 What is the implied name of the green creatures Horst and his gang are herding?
The ancient rule was sink or swim—swim in the miasma of a planet without spaceflight, or sink to utter destruction! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1963. I The horses and packs were loaded before we went aboard the scoutship. The scout bay is no more than a great oversized airlock with a dozen small ships squatting over their tubes, but it was the last of the Ship that I might ever see, so I took a long final look from the top of the ramp. I'm short, dark and scrawny, though I don't expect that scrawniness to last much longer. The last contact the Ship had had with it—and we were the ones who dropped them—was almost 150 years ago. Planets make me feel wretched. Either your arches and calves ache or every time you step you think you're going to trip on a piece of fluff and break your neck. There are vegetables everywhere and little grubby things just looking for you to crawl on. A planet is all right for a Mud-eater, but not for me. We have a place in the Ship like that—the Third Level—but it's only a thousand square miles and any time it gets on your nerves you can go up a level or down a level and be back in civilization. We swung over the sea from the morning side and then dropped low over gray-green forested hills. They don't care what order you go in, so Jimmy D. jumped up, grabbed his gear and then led his horse down the ramp. When we turn fourteen, they drop us on the nearest colonized planet and come back one month later. They don't let us grow for fourteen years and then kick us out to die. It means that everybody on the Ship is a person who can take care of himself if he has to. Daddy says that something has to be done in a closed society to keep the population from decaying mentally and physically, and this is it. I began to check my gear out—sonic pistol, pickup signal so I could be found at the end of the month, saddle and cinches, food and clothes. At our next landing, I grabbed Ninc's reins and cut Venie out smoothly. The ship lifted impersonally away from Ninc and me like a rising bird, and in just a moment it was gone.
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