THE NIGHT OF HOGGY DARN,
by Richard McKenna
Red-haired Flinter Cole sipped his black coffee and looked around the chrome and white tile galley of Space FreighterGorbals, in which he was riding down the last joint of a dogleg journey to the hermit planet of New Cornwall.
“Nothing’s been published about the planet for the last five hundred years,” he said in a nervous, jerky voice. “You people onGorbals at least see the place, and I understand you’re the only ship that does.”
“That’s right, twice every standard year,” said the cook. He was a placid, squinting man, pink in his crisp whites. “But like I said, no girls, no drinks, nothing down there but hard looks and a punch in the nose for being curious. We mostly stay aboard, up in orbit. Them New Cornish are the biggest, meanest men I ever did see, Doc.”
“I’m not a real doctor yet,” Cole said, glancing down at the scholar grays he was wearing. “If I don’t do a good job on New Cornwall I may never be. This is my Ph. D. trial field assignment. I should bestuffing myself with data on the ecosystem so I can ask the right questions when I get there. But there’s nothing!”
“What’s a pee aitch dee?”
“That’s being a doctor. I’m an ecologist—that means I deal with everything alive, and the way it all works in with climate and geography. I can use any kind of data. I have only six months untilGorbals comes again to make my survey and report. If I fumble away my doctorate, and I’m twenty-three already….” Cole knitted shaggy red eyebrows in worry.
“Well hell, Doc, I can tell you things like, it’s got four moons and only one whopper of a continent and it’s low grav, and the forest there you won’t believe even when you see it—”
“I need to know aboutstompers. Bidgrass Company wants Belconti U. to save them from extinction, but they didn’t say what the threat is. They sent travel directions, a visa and passage scrip for just one man. And I only had two days for packing and library research, before I had to jump to Tristan in order to catch this ship. I’ve been running in the dark ever since. You’d think the Bidgrass people didn’t really care.”
“Price of stomper egg what it is, I doubt that,” the cook said, scratching his fat jaw. “But for a fact, they’re shipping less these days. Must be some kind of trouble. I never saw a stomper, but they say they’r
