GAME PRESERVE

BY ROG PHILLIPS

The hunters were necessary, of course—but there was the other side of the picture too.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, October 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The first of the morons, as they were popularly called, though they were totally lacking in intelligence, were born in 1971, eleven years after the Mutual Retaliation phase of the big war-that-no-one-started, the majority of them near the big, bombed-out cities. By 1973, with the aid of the electron microscope, the scientists had learned all about it. Parents and offspring were sterilized and the offspring placed in state institutions. By 1983 there were too many of them. A new solution to the impossible situation was tried, large isolated areas in the south where the climate was mild were made into preserves for them. In the wilds the morons banded into small herds that showed no inclination to roam. By 1985 no more of the morons were being born, thanks to the sterilization of all parents carrying the contaminated gene. It was thought the problem was permanently solved, through perfect cooperation between science, the government, and the public. If the contamination had not been weeded out of the race one fourth of every generation for all the future would have been without any intelligence whatever.

But here and there had been natural births, unattended by a doctor; and parental love coupled with fear of being sterilized and thus denied further parenthood had brought into existence a few thousand unsterilized morons, hidden away in attic rooms or in basements. And to these parents the Preserves offered the logical solution too—drive into the nearest Preserve and turn the child loose with its kind. Thus, a new generation came into being in the scattered herds, and by 2010 A.D. a new problem had come into being. Thanks to impurities in the moron strain or to wandering renegades—or both—a few normally intelligent offspring were appearing in the herds. There was danger of these recontaminating the race, if they left the herds, learned to speak, wear clothes....

In 2010 the government attempted a mass sterilization of the herds but the herds were too wild by now, and the males too dangerous, so the sterilization program was abandoned and a new plan substituted. The government Hunters came into being, small patrol groups whose job was to pick off the 

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