Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 52 — page 46: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

STAR HAVEN eliminate the beetles then we could grow what we liked. Could that be done?’ “Over my dead body.” “Could it be done?’ “T don’t know, and I don’t want to find out. Alter- ing the ecology of a planet is similar to performing a major operation on a creature you don’t know the first thing about. We’ve tried it before, remember, and look at what happened. Rabbits were never meant to live in Australia. Some of the early explorers had the bright idea of altering the ecology of the continent by releasing a few pairs and so providing meat for the settlers. Fine—in theory. In practice, as the beasts had no natural enemies there, they increased until they became a menace to the community. So they tried infecting them with a restrictive disease to kill them off, and that worked fine—until the disease spread to countries where there were supposed to be rabbits. It killed them off there, too, and so the foxes and weasels, the stoats and owls, all the crea- tures who depended on rab- bits for food, starved. That upset the ecology still more, and there was all hell to pay until they managed to strike a new balance. Over twelve species of wild life became extinct through that experi- ment, Williams, and that was on Earth, a planet, we should know something about. What damage do you think we could do if we tried altering the ecology of an unknown world ?”’ ‘““You haven’t answered my question, Gerald. Could you Gant: ~ “Perhaps. With about a hundred years of experimen- tation, a full staff and a few ship-loads of equipment. Then we'd have some idea of just what we were doing. Now? As far as I can see there are only the beetles and the bees. You want to get rid of the beetles. So we poison them— if we can, and then find out that they and the bees are in symbiosis and without the beetles the bees die. That comiclooks.conn