“I’m not interested in telescreen images either. I want to land on the planet, see its people with my own eyes, hear them talk, watch them at work and play. There’s a feel to a race you can only get by direct observation.” Goram’s bulldog face thrust aggressively forward. “Oh, I know your fancy theories don’t include that—you just watch from afar and write it all down in mathematical symbols nobody can read without twenty years of study. But I’m a practical man, I’ve dealt with enough barbarians to have an instinct for them.”

Superstition! thought Heym bitterly. Typical primitive mind reaction—magnifying his own ignorant guesses and impulses into an “instinct”: No doubt he also believes hair turns gray from fear and drowned men always float face down. Behold the “practical man”!

It was surprisingly hard to lie, after a lifetime’s training in the honesty of science and the monastic community of observers at the station. But he said calmly enough: “Well, that’s very interesting, Marshal Goram. We’ve often noticed curious talents—precognition, telepathy, telekinesis, and the rest, appearing sporadically among people who have some use for them, but we’ve never been able to pin them down. It’s as if they were phenomena inaccessible to the ordinary scientific method. I see your point.”

And I flatter myself that’s good flattery—not too obviously in agreement, but still hinting that he’s some kind of superman.

“Haven’t you ever landed at all?” asked Goram.

“Oh, yes, fairly often—usually invisible, of course, but now and then making an open and even spectacular appearance to test the effects of seemingly supernatural manifestations. However, we can generally see quite enough through the strategically planted recording televisors and other spy devices.”

“You think,” grunted Goram. “But a planet is mighty big, I tell you. How do you know what they’re cooking up in places your gadgets don’t see?”

Heym was unable to keep all the weariness and disgust out of his voice. “Because history is a unity,” he said. “The whole can be inferred from the part, since the part belongs to the whole. Why should the only unwarlike people in the Galaxy suddenly start building weapons?”

“Oh, we don’t fear their military power—yet,” replied Goram. “I should think you, as a psychologist, would know what sort of a danger Station Seventeen represents—a danger that can wreck civilization. They can become a disrupting factor—the worst in all history.”

“Progress is disruption.”

“Maybe. But the Empire is based on stasis. It’s sacrificed progress for—survival.”

“True—but here we may have a clue to controlled progress, safe advancement. Even stasis isn’t safe, as we well know. It’s a poor makeshift, intended to keep civilization alive while something else is worked out. Well—we’re working it out at Station Seventeen.”

Coram grunted again, but remained silent.

* * *

Valgor’s Star lay a good hundred parsecs from Sol, not far from the Empire’s border though sufficiently within the garrisoned marches to be protected from barbarian raids. The early researchers, looking for an uninhabited Earth-like planet, had found the obscure GO-type sun far off the regular space lanes; an ancient planetographic expedition had stopped briefly there, recording that the third world was practically terrestrial, but this whole galactic sector was so isolated and unprofitable that there had been no further visits, and the old report lay for centuries in the Imperial files before the Psychotechnic Foundation resurrected it. The remoteness and unknownness were assets in any such project, and the fact that there were no aborigines requiring troublesome and costly extermination and eradication of all traces had been decisive.