CREATION MYTHS OF THE RECENTLY EXTINCT
  Frederik Pohl

When the check team for the Gerat Galactics got within sensor range of their new colony site the captain summoned them to the ship's centrum. They came reluctantly. Although they had each spent as much time as possible in their own quarters—sleeping, sulking, working on their own projects or merely hiding from the rest—the interminable flight had made them thoroughly sick of each others' presence.

Still, at first, they were delighted with what the sensors revealed. The little blue planet was right where the original surveyors had reported it, sixty-odd million years before... but then details began to emerge.

"Oh, yuck," cried the captain, writhing in revulsion. "We're in trouble here! The place is _infested_. It's got _living things_  all over it again."

That was the worst of news. The Great Galactics didn't care to share the planets they inhabited with any kind of living things but themselves. The deputy moaned, "What are we going to do now?"

The captain gave him a brief stare of contempt. "Think it through," he ordered. "As I see it, we have two options. We can go back to Galactic Central and report failure. Or we can clean it up some way or another. Which would you prefer?" The collective shudder was answer enough. "Right, then. How do we go about the clean-up?"

There was silence for a moment, until the political representative offered, "We could tickle the star until it went nova and burned the planet clean."

"With our budget? Get real."

"Or we could dump a big asteroid on it and kill everything off that way," the deputy captain said hopefully.

"The survey team tried that sixty-five million years ago, and all they did was get rid of the big scaly things with the sharp teeth. No, we need something _thorough_ and _сhеар_. Anybody else got any ideas?"

There was silence for a moment, and then the most junior member of the expedition raised his feeler. "You know I've been working in my shop to pass the time," he said diffidently. "Well, I've come up with a little in¬vention that might help us out here. I call it a 'Black Monolith.' "

"We don't have time for your silly contraptions," the captain said menacingly.

The junior shivered, but stuck to his guns. "I think it might do the trick," he insisted. "This Black Monolith thing of mine is an intelligence stimulator. What we do with it, we set it down among those little furry things down there—" he meant the australopithecines, but that word had not been invented—"and it will teach them to use sticks and bones and things to hit other things. That's to say, they'll learn to use _tools_. And then that would mean that they'd need to use their 'hands,' as I call them, in more complicated and subtle ways, which would mean that before long they'd develop a more complex nervous system in their hands' and 'arms'—and, ultimately, even a more elaborate _central_ nervous system in their 'brains.' Do you see what that means? Those little animals could evolve toward intelligence."

"By the Great Blast," the captain swore, "what's got into you? Vermin are bad enough, but do you think the Great Galactics will sit still for _intelligent_ vermin?"

"No, I think it would really work out," the junior said, growing braver. "See, once the Monolith taught them to use tools in the first place they wouldn't stop there. They'd go right on inventing more tools, of all different kinds—simple things like wheels and levers at first, but then they'd go on to much more complicated ones. Before you know it they'd start mak¬ing machines, and discovering chem-istry, and inventing vehicles; why, in a million revolutions of this planet or so—long before the first colony gets here from Galactic Central—there'd be billions of them."

"And then?"

"Well, then, what comes with all that kind of primitive industrialization? You know the answer to that as well as I do: Pollution! Ecological destruction! Trust me, Captain. All we have to do is get them started, and those little creatures'll have the planet scorched sterile in no time!" ■