SOURCE: "Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons" by Cordwainer Smith (Galaxy, June 1961)

DESCRIPTION: "She moved among them. She and her father had bred them from Earth mink, from the fiercest, smallest, craziest little minks that had ever been shipped out from Manhome. The lives of the minks had been shaped to keep away other predators who might bother the sheep on whom the stroon grew. But these minks were born mad. Generations of them had been bred psychotic to the bone. They lived only to die and they died so that they could stay alive. These were the kittons of Norstrilia. Animals in whom fear, rage, hunger, and sex were utterly intermixed; who could eat themselves or each other; who could eat their young, or people, or anything organic; animals who screamed with murder-lust when they felt love; animals born to loathe themselves with a fierce and livid hate and who survived only because their waking moments were spent on couches, strapped tight, claw by claw, so that they could not hurt each other or themselves. Mother Hitton let them waken only a few moments in each lifetime. They bred and killed. She wakened them only two at a time. " ("Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons" by Cordwainer Smith)

NOTES: The psychotic brain energy of the Kittons is used by the Nostrillians to protect their supplies of the santaclara drug which gives immortality. The insanity of these mutant mink is projected telepathically into the minds of invaders, causing them to eat their own bodies in rage. Mother Hitton is the lone female scientist who tends and breeeds the vile creatures.

HISTORY: Any other writer would have had the killer minks unleashed on the invaders in a pulpy Edgar Rice Burroughs attack animal kind of way. Smith is so cool he finds a better way to use these evil creatures, making statements about society's use of force.

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