stomach was becoming hard to placate.
“Eunice, do your sea-going Coelenterates include anything
like the Portuguese man-of-war?”
The ecologist nodded.
“There’s your answer, Paul,” Saltonstall said. “The sea is
out. It’s got to be fresh water, where the competing creatures
are less formidable and there are more places to hide.”
“We can’t compete with a jellyfish?” la Ventura asked, swal-
lowing.
“No, Paul,” Chatvieux said. “Not with one that dangerous.
The pantropes make adaptations, not gods. They take human
germ-cellsin this case, our own, since our bank was wiped
out in the crashand modify them genetically toward those
of creatures who can live in any reasonable environment. The
result will be manlike, and intelligent. It usually shows the
donors’ personality patterns, too, since the modifications are
usually made mostly in the morphology, not so much in the
mind, of the resulting individual.
“But we can’t transmit memory. The adapted man is worse
than a child in the new environment. He has no history, no
techniques, no precedents, not even a language. In the usual
colonization project, like the Tellura affair, the seeding teams
more or less take him through elementary school before they
leave the planet to him, but we won’t survive long enough to
give such instruction. We’ll have to design our colonists with
plenty of built-in protections and locate them in the most fa-
vorable environment possible, so that at least some of them
will survive learning by experience alone.”
The pilot thought about it, but nothing occurred to him