Gor Haml rubbed a hand over his weary eyes. “It is grueling work,” he admitted, “but it can be done, due to a combination of the highly evolved Taithan psychotechnology and certain phenomena of evolution and history. We have a very exact technique for dealing with human races.”

  “Human races!”

  “Yes! It seems strange, but the fact is that in three hundred years of Galactic exploration the Taithans have never found an Earth-like world which was not inhabited by a human race. Oh, there are differences, of course, and even races which look and think exactly alike could hardly be so similar as to make interbreeding possible—but by and large, the similarities exceed the differences.”

  “I should think the random element—”

  “There is none, not if you agree that like causes produce like effects. All planets are produced by the same basic process, and so every Sol-type star must have a system like this one. And every Earth-type planet must produce the same general forms of life—because two processes beginning with the same initial conditions must run the same course.”

  “But how can the initial conditions be so much alike?”

  “They are, in at least half the cases. There are deviations of greater or less degree, but over half the GO-type stars explored so far have been found to have planets similar to Taitha inhabited by an intelligent race similar to our own—and Earth is such a one.” Gor Haml’s eyes rested speculatively on the President: “We were astonished at this ourselves, when we first began exploring, but the fact was there. Now we know the reasons and see that such similarity is inevitable in this universe, but I cannot explain the philosophy to you. A thousand years from now, Earthlings should be able to understand it—but not at your present stage of development.”

  “I begin to see how you were able to learn about us so quickly,” said Brackney. “You knew just about what to expect and what to look for.”

  “That is part of it, to be sure. Also, we have the benefits of a psychological science evolved to a point that might seem miraculous to you. It includes all human knowledge, which is after all only a function of the human organism, and integrates it according to principles your scientists and philosophers have not yet imagined. You have the germ of it in your experimental and analytical psychology, in semantics and symbolic logic, in physical and biological sciences, yes, and in some of your philosophical speculations. But you have not begun to exploit the potentialities of your own nervous systems. Taithans have no more inherent intelligence than Earthlings, but they know how to use it; just as a caveman was inherently capable of using, say, tensor analysis, but the knowledge did not exist for him. Thus we can perform such apparent feats of legerdemain as understanding and classifying a planet in a month’s hard work.”

  “I see,” nodded Brackney. “I can even guess your main line of approach—simply reading tons of written material of every kind, at some fantastic speed, and analyzing the information, both direct and indirect, it contains.”

  “That is one important line, at least,” smiled the Taithan. “I might add that history books are the leading source of the knowledge we are after.”

  There was a moment of silence. The Earthlings sat looking at the strangers, seeking some sign of foreignness or of godlike power or anything, rather than the score of weary-looking, ordinary men before them. Brackney, with a politician’s sensitivity to moods, could not, escape the nagging conviction that the Taithans were depressed. They look at us as if they felt sorry for us!

  He said, more to break that awkward stillness than for any other reason: “I suppose this is a rather meaningless question, but how far ahead of our civilization is yours? I mean…well, of course we’re contemporaries, but what time equivalent separates us—?” He stopped, acutely aware of his own lack of terminology.

  “The question is not meaningless,” replied Gor Haml. “We are about fifteen hundred years ahead of you—in actual time. Our recorded and archeological history is longer than yours by that many years. Indeed, that is the only significant difference between our races.”

  “That’s quite encouraging,” smiled the Secretary of State. “I was beginning to fear you were the sort of supermen the fiction writers love—completely alien to us. But if you help us get started, we should be able to catch up with you in a generation or two.”

  “That…yes, that is why I have been so thankful,” exclaimed Brackney. “Here on Earth we die of disease and war, we impoverish ourselves and go in fear and ignorance, we are bound to this one little planet—worse yet, to our own archaic superstitions and hates. Taithan science means things like spaceships and limitless energy sources and disease-free men, yes, and that’s what all the world has been so jubilant about. But to me, it is the enlightenment and the freedom from our old heritage of cave and beast which is the great gift—” He stopped, a little embarrassed at his own loquacity. He heard his own blood beating in his arteries, and his face was hot.

