so he wouldn't miss anything.
	There was a moment's tension—I don't mean silence; the gabbling kept up at that astounding volume, but nothing moved. When movement started, it was awfully fast.
	The Captain raised both arms in what he obviously felt was a gesture of peace. Judging by what happened the Gabblers took it as a deadly insult. They went straight up in the air, all three of them, and hit the ground running. They traveled in great bounds, yowling and roaring as they came, and behind them the mass of their followers started down the slope. Over the racket I heard Honey Lundquist scream. The three spacesuited figures looked very tiny down there at the approach of that wave of bellowing giants. I saw one of the three go down in a faint. Riggs yelled a futile, "Halt or I fire!" and aimed the pencil gun. One volunteer scooped up the limp form of the other, draped it across the shoulders of the space suit, and began lumbering toward the ship. Riggs aimed, fired, turned, and ran without waiting to see what his shot had accomplished.
	It was Slopes who leaped to the lock control and pressed his nose to the vision port to make sure all three were safely inside, and then slammed the outer door. He switched on the air-replacement pump that would get rid of the ammonia gas in the lock, and dived back to the screens.
	There was a cluster of Gabblers around the one Riggs had shot. The noise was fiendish. I went to the shack and turned down the volume again, but you could actually hear that racket through your feet on the deck plates.
	The inner-lock gate slid open, and a very pale-faced skipper stepped out. Behind him were his volunteers—Honey Lundquist looking winded, and Purci draped over her shoulders. "He fainted," she said unnecessarily and dumped him in our arms.
	We rolled him into a corner and kept our eyes on the screens. "Anyway, I got one of them," breathed Riggs.
	"No, you didn't, Captain," said Slopes. Sure enough, the prostrate Gabbler was sitting up, weaving his massive tusked head from side to side and shrieking.
	"Are they bullet-proof?" Greaves mouthed.
	"No," Slopes said devastatingly. "The skipper shot him smack on that crystal he had around his neck."
	Captain Riggs groaned. "And that's about as close we'll get to those crystals this trip," he predicted morosely. "They never told me it was going to be like this. Why in time didn't they send a battle cruiser?"
	"To kill off these creatures and loot their bodies for their ornaments?" asked Lorna scornfully. "We've come a long way in the last thousand years, haven't we?"
	"Now that's not the way to look at it," I began, but Riggs cut in, "You're right, you're right, Lorna. Unless we get them to cooperate, we'll spend years in finding out how they make the crystals. Or where they mine them. And we haven't got years. We've got about four more days."
	See, sixty years ago a ship could fuel for just so much blasting. A trip was timed for the closest transit of the planets. To leave Venus and chase after Earth as the planets drew apart again in space was out of the question. Now, of course, with power to throw away, it happens every day.
	We got Purci out of his suit and revived him. We were all ready to swear that he'd had some secret weapon used on him. He didn't scare easily. It was probably just his particular response to that	particular level of noise—a completely individual thing. But at the moment we were ready to believe anything of the Gabblers.
	The ship began to tremble.
	"They're attacking us!" yelped Greaves.
	But they weren't. There were more than ever of them. The entire slope was covered with bulky, scaly, horribly manlike monsters. They were all gabbling away insanely, and in great numbers they'd squat down and pound on the ground with their mallet-like fists.
	"Working theirselves up into a frenzy," Zipperlein diagnosed. "Skipper, let's blast off. We're what you might call underequipped for this sort of stuff."
	Riggs thought. "We'll stick it out for a while," he said finally. "I'd like to feel I'd done everything I could—even if it's just sitting here until we have to leave."
	I had my doubts, and from the looks of them, so had the others. But no one said anything. The ship trembled. We went and had chow.

	About thirteen hours before blast-off time I was staring glumly into a screen at the swarm of Gabblers when I sensed someone beside me. It was Slopes. He'd been left pretty much alone in the past three days. I guess everyone was too depressed and nervous to want fun.
	"Look at 'em," I growled, waving at the screen. "I don't know whether it's the same ones or whether they've been working in relays to keep the hassle going all this time. You'd have to be a Venusian to tell one from another. I can't tell 'em apart."
