The Stranger tries to get up and I kick him solid. Hunker grabs back his branch and hits again and again with me helping hard.

Biggest, his Stranger gets up and starts to run. Biggest whacks his ass with the branch, roaring and laughing.

Me, I got my skill. Special. I pick up rocks. I’m the best thrower, better than Biggest even.

Rocks are for Strangers. My buddies, them I’ll scrap with, but never use rocks. Strangers, though, they deserve to get rocks in the face. I love to bust a Stranger that way.

I throw one clean and smooth. Catch the Stranger on the leg. He stumbles. I smack him good with a sharp-edged rock in the back.

He runs fast then. I can see he’s bleeding. Big red drops in the dust.

Biggest laughs and slaps me and I know I’m in good with him.

Hunker is clubbing his Stranger. Biggest takes my club and joins in. The blood allover the Stranger sings warm in my nose and I j urnp up and down on him. We keep at it like that a long time. Not worried about the other Stranger corning back. Strangers are brave sometimes, but they know when they have lost.

The Stranger stops moving. I give him one more kick.

No reaction. Dead maybe.

We scream and dance and holler out our joy.

Hari shook his head to clear it. That helped a little.

“You were that big one?” Dors asked. “I was the female, over by the trees.”

“Sorry, I couldn’t tell.”

“It was…different, wasn’t it?”

He laughed dryly. “Murder usually is.”

“When you went off with the, well, leader-”

“My pan thinks of him as ‘Biggest.’ We killed another pan.”

They were in the plush reception room of the immersion facility. Hari stood and felt the world tilt a little and then right itself. “I think I’ll stick to historical research for a while.”

Dors smiled sheepishly. “I…I rather liked it.”

He thought a moment, blinked. “So did I,” he said, surprising himself.

“Not the murder-”

“No, of course not. But…the feel.”

She grinned. “Can’t get that on Trantor, Professor.”

He spent two days coasting through cool lattices of data in the formidable station library. It was well equipped and allowed interfaces with several senses. He patrolled through cool digital labyrinths.

Some data was encrusted with age, quite literally. In the vector spaces portrayed on huge screens, the research data of millennia ago were covered with thick, bulky protocols and scabs of security precautions. All were easily broken or averted, of course, by present methods. But the chunky abstracts, reports, summaries, and crudely processed statistics still resisted easy interpretation. Occasionally some facets of pan behavior were carefully hidden away in appendices and sidebar notes, as though the biologists in the lonely outpost were embarrassed by it. Some was embarrassing: mating behavior, especially. How could he use this?

He navigated through the 3D maze and cobbled together his ideas. Could he follow a strategy of analogy?

Pans shared nearly all their genes with humans, so pan dynamics should be a simpler version of human dynamics. Could he then analyze pan troop interactions as a reduced case of psychohistory?

Security Chief Yakani opened confidential files which implied that pans had been genetically modified about ten thousand years before. To what end Hari could not tell. There were other altered creatures, “raboons” particularly. Yakani took such an interest in his work that he became suspicious she was keeping an eye on him for the Potentate.

At sunset of the second day he sat with Dors watching bloodred shafts spike through orange-tinged clouds. This world was gaudy beyond good taste, and he liked it. The food was tangy, too. His stomach rumbled, anticipating dinner.

He remarked to Dors, “It’s tempting, using pans to build a sort of toy model of psychohistory.”

“But you have doubts.”

“They’re like us but they have, well, uh…”

“Base, animalistic ways?” She smirked, then kissed him. “My prudish Hari.”

“We have our share of beastly behaviors, I know. But we’re a lot smarter, too.”

Her eyelids dipped in a manner he knew by now suggested polite doubt. “They live intensely, you’ll have to give them that.”

“Maybe we’re smarter than we need to be anyway?”

“What?” This surprised her.

“I’ve been reading up on evolution. Not a front rank field anymore; everybody thinks we understand it.”

“And in a galaxy filled with humans and little else, there isn’t much fresh material.”

He had not thought of it that way before, but she was right. Biology was a backwater science. All the academic sophisticates were pursuing something called “integrative sociometrics.”

He went on, laying out his thoughts. Plainly, the human brain was an evolutionary overshoot. Brains were far more capable than a competent hunter-gatherer needed. To get the better of animals, it would have been enough to master fire and simple stone tools. Such talents alone would have made people the lords of creation, removing selection pressure to change. Instead, all evidence from the brain itself said that change accelerated. The human cerebral cortex added mass, stacking new circuitry atop older wiring. That mass spread over the lesser areas like a thick new skin. So said the ancient studies, their data from museums long lost.

“From this came musicians and engineers, saints and savants,” he finished with a flourish. One of Dors’ best points was her willingness to sit still while he waxed professorily longwinded-even on vacation.

“And the pans, you think, are from before that time? On ancient Earth?”

“They must be. And all this evolutionary selection happened in just a few million years.”

Dors nodded. “Look at it from the woman’s point of view. It happened, despite putting mothers in desperate danger in childbirth.”

“Uh, how?”

“From those huge baby heads. They’re hard to get out. We women are still paying the price for your brains-and for ours.”

He chuckled. She always had a special spin on a subject that made him see it fresh. “Then why was it selected for, back then?”

Dors smiled enigmatically. “Maybe men and women alike found intelligence sexy in each other.”

“Really?”

Her sly smile. “How about us?”

“Have you ever watched very many 3D stars? They don’t feature brains, my dear.”

“Remember the animals we saw in the Imperial Zoo? It could be that for early humans, brains were like peacock tails, or moose horns: display items to attract the females. Runaway sexual selection.”

“I see, an overplayed hand of otherwise perfectly good cards.” He laughed. “So being smart is just a bright ornament.”

“Works for me,” she said, giving him a wink.

He watched the sunset turn to glowering, ominous crimson, oddly happy. Sheets of light worked across the sky among curious, layered clouds. “Ummm…” Dors murmured.

“Yes?”

“Maybe this is a way to use the research the Ex Specs are doing, too. Learn who we humans once were-and therefore who we are.”

“Intellectually, it’s a jump. In social ways, though, the gap could be less.”

Dors looked skeptical. “You think pans are only a bit further back in a social sense?”

“Ummm. I wonder if in logarithmic time we might scale from pans to the early Empire and then on to now?”

“A big leap.”

“Maybe I could use that Voltaire sim from Sark as a scaling point in a long curve.”

“Look, to do anything you’ll need more experience with them.” She eyed him. “You like immersion, don’t you?”

“Well, yes. It’s just…”

“What?”

“That Ex Spec Vaddo, he keeps pushing immersions-”

“That’s his job.”

“-and he knew who I was.”

“So?” She spread her hands and shrugged.

“You’re normally the suspicious one. Why should an Ex Spec know an obscure mathematician?”