  Gor Haml smiled. It was a very weary smile, with no humor in it, and his lined gaunt visage was not brightened by it. He said quietly:

  “The histories of Earth and Taitha run as parallel as the histories of nearly all human races known to us. The only important difference is that ours is some fifteen hundred years older—but that difference is enormous. In the Galaxy so far, we have found human races in every stage from pure savagery to our own level, but in nearly every case—and your own among them—the only variation seems to be when they got started. Once under way, they follow the same patterns.”

  “But—hold on!” exploded Brackney. “You don’t mean to say that on every planet there was an ancient Egypt and Rome, or a United States—?”

  “Oh, no.” Gor Haml’s smile twitched with the faintest hint of amusement. “Indeed, the superficial differences—language, dress, religion, laws and customs, almost everything which an untrained observer would notice—are usually radical. I am, however, speaking in a deeper sense. There is a parallelism in mental and, well, spiritual evolution which transcends outward appearances.”

  At their evident puzzlement, he went on: “I suppose some of you, at least, are familiar with such philosophers of history as Spengler and Toynbee. They have the beginnings of the truth, in their analysis of history into distinct cultures. And be it noted, those cultures follow a cycle of genesis in barbaric folk-wanderings, growth and expression of innate tendencies in the people, breakdown, time of troubles, stiffening into a ‘universal state’ statism, and ultimate extinction. The cycle has a time scale which varies by no more than ten or twenty years from the norm for each distinct stage.

  “There is no reason to invoke a mysterious ‘Destiny’ to explain this fact. The casual law is sufficient. Under similar conditions, human beings react similarly. For instance, the nature myths of primitive peoples who never heard of each other are so alike that your own anthropologists have been able to classify them according to type, and to enunciate the unspoken beliefs underlying magic rites everywhere. In like manner, what is more natural than that outlying barbarians should invade a decadent empire and, coming under its influence, generate a new civilization—or that the miseries of a time of troubles should be forcibly ended by the imposition of a universal state? I am, of course, much oversimplifying, but I believe you can see in a rough way why Earth-type planets must evolve human races and why these races must have similar cycles of history.”

  “But history isn’t all cyclic,” objected Brackney.

  “No, no, of course not. It is, indeed, an irreversible process only one of whose components, so to speak, is cyclic. For instance, the progress in technology is almost a direct line. Likewise, when a planet has advanced far enough, it is able to break out of the cycle of wars and other social evils—as Taitha has done. But the time of that achievement is governed by casual laws, not by wishful thinking or futile attempts at interference.”

  “Wait a minute—” A sudden fear, dim and inchoate, all the more ghastly for that, crawled coldly along Brackney’s spine. “Wait! Aren’t you assuming that conditions remain the same? For instance, your arrival on Earth is a factor which, I suppose, has no parallel on Taitha—”

  “That is true.” Suddenly Gar Haml’s eyes were bright—with tears? “But when we depart, our brief visit will have had no long-range significance. Men tend to thrust unpleasant facts out of their minds, and the existence of planets immensely beyond Earth will prove unpleasant to most humans.”

  “Not…oh, no!” Brackney started out of his chair. “But you…you’re going to stay! You’re going to guide us, help us become truly civilized—”

  “No, Mr. Brackney. We have classified Earth, and it is well below the stage of development at which prolonged contact with superior culture would be safe for either side. We leave immediately.”

  He stood up, and laid a hand on the President’s shoulder. His face was bleak and stern and sorrowful. “Your assumption that we, whose intentions are admittedly benevolent, will give you guidance, is based on my own statement that Earthlings are intellectually capable of learning all that Taithans know. But man is not entirely, or even primarily, an intellectual animal. He has to feel his knowledge, if he is not to make hideous misuse of it. A wise man is not necessarily a good man, and intellect turns as readily to destructive as to useful ends. Do not forget the example of Japan, which your own people forced from feudalism to industrialism without changing the inherent structure of society—thus loosing a fanatical menace on the world.”

