consider that a fair sample?”
‘No. I just mention it as a little-indication, shall we say? I repeat, this one denies that five ships in ten years could have been lost because of unknown diseases, treacherous natives, trepidation vortices, or the like. Their captains weren’t that stupid.
“I’ve talked with Nomads who’ve been there, and also with outsiders-explorers, traders, scouts looking for colony sites, anyone. Or any thing, since I also got hold of some otherlings”-he meant nonhuman spacemen-“who bad passed through or stopped by. I even talked my way into the Corcly office on Nerthus, and got a look at their Galactic
Survey records.
“Space is too big. Even this little splinter of the Galaxy that man has traversed is larger than we can think-and we’ve spent our lives in the void. It’s thirty thousand lightyears to Galactic center. There are some hundred billion suns in the Galaxyl Man will never be able to think concretely in such terms. It just can’t be done.
“So a lot of information lies around in the shape of isolated facts, and nobody coordinates it and sees what the facts mean. Even the Service can’t do it-they have troubles enough running the U@on without worrying about the frontiers and the beyond-frontiers. When I started investigating, I found I was the first being who’d even thought of this.”
“And what,” asked Thorkild quietly, “have you found out?”
“Not too much, but it’s damned indicative. There have been otherling ships which vanished in that region, too. But Coordination and Survey never bad any trouble. If something had happened to one of their vessels, they’d have spyboats out there so fast they’d meet themselves coming back. You see what it means? Somebody knows a lot about our civilization-enougb to know who it’s safe to molest.
“Then there are any number of E-planets-which is what you’d expect-and not too many of them seem to have natives-which is what you wouldn’t expect. They-well, there are at least a dozen whicl-i remind you of Rendezvous, beautiful green worlds with not a building or a road in sight.”
“Maybe they’re shy, like the ones on this planet,” said Vagabond MacTeague. “We’d been here for fifty years before we knew there were natives. And a similar case bappened on Nerthus, you remember.”
“The Nerthusians have an unusual sort of culture,” said Romany Ortega thoughtfully. “No, most likely those worlds you speak of are really uninhabited.”
“All right,” said Joachim. “There’s more to tell. In a few cases, there were E-planets with what we’d considered a normal culture: houses, farming, and so on. Contact was made rather easily in all those instances, and in general the natives seemed not unfamiliar with the sight of spaceships. But when I checked the reports against each other, I found that none of those planets bad been visited before by anyone from our civilization.”
“Now bold on,” began Thorkild. “You aren’t suggesting-”
“There’s more yet.” Joachim interrupted. “Unfortunately, few scientifically minded expeditions have been in thethe X region, so I couldn’t get an accurate description of
flora and fauna. However, a couple of those I talked to had been struck by what seemed remarkably similar plants and trees on some of these supposedly uninhabited E-planets. Galactic Survey had some helpful information there. They had noted more than similarity-tbey had found identity of a good dozen plant species on six uninhabited worlds. Explain that awayl”
“How did Survey explain it?” asked Fiddlefoot Ko-arna.
“They didn’t. Too much else to do. Their robotfile bad integrated a reasonable probability that the similarity was due to transplantation, maybe accidental, by a Tiunran expedition.”
“Tiunra? I don’t think I’ve beard-”
“Probably you wouldn’t have. They’re the natives of an M-planet on the other side of Vega. Strange cultiire-tlicy bad space travel a good five hundred years before man left Sol, but they never were interested in colonization. Even today, I understand they don’t hive much to do with the
Union. They’re just uninterested.
“Anyway, I took the trouble to write to Tiuiira. Sent the letter off on Nerthus a good two years ,igo, I asked whoever was in charge of their survey records about the X region, What bad they found out? What had been done by