And on those planets—
A thrill of memory shook Wan-To. He had not remembered the strange thing Matter Copy Number Five had told him, but there was the datum, long neglected, now recalled at last. Yes. It was so. The planets were known to possess that strange and unhealthy phenomenon, living matter.
Some parts of them were inhabited.
Wan-To stopped what he was doing for a moment to think that over. Could that forgotten fact be in any way important?
Then common sense took over. Of course not, he chided himself. How could it? They were so tiny and helpless. Why, it was even possible that they might be quite amusing—even a kind of company for him, more or less as Kind and Sweet had been long, long ago. In any case, they could not possibly be a threat. With a healthy star behind him, he could easily enough annihilate them, if that proved necessary—as he had with creatures like them, so many times before.
It had never occurred to Wan-To to think about what those silly, short-lived little creatures might become . . . in some tens of thousands of years.