  “But…you would change our society—wouldn’t you?”

  “Never. It would leave Earthlings pensioners, with no sense of cultural continuity—worse off than primitive aborigines forced into modern factories.”

  The grave, implacable voice seemed to come from enormous distances, gulfs of space and time and evolution. “Man must win his own salvation. He must learn, not only with his brain but with bitter and horrible and unforgettable experience, branded so deep as to be almost an instinct, that he is part of a whole, and that misuse of wisdom recoils a thousand fold.

  “I am afraid that there is nothing we can do for you until you have had your atomic wars. We will be back in a thousand years. Good-by, gentlemen.”

  Einstein’s Distress

  ∆p∆x,

  Werner K. Heisenberg

  Claimed that our knowledge of

  Atoms has gaps.

  Einstein, distressed by such

  Discontinuity,

  Said that the Almighty

  Does not shoot craps.

  Kings Who Die

  Luckily, Diaz was facing the other way when the missile exploded. It was too far off to blind him permanently, but the retinal burns would have taken a week or more to heal. He saw the glare reflected in his view lenses. As a ground soldier he would have hit the rock and tried to claw himself a hole. But there was no ground here, no up or down, concealment or shelter, on a fragment of spaceship orbiting through the darkness beyond Mars. Diaz went loose in his armor. Countdown: brow, jaw, neck, shoulders, back, chest, belly…No blast came, to slam him against the end of his lifeline and break any bones whose muscles were not relaxed. So it had not been a shaped charge shell, firing a cone of atomic-powered concussion through space. Or if it was, he had not been caught in the danger zone. As for radiation, he needn’t worry much about that. Whatever particles and gamma photons he got at this distance should not be too big a dose for the anti-X in his body to handle the effects.

  He drew a breath which was a good deal shakier than the Academy satorist would have approved of. (“If your nerves twitch, cadet-san, then you know yourself alive and they need not twitch. Correct?” To hell with that, except as a technique.) Slowly, he hauled himself in until his boots made magnetic contact and he stood, so to speak, upon his raft. Then he turned about for a look.

  “Nombre de Dios,” he murmured, a hollow noise in the helmet. Forgotten habit came back, with a moment’s recollection of his mother’s face. He crossed himself.

  Against blackness and a million wintry stars, a gas cloud expanded. It glowed in many soft hues, the center still bright, edges fading into vacuum. Shaped explosions did not behave like that, thought the calculator part of Diaz; this had been a standard fireball type. But the cloud was nonspherical. Hence a ship had been hit, a big ship, but whose?

  Most of him stood in wonder. A few years ago he’d spent a furlough at Antarctic Lodge. He and some girl had taken a snowcat out to watch the aurora, thinking it would make a romantic background. But when they saw the sky, they forgot about each other for a long time. There was only the aurora.

  The same awesome silence was here, as that incandescence which had been a ship and her crew swelled and vanished into space.

  The calculator in his head proceeded with its business. Of those American vessels near the Argonne when first contact was made with the enemy, only the Washington was sufficiently massive to go out in a blast of yonder size and shape. If that was the case Captain Martin Diaz of the United States Astromilitary Corps was a dead man. The other ships of the line were too distant, traveling on vectors too unlike his own, for their scout boats to come anywhere close. On the other hand, it might well have been a Unasian battlewagon. Diaz had small information on the dispositions of the enemy fleet. He’d had his brain full just directing the torp launchers under his immediate command. If that had indeed been a hostile dreadnaught that got clobbered, surely none but the Washington could have delivered the blow, and its boats would be near—

  There!

  For half a second Diaz was too stiffened by the sight to react. The boat ran black across waning clouds, accelerating on a streak of its own fire. The wings and sharp shape that were needed in atmosphere made him think of a marlin he had once hooked off Florida, blue lightning under the sun…Then a flare was in his hand, he squeezed the igniter and radiance blossomed.

