The Scamperers

Lieutenant Wellesley arrives on the isolated planet Ophir with a badge and a simple directive: find the mutants. The colony is small, inbred, sealed off from the stars for generations - a genetic crucible that has been refining its own variations in near-total isolation. At first the deviations are subtle. A child too tall. A jaw too narrow. But the deeper Wellesley digs, the more the horror crystallizes: everyone carries the mark. Every family, every bloodline, every laughing face in the colony - they're all carriers, all descended from some original mutation that has long since become the norm. The question isn't whether the mutants exist. The question is whether normal ever existed here at all, and what that makes him - the outsider who came to judge.This is cold war paranoia rendered in alien soil: a story about the fear of contamination, the arrogance of categorical thinking, and the unsettling discovery that the line between pure and polluted is thinner than any badge can draw. For readers who like their science fiction to ask uncomfortable questions about who gets to decide what human means.