“That’s as may be,” muttered Goram, “but in that case a planet full of geniuses becomes doubly dangerous.”

Heym went over to the wall of the officers’ lounge and touched a button. The telescreen sprang to life with a simulacrum of the outside view. An uncounted host of stars blazed against the infinite blackness, a swarming magnificent arrogance of unwinking hard jewels strewn across the impassive face of eternity. The Milky Way foamed around the sky, the misty nebulae and star clusters wheeled their remote godlike way around heaven, and the other galaxies flashed mysterious signals across the light-years and the centuries. As ever, the psychologist felt dwarfed and awed and numbed by the stupendous impact.

“It was a great dream,” he whispered. “There never was a higher dream than man’s conquest of the universe—and yet like so many visions it overleaped itself and shattered to bits on the rocks of reality—in this case, simple arithmetic defeated us. How to reconcile and coordinate a hundred thousand stars except by absolutism, by deliberate statism—by chaining ourselves to our own achievements? What other answer is there?”

He turned around to Goram. The soldier sat unmoving, face stone-hard, like a primitive idol. “We’re looking for a new way,” said Heym. “We think we’re finding it, at Station Seventeen. It’s the first hope in four thousand years.”

* * *

The planet might almost have been Earth, a great blue spheroid swinging majestically against the incredible spatial sky with a softly shining moon for companion. Auroras wavered over the ice-capped poles, and cloud masses blurred the greenish-brown continents. They were storms, those clouds, snow and rain and wind blowing out of a living heaven over broad fair fields and haughty mountains, and looking down from the sterile steel environment of the ship, remembering the world city sprawling over Earth and the cold hard mechanized pattern of all Imperial life, Heym felt a brief wistfulness. All at once, he envied his experimental animals, down there on the green young planet. Even if they were to be destroyed, they had been more fortunate than their masters.

But they wouldn’t be destroyed. They mustn’t be.

“Where is your observation post?” asked Goram.

“On an asteroid well away from here and rendered invisible.”

“Why not on the satellite? It’d be a lot closer.”

“Yes, but distance doesn’t mean anything to a transvisor. Also, if—when—the colonists learn the means of interplanetary travel, we’d have had to move off the Moon, while we can remain hidden indefinitely on the invisible planetoid.”

“I’d say ‘if’ rather than ‘when’,” amended Goram grimly. “It was your report that the inhabitants were experimenting with rockets that alarmed the rulers enough to order me here to see if it weren’t best simply to sterilize the planet.”

“I’ve told you before, there’s no need for alarm,” protested Heym. “What if the people do have a few rocketships? They have no reason to do more than visit the other worlds of this system, which aren’t habitable—certainly no reason to colonize, with their own planet still practically uninhabited. The present population is estimated at only some eight hundred million.”