EarthSale

A procession of researchers came and went until Amone finally lost interest and sold his planet, Hydron 4, and his entire stock of humans. The buyer was B.L. Zeebub, a chemical engineer and entrepreneur from the Hades District. He brought in his own experts and soon made his first breakthrough. Reproductive organs were incorporated into the experimental humans and manufacturing costs were reduced to zero.

Impressive though this was, humans were still not viable. The intelligence problem had not been solved, but Zeebub was confident. Renting a thousand disused planets, he isolated a million humans on each and experimented on each group with drugs. The results were not to be known for many years as the drugs were designed to evolve the human brain over hundreds or thousands of generations.

Most of the drugs failed, proving fatal to the recipients. There were also some spectacular failures, most notably in the Gherm District, where the humans developed at an alarming rate and erupted into a conflict that eventually destroyed sixteen planets.

The only successful drug was Expron, one of Zeebub’s later drugs. It developed intelligence over a period of one million years. After that time humans could, within limits, think for themselves. It became conceivable that one day humans could control the day to day running of the universe. Zeebub was lauded everywhere for his genius.

On hearing this, Christ obtained details from Hydron 4. Developed humans were beyond his reduced means, but he found he could afford two million basic units of various designs and colors plus the recommended dose of Expron to inject into Earth’s atmosphere.

There was a short one hundred thousand year wait for the stock, but Christ was unconcerned. He was well ahead of any other potential breeders in the Palfrem District and used the time to establish lucrative advance contracts for his matured humans. Christ also informed his father of his plans and asked him to return to Earth. "Father was very excited about the prospects and agreed to come back. He even picked up the humans on the way."

The humans were soon installed on the Earth’s surface and the Expron administered. Christ and Almighty looked forward to a profitable future.

In hindsight, Christ and Almighty may look foolish. However, they were not the only ones taken in by Zeebub’s audacious plan. At that time he was a respected figure throughout the universe. The Human Incident was only the first of his criminal plans and was completely unexpected at the time. It was later established that Expron was developed long before Zeebub had purchased Hydron 4. The other drugs were merely a cover to add authenticity to his plan.

The ironic part of Zeebub’s plot was that Expron did exactly as advertised. Subjected humans did eventually become capable of responsibility and it is widely acknowledged they would indeed have assumed influential administration positions. Zeebub would have then played his master card - Exprosil, the companion drug to Expron. This would have caused all humans to fall under his control. Zeebub would become the greatest power in the universe.

The scale of the plan proved his undoing. Humans were sold throughout the universe, in almost every district. All the planets had to have similar conditions to house their humans, but there are too many local variables. Testing of Expron had taken place in ideal human conditions and the effects of the twin suns of Geynol or the heat drifts of the Pycren District could not have been foreseen. As an atmospheric drug, Expron simply mutated.

The initial customers noticed something was wrong after half a million years, when the humans began to stray from Zeebub’s advertised path. On many planets human populations died within a generation. On others super-intelligent humans developed so quickly they had to be destroyed. When reports reached Zeebub he knew the game was up and fled.