* * * * *
"Things happened pretty much as people foresaw back in 1981," she said.
"The drive was perfected. The ships went out to the nearer stars. They
found worlds. They established colonies from the overflowing population
of Earth. They found human indigenous races on a few worlds, all of them
at a rather low technical level, and they taught them.
"There was a determination from the beginning to make it one universe.
No separate nationalistic groups, no chance of wars. The governing
council was set up at Altair Two. Every world was represented. There are
twenty-nine of them, now. It's expected to go on like that, till there
are twenty-nine hundred starworlds represented there, twenty-nine
thousand--any number. But--"
Kieran had been listening closely. "But what? What upset this particular
utopia?"
"Sako."
"This world we're going to?"
"Yes," she said soberly. "Men found something different about this world
when they reached it. It had people--human people--on it, very low in
the scale of civilization."
"Well, what was the problem? Couldn't you start teaching them as you had
others?"
She shook her head. "It would take a long while. But that wasn't the
real problem. It was-- You see, there's another race on Sako beside the
human ones, and it's a fairly civilized race. The Sakae. The trouble
is--the Sakae aren't human."