to flaws that might otherwise be obvious.
The Adapted Man settled himself comfortably and looked
out through the transparent metal. “Ah,” he said. “Our tar-
get is sensibly bigger now, eh. Captain? Think of it: in just a
few days now, we will bein ‘the historical sensehome
again.”
And now it was riddles! “What do you mean?” Corbel
said.
“I’m sorry; I thought you knew. Earth is the home planet of
the human race. Captain. There is where the basic form
evolved.”
Gorbel considered this unexpected bit of information cau-
tiously. Even assuming that it was trueand it probably was,
that would be the kind of thing Hoqqueah would know about
a planet to which he was assignedit didn’t seem to make
any special difference in the situation. But Hoqqueah had ob-
viously brought it out for a reason. Well, he’d be trottingout
the reason, too, soon enough; nobody would ever accuse the
Altarian of being taciturn.
Nevertheless, he considered turning on the screen for a
close .look at the planet. Up to now he had felt not the slight-
est interest in it.
“Yes, there’s where it all began,” Hoqqueah said. “Of course
at first it never occurred to those people that they might pro-
duce pre-adapted children. They went to all kinds of extremes
to adapt their environment instead, or to carry it along with
them. But they finally realized that with the planets, that
won’t work. You can’t spend your life in a spacesuit, or under
a dome, either.
“Besides, they had had form trouble in their society from
their earliest days. For centuries they were absurdly touchy