“Besides, they had had form trouble in their society from their earliest days. For centuries they were absurdly touchy over minute differences in coloring and shape, and even in thinidng. They had regime after regime that tried to impose its own concept of the standard citizen on everybody, and en-slaved those who didn’t fit the specs.”
Abruptly, Hoqqueah’s ‘chatter began to make Gorbel uncomfortable. It was becoming easier and easier to sympathize with Averdor’s determination to ignore the Adapted Man’s existence entirely.
“It was only after they’d painfully taught themselves that such differences really don’t matter that they could go on to pantropy,” Hoqqueah said. “It was the logical conclusion. Of course, a certain continuity of form had to be maintained, and has been maintained to this day. You cannot totally change the form without totally changing the thought processes. If you give a man the form of a cockroach, as one ancient writer foresaw, he will wind up thinking hie a cockroach, not like a human being. We recognized that. On worlds where only extreme modifications of the human form would make it suitablefor instance, a planet of the gas giant type no seeding is attempted. The Council maintains that such worlds are the potential property of other races than the human, races whose psychotypes would not have to undergo radical change in order to survive there.”
Dimly, Capt. Gorbel saw where Hoqqueah was leading him, and he did not like what he saw. The seal-man, in his own maddeningly indirect way, was arguing his right to be considered an equal in fact as well as in law. He was arguing it, however, in a universe of discourse totally unfamiliar to Capt.