	He looked at me as if I'd just told him where the crown jewels were hid, and walked off without a word. He began pulling off his clothes. None of us paid any attention. If we thought anything at all, I guess we figured he was going to take a shower. Before any of us knew what was happening, he'd skinned into a space suit and was clamping on the helmet.
	"Hey! Slopes! Where do you think you're going?"
	He said something but I couldn't hear. I reached back and flipped on the intercom, which would pick up his suit radio. He repeated his remark, which was simply, "Out." He stepped into the airlock and slid the door shut.
	Riggs came pounding out of the control room. "Where's that crazy fool go—" He went for the airlock, but the red light over it blazed, indicating that the chamber was now open to the outside, and Slopes was gone.
	"Get on his beam," Riggs snapped, and grabbed a mike from my bench. "Slopes!" he roared.
	I punched buttons. Slopes's voice came in, far more calm and clear than I had ever heard it before.
	"Yes, Captain."
	"Get back in here!"
	"I'm going to try for those crystals."
	"You're trying for some suicide. Get back here. That's an order!"
	"Sorry, Captain," said Slopes laconically. Riggs and I stared at each other, amazed. Slopes said, before the Captain could splutter out another word, "I have an idea about these Gabblers, and I'm the only one qualified to carry it out."
	"You'll get killed!" Riggs bellowed.
	"I will if I'm wrong," said Slopes's quiet voice. "Now, if it's all the same to you, I'll switch off. I have to think."
	Riggs was filling his lungs when he saw Slopes's radio-response indicator wink out on the board. The breath came out in a single obscene syllable.
	All hands went to the screens, in which Slopes was just visible walking away from the ship. "Qualified!" I snorted. "What the hell is he qualified for?"
	"Humanity," said Lorna. I didn't know what she meant by that. Her face was white and strained as she watched the screen.
	The Gabblers went into a flurry of activity when they saw him. They crowded forward, practically stepping on one another to get at him. Three or four of the fastest raced out to him, screaming and clashing their tusks. As if to gloat over his helplessness, they circled him, leaping and yammering, occasionally dropping to drum powerfully on the ground with their fists. Then suddenly one of them picked him up, held him high over its head, and raced up the slope with him. The mob parted and closed again behind the creature, and the whole scaly crowd followed as Slopes was borne up out of sight in the blue underbrush.
	"Of all the ways in the world to commit suicide," breathed Purci. Honey Lundquist began to sob.
	"It isn't suicide," said Lorna. "It's murder. And you murdered him."
	"Who?" I demanded. "Me?"
	"Yes, you," she flared, "you and all the rest of you. That poor little tyke never hurt anyone. You did the rottenest thing that can be done to a human being—you persecuted him for what he was, and not for anything he'd done. And now he proves himself man enough—human enough—to give his life for the mission we've all failed on."
	"If he went out there to get killed," said Betty Ordway with icy logic, "it's suicide, not murder. And if his going out there had anything to do with getting the crystals, I don't see it."
	"I didn't see you giving him a tumble," said Honey smugly.
	Lorna didn't try to fight back. "I didn't really know what he was until just now," she said ashamedly, and went to her quarters.
	"We ought to go out after him," said Greaves. Everyone just let that remark lie there. Riggs said, "We blast off in eleven-point-three hours, whatever," and went into the chart room. The rest of us stood around trying not to look at one another, feeling, Maybe we were a little hard on the guy, and damn it, we never did him any harm, did we?
	It hit all of us at the same second, I think, that after three days of incessant babbling and ground-thumping, it was deadly quiet outside. Everybody started to talk and shut up after two syllables. And I think we all began to understand then what Lorna had been driving at.
	It was Purci who said it for us, softly, "He didn't want to come back into this ship. He didn't want to go back to Earth. He didn't belong anywhere, because no one ever bothered to take him in. And I guess he just naturally got tired of that."
	I don't think fifty words were spoken—outside the line of duty—in the next ten hours.
	It couldn't have been more than ninety minutes before blast-off when we heard the Gabblers coming back. Heads came up one by one.
	"They want another bite to eat," someone said. Someone else—one of the girls—swore abruptly.
	I threw power into the screens. The underbrush was alive with Gabblers, swarming toward the ship. "Skipper!" I called "blast off, huh? And singe the scales off'n them."
