be surprised if that happened. God knows, I'm not surprised at anything we do. Besides even if those planet-killers did come sweeping in from a neighborhood galaxy breathing fire and shooting up worlds, we're not completely without a defense, you know. For 15,000 N.Y. we've been so worried about those dead bastards that we've spent a pile of loot working on weapons we've never had a need for. You know the line—if they could kill a planet, we had to be able to kill a planet. We bewail their cruelty, but we're not entirely without aggressive tendencies ourselves. Our history shows that. So far we've not destroyed entire worlds, but we sure cut the population when Zede IV came up with that fascist nut who was going to establish an empire. We've got some blood on our hands, too. We go armed. Hell, I've got enough weapons aboard an Expo ship to handle a fleet of those planet killers and shoot up a dozen worlds while doing it. I've never had to use a single popgun and I pray I don't ever have to, but I've got them and I would use them if necessary. But we've been good boys and girls for a few thousand N.Y. and we haven't killed anyone except in accidents and occasional cases of psychopathic murder or something. We've spread ourselves from asshole to appetite all over this arm of the galaxy and we're breeding as fast as we can to settle more worlds. I think I heard someone say that new world settlement requests come into United Planet Central at the rate of about five a year. We're pretty prolific. There are a hell of a lot of us, and we're still suffering from two afflictions. One, we're lonely. In our billions, we're all alone. We can't understand why there's no life in this galaxy except us. We're always looking for it and we're always scared we're going to find it in the form of the planet-killers. This makes us hope and quake at the same time, being human, but we're curious enough to go on looking. We're so hungry for company we breed our dogs to be almost human and those scientists on Xanthos II breed sea mammals up to the communication level and go swimming around under the water talking with them. Well, I think a lot of people are thinking of X&A in terms of a search for human dogs. But what if we run into someone out here who is our equal? Not the planet-killers, but just a race that can stand up to us intellectually? Will we start shooting, unable to bear the competition? When this Dr. Feli Janti, the telepath from that mucked-up Belos II, discovered that these poor bastards here are way to hell and gone ahead of us in certain mental powers he panicked. Some of these people can, without a single number, picture in their heads a number of what they call sun circles equivalent to 100,000 of our old years. Janti came face to face with a guy who could manipulate his cells at the DNA level. He got pictures of others who could fly, or teleport, using some power we can't even measure. Janti went white. He shook. He turned to me and said, «Captain, I recommend that we sterilize the planet immediately.» Just like that, from one look into their minds. He was scared shitless. These people don't have a single weapon, offensive or defensive, and their only enemy is the planet itself, but that creep wanted to wipe them out lest they overpower us with their superior mental abilities. Jack, I know I'm taking up a lot of your time. I know you're damned busy flying that desk and painting scuff spots on the red tape. So I'll get down to it. We've seen some hell- holes together, Jack. Some of the places we checked out were pretty bad, but all of them are like paradise compared to this one. She's a hot one. She's greenhoused by a thick atmosphere and under it there's a lot of volcanic activity, just as if she'd been split by something right down to the mantle. At the poles, in the winter, there's
just a trace of frost. It melts off completely in the summer. The air is full of sulphur and ammonia and other goodies with just the barest trace of oxygen. The surface is about eight-tenths water, but usable water is as scarce as on any desert planet you can name. The rivers are running chemical sewers and the seas are just about as thick as a good juaro soup—only they contain everything that is soluble in water. They'd float a piece of steel, almost, they're so saturated. Fortunately these people don't need water; they subsist on an all-purpose liquid food that comes from a slimy, green sea plant. There's not enough soil on the planet to grow a patch of beans. Most of the land is bare rock, except in valleys where soil has been trapped. Those low places are something out of a nightmare. They're filled with plants that look something like toadstools, but they're unlike anything we've seen because they're as toxic as a Telos red-snake. The soil holds about all the
