“That’s true,” Capt. Gorbel said, interested in spite of himself. “It’s probably just as well that we worked fast, way back there in the beginning. Before somebody else thought up the method, I mean. But, how come it was us? Seems to me that the first race to invent it should’ve been a race that already had itif you follow me.”
“Not quite. Captain. If you will give me an example1”
“Well, we scouted a system once where there was a race that occupied two different planets, not both at the same time, but back and forth,” Gorbel said. “They had a lifecycie that had three different forms. In the first form they’d winter over on the outermost of .the two worlds. Then they’d change to another form that could cross space, mother-naked, without ships, and spend the rest of the year on the inner planet in the third form. Then they’d change back into the second form and cross back to the colder planet.
“It’s a hard thing to describe. But the point is, this wasn’t anything they’d worked out; it was natural to them. They’d evolved that way.” He looked at Averdor again. “The navigation was tricky around there during the swarming season.”
Avedor failed to rise to the bait.
“I see; the point is well taken,” Hoqqueah said, nodding with grotesque thoughtfulness. “But let me point out to you, Captain, that being already able to do a thing doesn’t aid you in thinking of it as something that needs to be perfected. Oh, I’ve seen races like the one you describe, tooraces with polymorphism, sexual alteration of generation, metamorphosis of the insect life-history type, and so on. There’s a planet named Lithia, about forty light years from here, where the dominant race undergoes complete evolutionary recapitulation after birthnot before it, as men do. But why should any of them think of form-changing as something extraordinary, and to be striven for? It’s one of the commonplaces of their lives, after all.”