  Just an attention-getting device, he thought, and laughed unevenly as he and Bernie Sternthal had done, acting out the standard irreverences of high school students toward the psych course. But Bernie had left his bones on Ganymede, three years ago, and in this hour Diaz’s throat was constricted and his nostrils full of his own stench. He skyhooked the flare and hunkered in its harsh illumination by his radio transmitter. Clumsy in their gauntlets, his fingers adjusted controls, set the revolving beams on SOS. If he had been noticed, and if it was physically possible to make the velocity changes required, a boat would come for him. The Corps looked after its own.

  Presently the flare guttered out. The pyre cloud faded to nothing. The raft deck was between Diaz and the shrunken sun. But the stars that crowded on every side gave ample soft light. He allowed his gullet, which felt like sandpaper, a suck from his one water flask. Otherwise he had several air bottles, an oxygen reclaim unit, and a ridiculously large box of Q rations. His raft was a section of inner plating, torn off when the Argonne encountered the ball storm. She was only a pursuit cruiser, unarmored against such weapons. At thirty miles per second, relative, the little steel spheres tossed in her path by some Unasian gun had not left much but junk and corpses. Diaz had found no other survivors. He’d lashed what he could salvage onto this raft, including a shaped torp charge that rocketed him clear of the ruins. This far spaceward he didn’t need screen fields against solar particle radiation. So he had had a small hope of rescue. Maybe bigger than small, now.

  Unless an enemy craft spotted him first. His scalp crawled with that thought. His right arm, where the thing he might use in the event of capture lay buried, began to itch. But no, he told himself, don’t be sillier than regulations require. That scoutboat was positively American. The probability of a hostile vessel being in detection range of his flare and radio—or able to change vectors fast enough—or giving a damn about him in any event—approached so close to zero as made no difference.

  “Wish I’d found our bottle in the wreckage,” he said aloud. He was talking to Carl Bailey, who’d helped him smuggle the Scotch aboard at Shepard Field when the fleet was alerted for departure. The steel balls had chewed Carl to pieces, some of which Diaz had seen. “It gripes me not to empty that bottle. On behalf of us both, I mean. Maybe,” his voice wandered on, “a million years hence, it’ll drift into another planetary system and owl-eyed critters will pick it up in boneless fingers, eh, Carl, and put it in a museum.” He realized what he was doing and snapped his mouth shut. But his mind continued. The trouble is, those critters won’t know about Carl Bailey, who collected antique jazz tapes, and played a rough game of poker, and had a D.S.M. and a gimpy leg from rescuing three boys whose patroller crashed on Venus, and went on the town with Martin Diaz one evening not so long ago when—What did happen that evening, anyhow?

  * * *

  There was a joint down in the Mexican section of San Diego which Diaz remembered was fun. So they caught a giro outside the Hotel Kennedy, where the spacemen were staying—they could afford swank, and felt they owed it to the Corps—and where they had bought their girls dinner. Diaz punched the cantina’s name. The autopilot searched its directory and swung the cab onto the Embarcadero-Balboa skyrail.

  Sharon sighed and snuggled into the curve of his arm. “How beautiful,” she said. “How nice of you to show me this.” He felt she meant a little more than polite banality. The view through the bubble really was great tonight. The city winked and blazed, a god’s hoard of jewels, from horizon to horizon. Only in one direction was there anything but light: westward, where the ocean lay aglow. A nearly full moon stood high in the sky. He pointed out a tiny glitter on its dark edge.

  “Vladimir Base.”

  “Ugh,” said Sharon. “Unasians.” She stiffened a trifle.

  “Oh, they’re decent fellows,” Bailey said from the rear seat.

  “How do you know?” asked his own date, Naomi, a serious-looking girl and quick on the uptake.

  “I’ve visited them a time or two,” he shrugged.