John Brunner by A Planet of Your Own

"Too late!"
    Right back at the beginning, years ago,
somebody he had heard of in garbled fashion from Victor and Coberley had been foolish enough to think the Zygra Company
would simply take pity on an employee—ex-employee—stranded here. He'd hung
around the main station, eking out a diet of whatever edible stems and seeds
he could lay hands on, until the starship had landed, and then had shown himself .
    The crew, under orders from some company
official, had shot him down, affecting to mistake him for a pirate or some
other rival illegally on this private planet, or perhaps a wild beast—on a
world without animalsl
    The frightening moral of that, for the others
who followed, was to keep clear of the annual human visitors. Accordingly,
devious ways were tried of getting messages out. The
pelts were not normally inspected by the humans who
came to pick them up, but crated and loaded by machinery. Horst had been told
that one year there had been an attempt to get a message into a pelt-crate.
What had seemed like a foolproof method had been worked out.
    The station, with majestic disregard for life
other than the pelts', had smashed the man's legs with an automatic
packing-press—and that had been the end of a year's cunning and scheming.
    Another year, hiding messages in young pelts
had been tried, in the hope that inspection on arrival would reveal they had
been tampered with. Nothing had come of that, though no lives had been lost.
    Another year—
    Oh, it wasn't important. Men had died: had
been killed, or had just withered away from deficiency diseases. Time had
passed. The company had ignored the stranded men on Zygra ,
and would go on doing so until they became a nuisance. Perhaps it was a source
of surprise that they survived so long on their own. It was certainly nothing
more. Sabotaging the pelt-crop was nearly impossible, with a monitor accompanying
every herd; it was taken for granted that approaching the main station was
tantamount to suicide; getting a message off-planet was out of the question
except once a year and then—likewise ....
    This,
though, was only the second time they had been so numerous. When Horst had
joined Coberley , his immediate predecessor, and
Victor, who had been around for perhaps two, perhaps three previous years, he
had raised the total to its all-time high. Then Solomon had joined them, and
they'd begun to recall the taste of hope, especially when they had devised the
notion of seizing and smashing a monitor so that its parent station would have
to ship it back to the main station for large-scale overhaul, carrying a man
hidden in its pelt-compartment.
    But
now Solomon was dead, and their newest recruit was both crippled by his arm and
partly dazed with pain.
    Enough. More than enough. Now was the time to gamble and if
necessary lose everything. Death would be better than this half-aware existence,
this fetid damp vegtetable continuation of what had
once been human lives.
    Furious
at the very start of it, railing blindly against the company that had trapped
him into breaking his contract, Horst had screamed at Coberley ,
telling him they ought to go straight back to the main station and tackle the
new supervisor.
    To
which Coberley had said only, "Suppose Victor
and I had come asking you for help?"
    And
Horst had shut his mouth on a vomit-like rising of self-disgust. He had no
loyalty to the Zygra Company, to keep him within the
terms of his contract, but he had needed to serve out his time and collect his
pay.
    There had been a certain
girl . . .
    Lost forever now. Probably thinks I'm dead. But wouldn't have made
inquiries to find out.
    He
was coming to feel that humanity was a horrible species, glamorous on the
outside with a sort of star-spangled gaudiness, but inside stinking and foul
with rot.
    So now: the double-or-nothing throw . Approach the main station, risking being spotted by
the newly arrived—hence still alert—supervisor (it would have been safer to
wait till he was