An ocean rolled beneath the boat, gray and green, shaking its white mane out on the restless horizon. “Swing northeast,” said Heym. “The planet’s greatest city lies that way, on a large island.”

“Good. A city’s a good place to observe a people. Can we go around incognito?”

“Naturally. I know the language well enough to pass for a traveler from some other part of the world, There’s a lot of intercourse between continents. The cities are quite cosmopolitan.”

“Well—go on. You’ve still not explained why the station and all this rigmarole of secrecy.”

“I was laying the background,” said Heym, unable to keep all the tiredness out of his voice. Can I really talk this moron over? Can anyone? Reason is wasted on an ape. “It’s really very simple. The crude psychotechnology available made it possible for the early emperors to conquer most of the human-inhabited Galaxy, hold it together, and reach an uneasy truce with the Taranian and Comi Empires. Our military might can hold off the barbarians and the Magellanic raiders, and have sufficient power left over to police the three hundred trillion citizens.

“Yet our science is primitive. On that vast scale, it can only deal with the simplest possible situations. It’s all we can do to keep the Empire stable. If it should develop on the colossal scale of which it is capable and with all the unpredictable erraticism of the free human mind, It would simply run away from us. We have trouble enough keeping industry and commerce flowing smoothly when we know exactly how it should work. If we permitted free invention and progress, there’d be an industrial revolution every year—there is never a large proportion of discoverers, but with the present population the number would be immense. Our carefully evolved techniques of control would become obsolete, there’d be economic anarchy, conflict, suffering, individuals rising to power outside the present social framework and threatening the co-ordinating authority—with planet-smashing power to back both sides and all our enemies on the watch for a moment’s instability.

“That’s only one example. It applies to any field. Science, philosophy—we can control known religions, channel the impulses to safe directions—but a new religion, rousing discontent, containing unknown elements—a billion fanatics going to war—No! We have to keep status quo, which we understand, at the cost of an uncontrollable advance into the unknown.

“The Empire really exists only to simplify the psychotechnic problem of co-ordination. Enforcement of population stability—good, we don’t have to worry about controlling trillions of new births, there’s no land hunger. Stable industry, ossified physical science, state religion, totalitarian control of the entire life span—good, we know exactly what we’re dealing with and our decisions will be obeyed—imagine the situation if three hundred trillion people were free to do exactly as they pleased in the Galaxy! Subjugation of nonhuman aborigines, or outright extermination—good, we only have to deal with human-type minds and needs, which are complex enough, not with a million or a trillion psychologies and past histories as wildly different as the planets of origin. Heym shrugged. “Why go on? You know as well as I do that the Empire is only an answer to a problem of survival—not a good answer, but the best our limited knowledge can make.”