ristarchy. But the Guesser couldn't remember off hand
just what they _did_ call themselves. Their form of government was a
near-anarchic form of ochlocracy, he knew--mob rule of some sort, as
might be expected among such people. They were the outgrowth of an
ancient policy that had been used centuries ago for populating the
planets of the galaxy.

There are some people who simply do not, will not, and can not fit in
with any kind of social organization--except the very flimsiest,
perhaps. Depending on the society in which they exist and the extent of
their own antisocial activities, they have been called, over the
centuries, everything from "criminals" to "pioneers." It was a matter of
whether they fought the unwelcome control of the society in power or
fled from it.

The Guesser's knowledge of history was close to nonexistent, but he had
heard that the expansion to the stars from Earth--a planet he had never
been within a thousand parsecs of--had been accomplished by the
expedient of combining volunteers with condemned criminals and shipping
them off to newly-found Earth-type planets. After a generation had
passed, others came in--the civilizing types--and settled the planets,
making them part of the Aristarchy proper.

(Or was the Aristarchy that old? The Guesser had a feeling that the
government at that time had been of a different sort, but he couldn't
for the life of him remember what it was. Perhaps it had been the
prototype of the Aristarchy, for certainly the present system of society
had existed for four or five centuries--perhaps more. The Guesser
realized that his knowledge of ancient history was as confused as
anyone's; after all, it wasn't his specialty. He remembered that when he
was a boy, he'd heard a Teacher Exec talk about the Geological Ages of
Earth and the Teacher had said that "cave men were _not_ contemporary
with the dinosaur." He hadn't known what it meant at the time, since he
wasn't supposed to be listening, anyway, to an Exec class, but he had
realized that the histories of times past often became mixed up with
each other.)

At any rate, the process had gone along smoothly, even as the present
process of using Class Sevens and Declassified citizens did. But in the
early days there had not been the organization that existed in the
present Aristarchy; planets had become lost for generations at a time.
(The Guesser vaguely remembered that there had been wars of some kind
during that time, a