: The missionary by Bone Jesse F Jesse Franklin Emshwiller Ed Illustrator - Science fiction; Short stories; Life on other planets Fiction; Religion Fiction; Space colonies Fiction; Psychic ability Fiction; Overpopulation Fiction

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Release date: January 4, 2024

Original publication: New York, NY: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, 1960

THE MISSIONARY

ILLUSTRATOR EMSH

My leg itched. The knitting fracture beneath the cast was letting me know in no uncertain terms that a simple fracture is simple in name only. There is nothing like a nagging, unscratchable itch. It doesn't really hurt, but after awhile it can become unadulterated torture,--and all you can do is grin and bear it. Ultimately you stop grinning.

To make matters worse, I had Wolverton for company. Zard knows, I despised the man enough before I saw him and contact had only served to change my dislike to active loathing.

He sat across from me, draped bonelessly in the contoured comfort of a Varkhide chair fashioned for him by one of his Halsite retainers--a tall, angular man of indeterminate age, sandy-haired, lean-cheeked, beak-nosed, with piercing yellow eyes that flashed golden under tufted brows. His face was leathery and hatched with innumerable fine wrinkles, but his eyes and voice were young.

To give the devil his due, he had a wonderful voice--cajoling, persuasive, domineering and demanding. He could use it with all the skill and passionate conviction of a Bearer of the Word. His tongue was a weapon--a club and a rapier--and I had been pounded and pierced with it for nearly two weeks. I hated it, but I had to listen for I was literally a captive audience.

"As I was saying last time," Wolverton continued, "rabbits have nothing on the human race. Given a halfway favorable opportunity and sufficient time, humanity can make a planet look like the Australian bush. Men don't understand it until it's too late--and then, stifled by their own swarm, they either degenerate or strike out to find a new world where a man can breathe. Always they go in pairs--male and female--and pretty soon another world becomes another rabbit warren."

"What's a rabbit?" I asked.

Wolverton looked at me and laughed. "It's obvious you've never been on the Inner Worlds, have you?"

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