discomfort on you for that. There are important questions to be considered, and you are the leader of your people.'
The Cepheid nodded, 'I am satisfied your purposes are kindly. Please proceed.'
The administrator almost wriggled in his difficulty in putting thoughts into words. 'It is a subject,' he said, 'of delicacy, and one I wou'd never bring up if it weren't for the overwhelming importance of the... uh... question. I am only the spokesman of my government-'
'My people consider the otherworld government a kindly one.'
'Well, yes, they are kindly. For that reason, they are disturbed over the fact that your people no longer breed.'
Antyok paused, and waited with worry for a reaction that did not come. The Cepheid's face was motionless except for the soft, trembling motion of the wrinkled area that was Ms deflated drinking tube.
Antyok continued, 'It is a question we have hesitated to bring up because of its extremely personal angles. Noninterference is my government's prime aim, and we have done our best to investigate the problem quietly and without disturbing your people. But, frankly, we -'
'Have failed?' finished the Cepheid, at the other's pause.
'Yes. Or at least, we have not discovered a concrete failure to reproduce the exact environment of your original world; with, of course, the necessary modification to make it more livable. Naturally, it is thought there is some chemical shortcoming. And so I ask your voluntary help in the matter. Your people are advanced in the study of your own biochemistry. If you do not choose, or would rather not -'
'No, no, I can help.' The Cepheid seemed cheerful about it. The smooth flat planes of his loose-skinned, hairless skull wrinkled in an alien response to an uncertain emotion. 'It is not a matter that any of us would have thought would have disturbed you other-worldlings. That it does is but another indication of your well-meaning kindness. This wor'd we find congenial, a paradise in comparison to our o!d. It lacks in nothing. Conditions such as now prevail belong in our legends of the Golden Age.'
'Well-'
'But there is a something; a something you may not understand. We cannot expect different intelligences to think alike.'
'I shall try to understand.'
The Cepheid's voice had grown soft, its liquid undertones more pronounced, 'We were dying on our native world; but we were fighting. Our science, developed through a history older than yours, was losing; but it had not yet lost. Perhans it was because our science was fundamentally biological. rather than physical as yours is. Your people discovered new forms of energy and reached the stars. Our people d:scovered new truths of psychology and psychiatry and built up a working society free of disease and crime.
'There is no need to question which of the two angles of approach was the more laudable, but there is no uncertainty as to which proved more successful in the end. In our dying world, without the means of life or sources of power, our biological science could but make the dying easier.
'And yet we fought. For centuries past, we had been groping toward the elements of atomic power, and slowly the spark of hope had glimmered that we might break through the two-dimensional limits of our planetary surface and reach the stars. There were no other planets in our system to serve as stepping stones. Nothing but some twenty light-years to the nearest star, without the knowledge of the possibility of the existence of other planetary systems, but rather of the contrary.
'But there is something in all life that insists on striving; even on useless striving. There were only five thousand of us left in the last days. Only five thousand. And our first ship was ready. It was experimental. It would probably have been a failure. But already we had all the principles of propulsion and navigation correctly worked out.'
There was a long pause, and the Cepheid's small black eyes seemed glazed in retrospect.
The newspaperman put in suddenly, from his corner, 'And then we came?'
'And then you came,' the Cepheid agreed simply. 'It changed everything. Energy was ours for the asking. A new world, congenial and, indeed, ideal, was ours even without asking. If our problems of society had long been solved by ourselves, our more difficult problems of environment were suddenly solved for us, no less completely.'
'Well?' urged Antyok.
'Well - it was somehow not well. For centuries, our ancestors had fought toward the stars, and now the stars suddenly proved to be the property of others. We had fought for