“Nevertheless, as soon as they have a whole system to move about in they’ll be dangerous. It’ll no longer be possible to keep track of everything of importance they may do. They’ll be stimulated by this success to perfect an interstellar drive—and even you will agree that that cannot be permitted. That engine may be developed without our knowledge, on some remote world of this system—and once even a few of them are running loose between the stars we’ll have no further control—and the results may well be catastrophic! Imagine a pure-bred line of geniuses allied with the barbarians!”

“I tell you, they’re not warlike. They haven’t had a single war in all their history.”

“Well, then they’ll try to innovate within the Empire, which would be just as bad if not worse. Certainly they won’t be satisfied with the status quo—yet that status quo means survival to us.”

“They can be co-ordinated. Good Spirit, we have plenty of geniuses in the Galaxy today! We couldn’t do without them. They are the very ones who run the Empire. Advancement is on a strict merit basis simply because we must have the best brains of mankind for the gigantic job of maintaining the social order.”

“Sure—everyone’s strictly brought up to accept the Empire, to identify its survival with its own. We have plenty of tame geniuses. But these are wild—a planetful of undomesticated intellects! If they can’t be tamed, they must be killed.”

“They can be,” insisted Heym. “Rather, they can become the leaders to get us out of status quo safely—if not directly, then indirectly through knowledge gained by observing them. Already administrative techniques have been improved, within the last five hundred or so years, because by watching unhampered intellect at work we have been able to derive more accurate psychomathematical expressions for the action of logic as a factor in society, A group in the Psychotechnic Foundation is working out a new theory of cerebration which may become the basis of a system of mind training doubling the efficiency of logical processes—just as semantic training has already increased mind power by applying it more effectively. But in order to develop and test that theory, as well as every other psychological research project, we must have empirical data such as the observation stations, above all Seventeen, furnish us. Without such new basic information, science comes to a standstill.”

“I’ve heard it all before,” said Goram wearily. “Now I want to go down there and look.”

“Very well. I’ll come along, of course. Do you wish to take anyone else?”

“Do I need to?”

“No, it’s perfectly safe.”

“Then I won’t. Meet me at Lifeboat Forty in half an hour.” Goram tramped off to give such orders as might be needed.

Heym stood for a while, chain smoking and looking out the visiplate at the silently rolling planet. Like an ominous moon, the warship swung in an orbit just beyond the atmosphere. For all its titanic mass, it was insignificant against the bulk of a world. Yet in guns and bombs and death-mists, gravitational beams and long-range disintegrators and mass-conversion torpedoes, in coagulative radiations and colloid-resonant generators, in the thousand hells man had made through all his tormented existence, lay the power to rip life off that surface and blanket the shuddering continents in smoke and flame and leave the blackened planet one great tomb under the indifferent stars.