“The question is not meaningless,” replied Gor Haml. “We are about fifteen hundred years ahead of you—in actual time. Our recorded and archeological history is longer than yours by that many years. Indeed, that is the only significant difference between our races.”

“That’s quite encouraging,” smiled the Secretary of State. “I was beginning to fear you were the sort of supermen the fiction writers love—completely alien to us. But if you help us get started, we should be able to catch up with you in a generation or two.”

“That…yes, that is why I have been so thankful,” exclaimed Brackney. “Here on Earth we die of disease and war, we impoverish ourselves and go in fear and ignorance, we are bound to this one little planet—worse yet, to our own archaic superstitions and hates. Taithan science means things like spaceships and limitless energy sources and disease-free men, yes, and that’s what all the world has been so jubilant about. But to me, it is the enlightenment and the freedom from our old heritage of cave and beast which is the great gift—” He stopped, a little embarrassed at his own loquacity. He heard his own blood beating in his arteries, and his face was hot.

Gor Haml smiled. It was a very weary smile, with no humor in it, and his lined gaunt visage was not brightened by it. He said quietly:

“The histories of Earth and Taitha run as parallel as the histories of nearly all human races known to us. The only important difference is that ours is some fifteen hundred years older—but that difference is enormous. In the Galaxy so far, we have found human races in every stage from pure savagery to our own level, but in nearly every case—and your own among them—the only variation seems to be when they got started. Once under way, they follow the same patterns.”

“But—hold on!” exploded Brackney. “You don’t mean to say that on every planet there was an ancient Egypt and Rome, or a United States—?”

“Oh, no.” Gor Haml’s smile twitched with the faintest hint of amusement. “Indeed, the superficial differences—language, dress, religion, laws and customs, almost everything which an untrained observer would notice—are usually radical. I am, however, speaking in a deeper sense. There is a parallelism in mental and, well, spiritual evolution which transcends outward appearances.”

At their evident puzzlement, he went on: “I suppose some of you, at least, are familiar with such philosophers of history as Spengler and Toynbee. They have the beginnings of the truth, in their analysis of history into distinct cultures. And be it noted, those cultures follow a cycle of genesis in barbaric folk-wanderings, growth and expression of innate tendencies in the people, breakdown, time of troubles, stiffening into a ‘universal state’ statism, and ultimate extinction. The cycle has a time scale which varies by no more than ten or twenty years from the norm for each distinct stage.

“There is no reason to invoke a mysterious ‘Destiny’ to explain this fact. The casual law is sufficient. Under similar conditions, human beings react similarly. For instance, the nature myths of primitive peoples who never heard of each other are so alike that your own anthropologists have been able to classify them according to type, and to enunciate the unspoken beliefs underlying magic rites everywhere. In like manner, what is more natural than that outlying barbarians should invade a decadent empire and, coming under its influence, generate a new civilization—or that the miseries of a time of troubles should be forcibly ended by the imposition of a universal state? I am, of course, much oversimplifying, but I believe you can see in a rough way why Earth-type planets must evolve human races and why these races must have similar cycles of history.”