Goram set the boat down in a vacant field outside the community’s limits. “What now?” he asked

“Well, I suppose you’ll want to spend a time just walking around the place.” Heym fumbled in a bag. “I brought the proper equipment, clothes and money of the local type. Planetary type, that is—since a universal coinage was established at the same time as a common language was adopted for international use and nobody cares what sort of dress you wear.” He unfolded the brief summer garments, shorts and sandals and tunic of bleached and woven plant fiber. Funny thing,” he mused, “how man has always made a virtue of necessity. The lands threatened with foreign invasion came to glorify militarism and war. The people who had to work hard considered idleness disgraceful. Dwellers in a northern climate, who had to wear clothes, made nudity immoral. But our colonists here are free of that need for compensation and self-justification You can work, think, marry, eat, dress, whatever you want to do, just as you please, and if you aren’t stepping on someone else’s toes too hard nobody cares. Which indicates that intolerance is characteristic of stupidity, while the true intellectual is naturally inclined to live and let live.”

Goram struggled awkwardly and distastefully into the archaic garments. “How about weapons?” he asked.

“No need to carry them. No one does, except in places where wild animals might be dangerous. In fact, arms are about the only thing in which the colonists’ inventiveness has lagged. They never got past the bow and arrow. Aside from a few man-to-man duels in the early stages of their history, and now abandoned, they’ve never fought each other.”

“Impossible! Man is a fighting animal.”

Heym tried to find a reply which was not to obviously a slap at the whole military profession. “There’s been war on all our other colonies,” he said slowly, “and, of course, through all human history—yet there’s never been any real, logical reason for it. In fact, at one stage of prehistoric man, the late Neolithic, war seems to have been unknown—at least, no weapons were found buried with the men of that time. And your whole professional aim today is to maintain peace within the Empire, isn’t it?

“It takes only one to make a quarrel unless the other lacks all spirit to resist—and a people like these are obviously spirited, in fifteen hundred years they’ve explored their whole planet. But suppose neither side wants to fight. Whenever two tribes met, in the history of Station Seventeen, they were all too intelligent to suffer from xenophobia or other non-logical motivations to murder, and certainly they had no logical reason to fight. So they didn’t. It was as simple as that.”

Goram snorted, whether in disbelief or contempt Heym didn’t know. “Let’s go,” he said.

* * *

They stepped out of the boat and its invisibility screen into the field. Tall breeze-rippled grass tickled their bare legs, and the wind in their faces had the leashless wild exuberance and the heady scent of green growing life brought over the many kilometers of field and forest across which it had rushed—incredible, that pulsing warm vitality after the tanked sterility of the ship, of the Empire. And up in the blue cloud-fleeced sky a bird was singing, rising higher and ever higher toward the sun, drunk with wind and light.