Hunt stretched back on the grassy bank and clasped his hands behind his head. “Anyhow, life’s full and exciting right now. I don’t need any of that kind of complication. A whole alien civilization. A revolution in science-profound things that need concentration.”

“You need all your time,”Jerry agreed solemnly. “Can’t afford the distraction.”

“To tell you the truth, life has never been simpler and more exhilarating.”

“A good way for it to be.”

Hunt lay back in the sun and closed his eyes. “Oh, you don’t have to worry about that. All the complications are three thousand miles away now, in Germany, and that’s about where I intend to keep them.”

At the sound of a car coming to a halt, he opened his eyes and sat up again. The metallic bronze car that he had glimpsed approaching a minute or two before had come up the access road and was standing outside the gateway where the driveways from the two apartments merged. It was a newish-looking Peugeot import, sleek in line, but with just the right note of restraint in dark brown upholstery and trim to set it apart from pretentiousness.

The same could be said of the woman who was driving it. She was in her early to mid-thirties, with a sweep of raven hair framing an open face with high cheeks, a slightly pouting, well-formed mouth, rounded, tapering chin, and a straight nose, just upturned enough to add a hint of puckishness. She was wearing a neatly cut, sleeveless navy dress with a square white collar, and the tanned arm resting along the sill of the open window bore a light silver bracelet.

“Hi,” she said. Her voice was easy and natural. She inclined her head slightly to indicate the still-open hood of Jerry’s Husky. “Since you’re relaxing, I assume you got it fixed.”

Jerry detached himself from the tree and straightened up. “Yes. It’s fine now. Er… can we help you?”

Her eyes were bright and alive, with a deep, intelligent quality about them that gave the impression of having taken in everything of note in the scene in a brief, first glance. Her gaze flickered over the two men candidly, curiously, but with no attempt at beguiling. Her manner was neither overly assertive nor defensive, intrusive nor apologetic, or calculated to impress. It was just, simply and refreshingly, the way that strangers everywhere ought to be able to be with each other.

“I think I’m in the right place,” she said. “The sign at the bottom said there were only these two places up here. I’m looking for a Dr. Hunt.”

The planet Jevlen possessed oceans that were rich in chloride and chlorate salts. Molecules of these found their way high aloft via circulating winds and air currents, where they were readily dissociated by a sun somewhat bluer and hotter than Earth’s, and therefore more active in the ultraviolet. This mechanism sustained a population of chlorine atoms in the upper atmosphere, which resulted in a palish chartreuse sky illuminated by a greeny-yellow sun. The atmosphere also had a high neon content, which with its relatively low discharge voltage added an almost continual background of electrical activity that appeared in the form of diffuse, orange-red streaks and streamers.

This was where, fifty thousand years previously, after the destruction of Minerva, the Thurien Ganymeans installed the survivors of the Lambian branch of protohumanity, when the Cerian branch elected to be returned to Earth. Thereafter, the Jevlenese were given all the benefits of Thurien technology and allowed to share the knowledge gained through the Thurien sciences. The Thuriens readily conferred to them full equality of rights and status, and in time Jevlen became the center of a quasi-autonomous system of Jevlenese-controlled worlds.

As the Thuriens saw things, a misguided worldview resulting from the Lunarians’ predatorial origins had been the cause of the defects that drove them to the holocaust of Minerva. It wasn’t so much that the limited availability of resources caused humans to fight over them, as most Terran conventional wisdom supposed; rather, the instinct to fight over anything led to the conclusion that what was fought over had to be worth it, in other words, of value, and hence in scarce supply.

But once the Lunarians absorbed the Ganymean comprehension that the resources of the universe were infinite in any sense that mattered, all that would be changed. Unrestricted assimilation into the Thurien culture and access to all the bounties that it had to offer would allay aggression, relieve insecurities and fears, curb the urge for domination and conquest, and build in their place a benign, homogeneous society founded on grateful appreciation. Freed, like the Thuriens, from want, doubt, and drudgery, the Jevlenese would unlock the qualities that were dormant inside them like the potential waiting to be expressed in a seed. No longer fettered by time or space, nor constrained to the things that one mere planet had to offer, they would radiate outward in a thousand life-styles spread across as many worlds to complete the upward struggle that had begun long before in Earth’s primeval oceans, and thence become whatever they were capable of.

At least, that was the way the Thuriens had imagined it would be. But in all those millennia the Thuriens had learned less about human perversity than Garuth, former commander of the Ganymean scientific mission ship Shapieron, from ancient Minerva, had in six months on Earth.

For self-esteem could only be earned, not given. Dependence bred feelings of inadequacy and resentment. The results were apathy, envy, surliness, and hate.

The more ambitious minority who gained control of Jevlenese affairs had lied, schemed, and eventually gained control of the surveillance operation set up by the Thuriens for monitoring developments on Earth. They had intervened covertly to keep Earth backward while they built up a secret military capability, and almost succeeded in a plan that would have enabled them to overthrow the Thuriens. Although Thurien technology had been indispensable in thwarting the Jevlenese, what had actually saved the situation had been the Thuriens’ decision to open direct contact with the Terrans-when the Shapieron’s story from Earth contradicted the Jevlenese version-and thus involve other minds capable of working at comparable depths of deviousness.

But the circumstances of the greater mass of Jevlenese were very different from those of the minority who rose to take charge. For them, the society that grew under the Thurien guidance became a protective incubator cocooning them until the grave. Smothered by largesse to the point where nothing they did or didn’t do could make any difference that mattered to their lives, they abandoned control of their affairs to impenetrable layers of nameless administrators and their computers, and either sank into lethargy or escaped, into empty social rituals of acting out roles that no longer signified anything, or into delusion.

Under the collective name JEVEX-the processing and networking totality serving the system of Jevlenese-controlled worlds-the computers ran the factories and farms, mining and processing, manufacturing, distribution, transportation, and communications, along with all the monitoring to keep track of what was going on. JEVEX kept the records, stocked the warehouses, scheduled the repairs; it directed the robots that built the plants, serviced the machines, delivered the groceries, and hauled the trash. And it created the dreams into which the people escaped from a system that didn’t require them to be people anymore.

And that, the Thurien and Terran leaders had concluded after the three-day Pseudowar that ended the self-proclaimed Jevlenese Federation, had been the problem. JEVEX had been modeled on the larger and more powerful Thurien complex, VISAR, which, while equipping JEVEX admirably for catering to Ganymean temperaments and needs, had done nothing to satisfy the very human compulsions to seek challenge and to compete.