The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Huddlers, by William Campbell Gault

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Title: The Huddlers

Author: William Campbell Gault

Illustrator: Ernie Barth

Release Date: June 20, 2010 [EBook #32904]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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The Huddlers

By William Campbell Gault

Illustrated by Ernie Barth

[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science
Fiction May 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

[Sidenote: _He was a reporter from Venus with an assignment on Earth. He
got his story but, against orders, he fell in love--and therein lies
this story._]

That's what _we_ always called them, where I come from, huddlers.
Damnedest thing to see from any distance, the way they huddle. They had
one place, encrusting the shore line for miles on one of the land bodies
they called the Eastern Seaboard. A coagulation in this crust contained
eight million of the creatures, _eight million_.

They called it New York, and it was bigger than most of the others, but
typical. It wasn't bad enough living side by side; the things built
mounds and lived one above the other. Apartments they called them. What
monstrosities they were.

We couldn't figure this huddling, at first.

All our attention since Akers' first penetration into space had been
directed another way in the galaxy, and though I'll grant you unified
and universal concentration may be considered unwise in some areas, it's
been our greatest strength. It's brought us rather rapidly to the front,
I'm sure you'll agree, and we're not the oldest planet, by a damned
sight.

Well, by the time we got to the huddlers, Akers was dead and Murten was
just an old man with vacant eyes. Jars was handling the Department,
though you might say Deering ran it, being closer to most of the gang.
Jars was always so cold; nobody ever got to know him really well.

Th