Plot: 6/9. It’s a horrible story happened in space colonization containing a mystery to be solved. I would give a higher score if how people treated this new human was depicted.
The very first morning that Executive Harfner was fully committed to the planet, he found someone stole the clothes and coverings from sleeping colonists bedding outside the spaceship, and therefore commanded Biologist Marin to discover the cause.
The culprit turned out to be a kind of rodents, a strange species undetected by Biological Survey. Harfner then let him find ways to keep them out of their crops and their warehouse. No poison could exterminate them all at once. So they asked engineers to create a robot cat. It worked temporarily.
One day, as Marin detected oil, he found an eerily blank fossil history spanning from twenty thousand years ago to a hundred million years ago.
At the same time, their robot was destroyed by dozens of the rodents, so Harfner asked him to introduce the terriers against rodents. It worked temporarily.
Then Marin debriefed the property of the rodents or the solo species of this planet actually:
From twenty thousand years ago to a hundred million years ago, the planet suffered extreme climatic fluctuations, causing the species to develop an ability of rapid evolution according to the environment and thus they became the only species on this planet. But now the arrival of human colonists gave them enough food to evolve more powerful than the limitation prescribed by their original environment.
As they talked, the species had turned into the size of tiger, declaring the doom of the terriers. Marin explained the species could be born as fully functioning adults. Luckily, tigers were large enough for people to shoot them easily.
In the end, a new species that could escape from the detection of dogs appeared. This time, Marin persuaded Harfner not to simply kill, because the next generation of the species would possibly be out of their control.
This species approached them and handed them a flower. It looked like human.
Core: 6/9. Wallace demonstrated the true terror of the universe through the story of human’s interaction with omnimals. I would give a higher score, if the biologist reported more professional research on the basic structure of this omnimal and the speculation chain was more circumstantial.
What did evolution explain? It was a history of organic life on a particular world. Beyond that world, it might not apply.
As we all know, the introduction of new species might be a disaster. Then why didn’t the colonization hold the same consequence? Omnimals wouldn’t evolve so high had not been for human’s appearance in their planet.