Read The Sirian Experiments for Free Online Page B

was also a quite unforeseen increase in height and girth.
    When their work was done on Southern Continent I, they were not returned to their own planet.
    This was because, during the period between their being taken off their own planet, and the end of their term on 23, another planet had been discovered, much nearer to Sirius, not dissimilar from 24, but with only very limited and lowly evolved life-forms. It was our intention to space-lift the Lombis to this planet – Colonized Planet 25 – in order to establish on it this species, which, we hoped, would continue to be useful for general hard unskilled labour.
    In other words, they were not to return home at all.
    But it was not possible for them to be taken to 25 at once, because that was being used for certain limited and short-term experiments, and their presence there would be disruptive. They were therefore brought under my aegis, on to Isolated Southern Continent II, as an interim measure.
    During their hundred years on S.C. I, they were in what can only be described as a social vacuum. They had not been allowed to glimpse any sign of Sirian general levels of culture. They had continued to be instructed – less and less, since they proved able pupils – by the C.P. 22 technicians, who never allowed themselves to be seen as superior in expectation to their pupils. They were not told why they were doing this work of establishing agricultural stations. Nor what happened on 23 after they left it. Nor what their destiny was to be. Some of their supervisors considered they were not capable of either asking questions or understanding the answers. Others disagreed. We took note of these comments but continued our policy, unmoved even by criticism that this whole experiment was brutal.
    We were watching, closely, constantly, for signs of the familiar demand for more, for higher, for better. That was, after all, as much a purpose of their being put on 23 and then on Rohanda as the actual work they did. Meanwhile, they were set free on a particularly favoured part of Isolated S.C. II. Of course this was before the ‘events’, the changing of the angle of the axis, the slight distancing of Rohanda from the sun. Everywhere on Rohanda was hotter then, proportionately. The southern part of the continent was ideal, a paradise – for once to use emotional language of course inappropriate to this report – and I have never seen anything to equal it. The conditions were similar but better than what the Lombis had known on 24: drier, more even, without extremes of any kind. They were given a large well-wooded, fertile plain, that had a central river and its many tributaries, informed they were not to stray beyond certain limits, and left entirely to themselves. Our monitors from 22 were withdrawn.
    I and my staff were established well away from them in an inaccessible place among mountains that they had no reason to approach. They were not told that their stay in this beautiful place would have a term – and probably a short one.
    I was at that time much occupied with other enterprises.
    This was one: observing the healthy, invigorating climate of this continent, we thought it worthwhile to transfer on to it, though temporarily, some of those who were succumbing to the mental disorders, chiefly depression and melancholy, that characterized our Dark Age. We used it, in fact, as a kind of mental hospital, or asylum. The conditions were so easy, so little effort was needed to maintain life, that all we did was to space-lift those who wished to try the experience to parts of Isolated S.C. II – of course well away from the Lombis, and leave them there to make their own shelters of branches or grass. Food was brought across from Southern Continent I. They were not permitted to hunt or harm the animals, but were allowed to fish, within limits. The idea was a deliberate return to a primeval innocence, of a kind that did not need even to be newly invented