«Well, I suppose you’ll want to spend a time just walking around the place.» Heym fumbled in a bag. «I brought the proper equipment, clothes and money of the local type. Planetary type, that is—since a universal coinage was established at the same time as a common language was adopted for international use and nobody cares what sort of dress you wear.» He unfolded the brief summer garments, shorts and sandals and tunic of bleached and woven plant fiber. «Funny thing,» he mused, «how man has always made a virtue of necessity. The lands threatened with foreign invasion came to glorify militarism and war. The people who had to work hard considered idleness disgraceful. Dwellers in a northern climate, who had to wear clothes, made nudity immoral. But our colonists here are free of that need for compensation and self-justification. You can work, think, marry, eat, dress, whatever you want to do, just as you please, and if you aren’t stepping on someone else’s toes too hard nobody cares. Which indicates that intolerance is characteristic of stupidity, while the true intellectual is naturally inclined to live and let live.»
Goram struggled awkwardly and distastefully into the archaic garments. «How about weapons?» he asked.
«No need to carry them. No one does, except in places where wild animals might be dangerous. In fact, arms are about the only thing in which the colonists’ inventiveness has lagged. They never got past the bow and arrow. Aside from a few man-to-man duels in the early stages of their history, and now abandoned, they’ve never fought each other.»
«Impossible! Man is a fighting animal.»
Heym tried to find a reply which was not too obviously a slap at the whole military profession. «There’s been war on all our other colonies,» he said slowly, «and, of course, through all human history—yet there’s never been any real, logical reason for it. In fact, at one stage of prehistoric man, the late Neolithic, war seems to have been unknown—at least, no weapons were found buried with the men of that time. And your whole professional aim today is to maintain peace within the Empire, isn’t it?
«It takes only one to make a quarrel unless the other lacks all spirit to resist—and a people like these are obviously spirited, in fifteen hundred years they’ve explored their whole planet. But suppose neither side wants to fight. Whenever two tribes met, in the history of Station Seventeen, they were all too intelligent to suffer from xenophobia or other non-logical motivations to murder, and certainly they had no logical reason to fight. So they didn’t. It was as simple as that.»
Goram snorted, whether in disbelief or contempt Heym didn’t know. «Let’s go,» he said.
They stepped out of the boat and its invisibility screen into the field. Tall breeze-rippled grass tickled their bare legs, and the wind in their faces had the leashless wild exuberance and the heady scent of green growing life brought over the many kilometers of field and forest across which it had rushed—incredible, that pulsing warm vitality after the tanked sterility of the ship, of the Empire. And up in the blue cloud-fleeced sky a bird was singing, rising higher and ever higher toward the sun, drunk with wind and light.
The two men walked across the field to a road that led cityward. It was a narrow rutted brown track in the earth, and Goram snorted again. They walked along it. On a hill to the right stood a farm, a solid, substantial, contented-looking cluster of low tile-roofed stone buildings amid the open fields, and ahead on the horizon was the straggling misty line of the city. Otherwise they were alone.
«Are all your colonies this wild?» asked Goram.
«Just about,» said Heym, «though the environments are often radically different—everything from a planet that’s barely habitable desert to one that’s all jungle and swamp. That way, we can isolate the effects of environment. We even have one world equipped with complex robot-run cities, to see how untutored humans will react. There are three control stations, Earth-like planets where ordinary human types were left, and from them we’re getting valuable information on the path which terrestrial history actually took, we can test basic anthropological hypotheses and so on. Then there are a number of planets where different human types are planted—different races, different intelligence levels, and so on, to isolate the effects of heredity and see if there is any correlation of civilization with, say, physiology. But only here on Seventeen, populated exclusively by geniuses, has progress been rapid. All the other colonies are still in the stone ages or even lower, though there have been some unique responses made to severe environmental stimuli.»
«And you mean you just dumped your subjects down on all these worlds?»
«Crudely put, yes. For instance, before colonizing Seventeen we—that is, the Foundation—spent several generations breeding a pure genius strain of man. On Imperial orders, the Galaxy’s best brains were bred, and genetic control and selection were applied, until a stock had been developed whose members had only genius in the intellectual part of their heredity. Barring mutation or accident, both negligible, the people here and their children can only be geniuses. Then the few thousand adult end-products, who had naturally not been told what was in store for them, were seized and put under the action of memory erasers which left them able to walk and eat and little else. Then a couple of hundred were planted in each climatic region of this planet, near strategically placed invisible spy devices, and the observers sat back on their asteroid to see what would happen. That was fifteen hundred-odd years ago, but even in the forty or so years I’ve been in charge the change here has been very noticeable. In fact, on choosing the proper psycho-mathematical quantities to represent the various types of progress and plotting them against time, almost perfect exponential curves were obtained.»
«Sure. All progress, scientific progress anyway, is exponential.»
«Oh, no—quite the contrary. There are only a few sudden, brilliant, and—brief—periods of expansion in human history; long dreary dark ages intervene, and even the times of expansion are irregular. Nor has there ever been any real social progress made today as in the stone ages, law is based on force, though most of our force is the subtler psychotechnic kind—and even it is not essentially different from the taboo or priestcraft holding earlier cultures in check. I tell you, only on Seventeen has scientific progress been continuous, and only on Seventeen has there been any real social progress at all.»
Goram scowled. «So on that exponential advance, you can expect them to work out interplanetary travel in a matter of years,» he said. «They’ll know the principles of the star drive in a few more generations, and invent a faster-than-light engine almost at once. No—they aren’t safe!»
It was strange to walk through the narrow twisting streets and among the high archaic facades of a city which belonged to the almost forgotten past. To Goram, who must have visited uncivilized planets often, it could not be as queer as to Heym, and, also, the military mind would be too unimaginative to appreciate the situation. But even though Heym had spent the better part of his life watching this culture, it never failed to waken in him a dim feeling of dreamlike unreality.
Mere picturesqueness counted for a little, though the place was colorful enough. Along those cobbled ways went the traffic of a world. There were fantastic-looking beasts, variations of the horned ungulate genus which the colonists had early tamed to ride and load with their burdens, and still more exotic pets; and steering cautiously between them came trucks and passenger vehicles which for all their crudeness of material and principle had a cleanness of design, all the taut inherent beauty of the machine, that only Imperial mechanisms matched. More significant were the people.