"The fault doesn't lie in change," Hazleton said quietly, "but in that you people have failed to change. Traveling away from Earth for us is very like traveling in time: different distances from the home planet have different year-dates. Stars remote from Earth, like yours, are historical backwaters. And the situation becomes complicated when the historical periods interpenetrate, as your Hamil-tonian era and the Hruntan Empire have interpenetrated. The two cultures freeze each other the moment they come in conflict, and when history catches up with them—well, naturally it's a shock."

"On a more practical subject," Amalfi said, "we'd prefer to pick our own landing area. If we can send technicians to your planet in advance, they'll find a lie for us."

"A lie?"

"A mining site. That's to be permitted, I presume?"

"I don't know," the girl said uncertainly. "We're very short on metals, steel especially. We have to salvage all our scrap———"

"We use almost no iron or steel," Amalfi assured her. "We reclaim what we need, as you do—steel's nearly indestructible, after all. What we're after is germanium and some other rare-earth metals for instruments. You ought

to have plenty of those to spare." Amalfi saw no point in adding that germanium was the base of the present universal coinage. What he had said was true as far as it went, and in dealing with these backward planets, there were always five or six facts best suppressed until after the city had left.

"May I use your phone?"

Amalfi moved away from the desk, then had to come back again as the girl dabbed helplessly at the 'visor controls. In a moment she was outlining the conversation to the Utopian captain. Amalfi wondered if the Hruntans understood English; not that he was worried about the present interchange being overheard—the giant planet would block that most effectively, since the Utopians used ordinary radio rather than ultraphones or Dirac communicators—but it was of the utmost importance, if Hazleton's scheme was to be made workable, that the Hruntans should have heard and understood the warning the Earth police had issued to the city. It was a point that would have to be checked as unobtrusively as possible.