Plekhanov kept his massive face blank. It wasn't for him to be impatient
with his superior. Nevertheless, the ship was waiting, stocked and
crewed.
Amschel Mayer said, "Certainly a last minute chat can't harm." Inwardly
he realized the other man's position. Here was a dream coming true, and
Mayer and his fellows were the last thread that held the Co-ordinator's
control over the dream. When they left, half a century would pass before
he could again check developments.
The Co-ordinator became more businesslike. "Yes," he said, "but I have
more in mind than a chat. Very briefly, I wish to go over your
assignment. Undoubtedly redundant, but if there are questions, no matter
how seemingly trivial, this is the last opportunity to air them."
_What possible questions could there be at this late date?_ Plekhanov
thought.
The department head swiveled slowly in his chair and then back again as
he talked. "You are the first--the first of many, many such teams. The
manner in which you handle your task will effect man's eternity.
Obviously, since upon your experience we will base our future policies
on interstellar colonization." His voice lost volume. "The position in
which you find yourselves should be humbling."
"It is," Amschel Mayer agreed. Plekhanov nodded his head.
The Co-ordinator nodded, too. "However, the situation is as near ideal
as we could hope. Rigel's planets are all but unbelievably Earthlike.
Almost all our flora and fauna have been adaptable. Certainly our race
has been.
"These two are the first of the seeded planets. Almost a thousand years
ago we deposited small bodies of colonists upon each of them. Since then
we have periodically checked, from a distance, but never intruded." His
eyes went from one of his listeners to the other. "No comments or
questions, thus far?"
Mayer said, "This is one thing that surprises me. The colonies are so
small to begin with. How could they possibly populate a whole world in
one millennium?"
The Co-ordinator said, "Man adapts, Amschel. Have you studied the
development of the United States? During her first century and a half
the need was for population to fill the vast lands wrested from the
Amer-Inds. Families of eight, ten, and twelve children were the common
thing, much larger ones were not unknown. And the generations crowded
one against another; a girl worried about spinsterhood if she reached
seventeen unwed. But in the next century? The frontier vanished, the
driving need for population was gone. Not only were drastic immigration
laws passed, but the family shrunk rapidly until by mid-Twentieth
Century the usual consisted of two or three children, and even the
childless family became increasingly common."
Mayer frowned impatiently, "But still, a thousand years. There is always
famine, war, disease ..."
Plekhanov snorted patronizingly. "Forty to fifty generations, Amschel?
Starting with a hundred colonists? Where are your mathematics?"
The Co-ordinator said, "The proof is there. We estimate that each of
Rigel's planets now supports a population of nearly one billion."
"To be more exact," Plekhanov rumbled, "some nine hundred million on
Genoa, seven and a half on Texcoco."
Mayer smiled wryly. "I wonder what the residents of each of these
planets call their worlds. Hardly the same names we have arbitrarily
bestowed."
"Probably each call theirs _The World_," the Co-ordinator smiled. "After
all, the basic language, in spite of a thousand years, is still
Amer-English. However, I assume you are familiar with our method of
naming. The most advanced culture on Rigel's first planet is to be
compared to the Italian cities during Europe's feudalistic era. We have
named that planet Genoa. The most advanced nation of the second planet
is comparable to the Aztecs at the time of the conquest. We considered
Tenochtitlan but it seemed a tongue twister, so Texcoco is the
alternative."
"Modernizing Genoa," Mayer mused, "should be considerably easier than
the task on semiprimitive Texcoco."