	"You could keep your big stupid fat mouth shut," said Lorna. It was barely a whisper, but I'll swear you could hear it all over the ship. "They're bringing back Slopes!"
	She was right. She was so right. With his legs wrapped around the neck of a capering Gabbler, his face slightly blue because of a dwindling oxygen supply in his suit, and a wide grin, Slopes rode up to the ship, followed and surrounded by hundreds of the scaly horrors. The Gabbler he rode knelt, and Slopes climbed stiffly off. He waved his hand, and a full fifty of the creatures dropped to their haunches and began pounding the dirt with their fists. Slopes walked wearily toward the ship, and four Gabblers followed him, each carrying a bulky bundle on its head.
	"Port open?" someone managed to say. I checked it. It was.
	There were heavy thumps in the port, and a nerve-rackingly close blast of Gabbler chatter. Then the red light went out and we heard the whine of the air-transfer pump.
	At last the door slid open. We fell all over each other to get his helmet and suit off. "I'm hungry," he said. "And I'm awful tired. And I swear I'll be deaf for life."
	We rubbed him down and wrapped him up and fed him hot soup. He fell asleep before he was half finished. About then it was blastoff time. We secured him in his bunk and lashed his four big bundles down and, after a couple of short puffs to warn the Gabblers back, we reached for the stars.
	In the four bundles were eight hundred and ninety-two perfect Venus crystals. And on the return trip we tried so hard to make up to Slopes for what he'd been through all his life that we actually began to be jealous of each other. And Slopes—he was no longer an Almost. He was very definitely an Altogether, with a ring to his voice, with a spring to his step.
	He worked like a slave on those crystals. "They've got to be synthesized," was all he'd say at first. "Humanity and the Gabblers must be kept apart." So—we helped him. And bit by bit the story came out. The nearer he got to analyzing the complex lattice of those crystals, the more he'd say. So before we reached Luna we found out what he'd done.
	"Those Gabblers," he said. "You had them figured wrong. That's the damn thing about a human being—anything he doesn't understand, he fears. That's natural enough—but why does he have to assume that every emotion he causes in a strange animal means the animal is going to attack?
	"Just suppose you're a small animal—say a chipmunk. You're hiding under a table eating cake crumbs and minding your own business. There's a half-dozen humans in the room and one of them is droning on about a traveling farmer and a salesman's daughter. He reaches the punch line and everybody laughs. But what about Mr. Chipmunk? All he knows is that there's a great, explosive roar of animal sound. He all but turns himself inside out with fright.
	"That's exactly what happened with human beings and the Gabblers. Only the humans were the chipmunks, for a change."
	Someone exploded, "You mean those lizard-apes was laughing at us?"
	"Listen to him," said the New Slopes. "How indignant can you get? Yes, I mean exactly that. Human beings are the funniest things the Gabblers have ever seen in their lives. When I went out to them they carried me off to their village, called in neighbors for miles around, and had themselves a ball. I couldn't do anything wrong. Wave my arm—they roared. Sit on the ground—they doubled up. Run and jump—they lay down and died."
	Suddenly he shoved aside his work and spoke from down deep inside himself. "That hurts, somehow, doesn't it? Humans shouldn't be laughable. They've got to be the kings of creation, all full of dignity and power. It's inexcusable for a human being to be funny unless he tries to be. Well, let me tell you something—the Gabblers gave me something that no human being ever was able to give me—a sense of belonging to humanity. Because what you people went through when the Gabblers first rushed up to you, laughing, is what I've been going through all my life. And it's never going to happen again. Not to me; for thanks to the Gabblers I know that all you superior joes are just as funny as I am.
	"The Gabblers are gentle, grateful people. They enjoyed the show and they showered gifts on me. When I indicated that I liked crystals, they went out and got more crystals than I could carry.
	"And I'm just as grateful, and that's why these crystals are going to be manufactured so cheaply on earth that there will never be another Venus Expedition for them. Don't you see? If mankind ever makes close contact with a race that laughs at them on sight—mankind will exterminate that race."
	On second thought, maybe they shouldn't nominate Slopes as Man of the Century. Maybe he wouldn't like for the Gabblers to get that much publicity. And besides, he's a stinker. He married my girl.