* * *

Baldinger set out glasses and a bottle of Irish. “Okay,” he said. “Those pills have worn off by now, but we need an equivalent.”

“Hoo, yes!” Haraszthy grabbed the bottle.

“I wonder what their wine will be like, when they invent that?” Lejeune mused.

“Be still!” Vaughan said. “They aren’t going to.”

We stared at him. He sat shivering with tension, under the cold fluoroluminance in that bleak little cabin.

“What the devil do you mean?” Haraszthy demanded at last. “If they can make wine half as well as they do everything else, it’ll go for ten credits a liter on Earth.”

“Don’t you understand?” Vaughan cried. “We can’t deal with them. We have to get off this planet and—Oh, God, why did we have to find the damned thing?” He groped for a glass.

“Well,” I sighed, “we always knew, those of us who bothered to think about the question, that someday we were bound to meet a race like this. Man…what is man that thou art mindful of him?”

“This is probably an older star than Sol,” Baldinger nodded. “Less massive, so it stays longer on the main sequence.”

“There needn’t be much difference in planetary age,” I said. “A million years, half a million, whatever the figure is, hell, that doesn’t mean a thing in astronomy or geology. In the development of an intelligent race, though—”

“But they’re savages!” Haraszthy protested.

“Most of the races we’ve found are,” I reminded him. “Man was too, for most of his existence. Civilization is a freak. It doesn’t come natural. Started on Earth, I’m told, because the Middle East dried out as the glaciers receded and something had to be done for a living when the game got scarce. And scientific, machine civilization, that’s a still more unusual accident. Why should the Jorillians have gone beyond an Upper Paleolithic technology? They never needed to.”

“Why do they have the brains they do, if they’re in the stone age?” Haraszthy argued.

“Why did we, in our own stone age?” I countered. “It wasn’t necessary for survival. Java man, Peking man, and the low-browed rest, they’d been doing all right. But evidently evolution, intraspecies competition, sexual selection…whatever increases intelligence in the first place continues to force it upward, if some new factor like machinery doesn’t interfere. A bright Jorillian has more prestige, rises higher in life, gets more mates and children, and so it goes. But this is an easy environment, at least in the present geological epoch. The natives don’t even seem to have wars, which would stimulate technology. Thus far they’ve had little occasion to use those tremendous minds for anything but art, philosophy, and social experimentation.”

“What is their average IQ?” Lejeune whispered.

“Meaningless,” Vaughan said dully. “Beyond 180 or so, the scale breaks down. How can you measure an intelligence so much greater than your own?”

There was a stillness. I heard the forest sough in the night around us.

“Yes,” Baldinger ruminated, “I always realized that our betters must exist. Didn’t expect we’d run into them in my own lifetime, however. Not in this microscopic sliver of the galaxy that we’ve explored. And…well, I always imagined the Elders having machines, science, space travel.”