veloping some new biological and generic skills, or
Eighteen, where there are some language changes going
on which will eventually influence the whole pattern of
human communication.”
“Think of Five,” Maddalena countered. “Unless they’ve
licked the cerebral palsy problem, the survivors there are
back to grunting like apes.”
There was silence for a feW minutes. Unhappily, Lan-
genschmidt chewed his lower lip and stared at Mad-
dalena, wondering what next to say.
The problem was a recurrent one, and had been de-
bated for a century and a half. Its roots, though, lay
much further backto be precise, some seven hundred
and seventy years before, when the primary of a planet
called Zarathustra went nova. For six hundred and thirty
years thereafter, it was believed that only a small handful
of refugees had escapedto Baucis Alpha, on the
Solward side. Then, without warning, radio signals be-
gan to be received from the opposite direction; fruit of
generation upon generation of dedicated workers start-
ing from no better level than the salvaged scrap in a
single starship, climaxing in the conversion of an as-
teroid into a huge generating station fed by solar power
and oriented to form a bowl-like transmission antenna
for messages limping at light-speed back to civilisation.
They came from Lex’s Planet, otherwise known as
ZRP One: the first Zarathustra Refugee Planet to be lo-
cated and recontacted. Now, it was part of the galactic
union, and regarded as a civilised world.
From there, it had been learned that no fewer than
three thousand ships got away from the night side of
Zarathustia, and the far quadrant of its orbit, carrying
some two and a quarter million people. The Patrol, con-
stituted a couple of centuries before, was given the task
of tracking down the remaining survivors, if any.
Twenty-one worlds had now been found where fugi-
tives had landed. On some, they had not only survived,
but built up during their period of isolation quite inter-
esting and respectable cultures. Few of them boasted
technology to more than rudimeritary level, but some
had other achievementssuch as those Langenschmidt
had cited to Maddalenawhich promised new avenues
for human cultural or scientific development.
After much argument and heart-searching, the non-in-
terference rule was formulated and applied. Unless the
ZRP’s succeeded in re-contacting civilisation themselves,
they were to be left to evolve along the paths they had
themselves created. There were many reasons for this.
On some planets there had been evolutionary changes
due to environment: on all, there had been cultural dis-
ruption, and centuries of “natural” breeding, four to five
generations per century, had magnified the discontinuity.
Perhaps most significant of all, galactic civilisation was
slowing down its former progress, as though the distance
between the stars imposed a psychological as well as
physical barrier on cross-fertilisation of cultures. Seem-
ingly, one felt there was little point in research or inven-
tiveness when for all one could determine on some other
of the 260 human planets the same work had already
been carried out.
Left to themselves, it was suggested, the ZRP’s might
rediscover the basic human drives of curiosity and ulti-
mately re-infect the rest of the race.
Elsewhere, there had been a cultural smoothing
process. Worlds like Earth were looked np to, but only
the superficialities of fashion spread, not the real changes
which underlay them, and consequently things were
much the same everywhere as they had been when the
Patrol was set up. Backward worlds struggled to catch
~up to the average standard, and some did so, but the
worlds above average were placid and lacked any initia-
tive. –
Maddalena stirred in her chair and raised her eyes to
her old friend’s rejuvenated face. “Who’s spearheading
the campaign this time? ZRP One as usual, presumably.”
Langenschmidt pounced. “No, and that’s the most in-
teresting part of it. It used to be fashionable for One to
shout about the shocking way their kinfolk were being
left to rot instead of rescued and brought home. But this
conservative tradition has died out lately, and I think this
is because it’s taken until now for One to mesh com-
pletely with galactic civilisation and discover just how
great a change was wrought in their own culture by