radioactivity that is left on the planet. It limits the stay in a Type-A suit to about ten minutes. That's damned hot. The radioactivity is artificially produced and is all old stuff. Lots of the carbon series. There are enough original radioactives down deep to tell us what happened. There are indications of mining at very deep levels. Yep. That's the story. I didn't put that in my official report and I leave it to you whether or not to break it right now. I was afraid if I reported it I might give the isolationists more fodder for their fear-mongering. The planet has been systematically looted of every resource. On the surface there's not enough metal to put together a child's toy and indications point to quite a few millennia since anyone has dug for it. We've turned up samples of most of the common stuff, Lead 208 and 206 and a bit of U-235 at the deep levels. On the surface, especially next to the vegetation in the low spots, there's some Strontium 90 and Cesium 137, and it gets into the atmosphere at times. But these beings are not the planet-killers of the central galaxy. I'd stake my career on that, Jack. This planet was killed, all right, but it's older than the center worlds. Not in geological formation, but in settlement. And this very oldness leads one to speculate. The ruins of the central worlds are about 75,000 N.Y. old. The planet-killers were in their big, final battles just about the time we came from wherever it was we came from and landed on Terra II. We couldn't have come from the central galaxy or beyond, or we'd have encountered the killers. Suppose we'd missed Terra II—and it would have been easy as it's the only life-zone planet in its sector. We'd have gone on and run head-on into that big war and that would have been the end of us. But we hit on the one planet in a thousand that could give us the proper conditions and then we settled down and started pulling ourselves into space again. It makes me think, sometimes, that Jordan is right in his history about a one-ship landing. That would explain a lot. If one ship had carried our little zoo out from the mother planet, wherever the hell it is, and if it had been severely damaged on landing so that somehow the history tapes or whatever records there were were lost, the survivors would have nothing but their intelligence. And they'd have been so damned busy during the first few generations rebuilding toward a technological civilization that they wouldn't have bothered with recording history and where they came from. Word of mouth is a chancy way of preserving fact. All right, I'm rambling, but it's all connected, It's all about the Goddamnedest bunch of people I've ever imagined. This world is peopled by four distinct racial types. No type is dominant. One type is a moron-intellectual sort of being, female, and the most humanoid in appearance. They're hairless, with skin much like ours, only a bit thicker and tougher. They have breasts and most of the other female accouterments. They grow to adult-size, a bit smaller than the average U.P. female, but their brains remain at the level of about a six-month-old baby. I've seen one or two of them. They lie in bed, naked, kicking and mewling like infants. But behind the part of the brain that controls their bodily functions is an area that, according to the creeps from Belos II, is like a flesh-and-blood computer. These idiot-computer beings can't control that part of the brain, but it's used by another racial type. This is a male who lives and works with the idiot female and he's a real monster right out of the flicks. He's got scales like a lizard and a chest about the size of a barrel and his head rises from his shoulders in a solid, fleshy cone into a rounded peak. He has no eyes, but has a small mouth and a hairy, inverted nose through which he breathes. All four types have one thing in common. They have red gills on their necks. The gills have something to do with breathing, because the computer morons, whose gills look like they haven't been completely formed, can't go into the outside, except under ideal conditions. The male types living with the computer morons have the gills on the thick, fleshy portion of their tall, domed heads. They see and hear and apparently smell and do a lot of other things with senses much like old-fashioned radar. They can hurt with the power of their minds, but they're gentle. We've observed no attempt to dominate. They can send their senses bouncing off the near planets and—try this one on for size—they can sense the stars. Of course, they're not sending signals all the way there and back, because the nearest star to their sun is four plus light-years distant, but they can feel something, maybe the light from the stars, which is quite a trick since the thickness of the atmosphere makes a summer's day as dark as the inside of a cat's ass. They've got an abstract sense of time that tells them the season, the month, and the day, although they have no names for them. They use pictures to compare the time in relationship to the entire year. Of the two other racial types one is male and one female. The female is the flyer. She uses electromagnetic force in some way that has our boys stumped to lift herself and a considerable load for fantastic distances. More on that later. The other male type is the worker. He's developed some amazing body functions, including the ability to rebuild damaged cells on the DNA level. This healing ability allows him to go out into that hell of a planet and gather food. He likes to travel and bugs around all over the land areas and under the seas when he's not working. He can exist in an atmosphere in which an ant couldn't get a good breath of air by storing oxygen and nutrition in his cells and using these reserves at will. These two types are the breeders. They copulate just once in a lifetime. Once in a lifetime, Jack. How would you like that? All four of the types are ugly by our standards. The male breeder has huge, thick scales that repel both the local radiation and that from the sun. This property in itself is worthy of a lifetime of study for a dozen of our scientists. He has a chest capacity of about four cubic liters. He has eyes, as do the three types other than the radar fellow. The male breeder also has the
