“I see what you mean,” Corbel said. “Well, I’ll think about it.”
But by the next ship’s day, when Hoqqueah returned to the greenhouse, Gorbel still had not made up his mind. The very fact that his own feelings were on the side of Averdor and the crew made him suspicious of Averdor’s “easy” solu-tion. The plan was tempting enough to blind a tempted man 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 obviously 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.