Bar Holliday is a scout for Seiglein Corporation. His job is to look for likely planets for humans to live on. He finds a planet but there is a large spaceship orbiting the planet. It is one of seven colony ships that set out hundreds of years ago looking for new worlds to establish new societies. Holliday enters the ship and finds it deserted and figures the people must be on the planet.
He lands his ship on the planet but can find no sign of people although there are thousands of large, ugly, kangaroo-like herbivores everywhere. He returns to his ship only to find it encased in a hard, white shell. He tries to melt the shell with his gun but it stops working and then his clothing and equipment crumble away to nothing. He's stranded, nude and locked out of his ship.
He starts to feel really hungry and begins to gorge on the local plants. His hunger overwhelms him and he can only stop when he is gorged. Long story short, he changes into one of the ugly herbivores that infest the planet.
These creatures are the human colonists, transformed into these strange beasts by a virus that was engineered by the artificial intelligence computer that operated the ship that brought them there. The computer, called Moses, was just doing what he thought was best for them. They are extremely healthy, long-lived, peaceful and self-sufficient. But because of their high reproduction rate, they have filled the planet to capacity. And because their lives are so easy and unchallenging, they are degenerating into the herd "cows" they appear to be.
Bar Holliday refuses to accept his fate and graze and screw and poop and sleep like the herd does. He has a plan, a plan to get back in his ship and warn the folks back home what the computer Moses has done to the humans in its care.
But as the poet says, "The best laid plans o' mice an' men Gang aft a-gley." And do Holliday's plans go awry! Instead of rescue, Seiglein Corporation sends destroyers that lay waste to all life on the planet. Bar Holliday has a motto though: "Noboby beats Bar Holliday." Holliday will make Seiglein pay very dearly indeed.
This was a pretty good book. Although the author's idea of an ideal race of beings is more than a little peculiar. He makes them blind and gives them hooves instead of hands and turns them into weird cows. The most exciting part of their day is taking a poop, I'm guessing.
Anyway, this is the last Jack L. Chalker book I will ever read. His ideas just don't appeal to me.
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