“They will,” I said.

“If we go away—” Lejeune began.

“Too late,” I said. “We’ve already given them this shiny new toy, science. If we abandon them, they’ll come looking for us in a couple of hundred years. At most.”

Haraszthy’s fist crashed on the table. “Why leave?” he roared. “What the hell are you scared of? I doubt the population of this whole planet is ten million. There are fifteen billion humans in the Solar System and the colonies! So a Jorillian can outthink me. So what? Plenty of guys can do that already, and it don’t bother me as long as we can do business.”

Baldinger shook his head. His face might have been cast in iron. “Matters aren’t that simple. The question is what race is going to dominate this arm of the galaxy.”

“Is it so horrible if the Jorillians do?” Lejeune asked softly.

“Perhaps not. They seem pretty decent. But—” Baldinger straightened in his chair. ‘‘I’m not going to be anybody’s domestic animal. I want my planet to decide her own destiny.”

That was the unalterable fact. We sat weighing it for a long and wordless time.

The hypothetical superbeings had always seemed comfortably far off. We hadn’t encountered them, or they us. Therefore they couldn’t live anywhere near. Therefore they probably never would interfere in the affairs of this remote galactic fringe where we dwell. But a planet only months distant from Earth; a species whose average member was a genius and whose geniuses were not understandable by us: bursting from their world, swarming through space, vigorous, eager, jumping in a decade to accomplishments that would take us a century—if we ever succeeded—how could they help but destroy our painfully built civilization? We’d scrap it ourselves, as the primitives of our old days had scrapped their own rich cultures in the overwhelming face of Western society. Our sons would laugh at our shoddy triumphs, go forth to join the high Jorillian adventure, and come back spirit-broken by failure, to build some feeble imitation of an alien way of life and fester in their hopelessness. And so would every other thinking species, unless the Jorillians were merciful enough to leave them alone.

Which the Jorillians probably would be. But who wants that kind of mercy?

I looked upon horror. Only Vaughan had the courage to voice the thing:

“There are planets under technological blockade, you know. Cultures too dangerous to allow modern weapons, let alone spaceships. Joril can be interdicted.”

“They’ll invent the stuff for themselves, now they’ve gotten the idea,” Baldinger said.

Vaughan’s mouth twitched downward. “Not if the only two regions that have seen us are destroyed.”

“Good God!” Haraszthy leaped to his feet.

“Sit down!” Baldinger rapped.

Haraszthy spoke an obscenity. His face was ablaze. The rest of us sat in a chill sweat.

“You’ve called me unscrupulous,” the Trader snarled. “Take that suggestion back to the hell it came from, Vaughan, or I’ll kick out your brains.”

I thought of nuclear fire vomiting skyward, and a wisp of gas that had been Mierna, and said, “No.”