“Why would we have limited ourselves to Earthlike planets in the first place?” Corbel said. “Not that I know much about the place, but the specs don’t make it sound like an optimum world.”
“To be sure,” Hoqqueah said, though as usual Corbel didn’t know which part of his own comment Hoqqueah was agreeing to. “There’s no survival value in pinning one’s race forever to one set of specs. It’s only sensible to go on evolving with the universe, so as to stay independent of such things as the aging of worlds, or the explosions of their stars. And look at the results! Man exists now in so many forms that there’s always a refuge somewhere for any threatened people. That’s a great achievementcompared to it, what price the old arguments about sovereignty of form?”
“What, indeed?” Corbel said, but inside his skull his other . self was saying: Ah-ha, he smells the hostility after all. Once an Adapted Man, always an Adapted Manand always fighting for equality with the basic human form. But it’s no good, you seal-snouted bureaucrat. You can argue for the isi
rest of your life, but your whiskers will always wiggle when you talk.
And obviously you’ll never stop talking.
“And as a military man yourself, you’d be the first to ap-preciate the military advantages, Captain,”. Hoqqueah added earnestly. “Using pantropy, man has seized thousands of worlds that would have been inacccessible to him otherwise.
It’s enormously increased our chances to become masters of the galaxy, to take most of it under occupation without steal-ing anyone else’s planet in the process. An occupation without dispossessionlet alone without bloodshed. Yet if some race other than man should develop imperial ambitions, and try to annex our planets, it will find itself enormously out-numbered.”