of course you take
their possessions!"

"Ah, yes," said Hoddan. "To be sure!"

He rode on. The road was a mere horse track. Presently it was less than
that. He saw a frowning, battlemented stronghold away off to the left.
Thal openly hoped that somebody would come from that castle and try to
charge them toll for riding over their lord's land. After Hoddan had
knocked them over with the stun-pistol, Thal would add to the heavy
weight of coins already in his possession.

It did not look promising, in a way. But just before sunset, Hoddan saw
three tiny bright lights flash across the sky from west to east. They
moved in formation and at identical speeds. Hoddan knew a spaceship in
orbit when he saw one. He bristled, and muttered under his breath.

"What's that?" asked Thal. "What did you say?"

"I said," said Hoddan dourly, "that I've got to do something about
Walden. When they get an idea in their heads...."

IV

According to the fiction tapes, the colonized worlds of the galaxy vary
wildly from each other. In cold and unromantic fact, it isn't so. Space
travel is too cheap and sol-type solar systems too numerous to justify
the settlement of hostile worlds. There's no point in trying to live
where one has to put on special equipment every time he goes outdoors.
There's no reason to settle on a world where one can't grow the kind of
vegetation one's ancestors adapted themselves to some tens of thousands
of generations ago. It simply doesn't make sense!

So the inhabited worlds of the galaxy are farther apart than they could
be, perhaps, and much more alike than is necessary. But the human race
has a predilection for gravity fields not too far from 980cm-sec
accellerative force. We humans were designed for something like that. We
prefer foodstuffs containing familiar amino compounds. Our metabolism
was designed around them. And since our geneticists have learned how to
put aggressiveness into the genes of terrestrial-origin plants--why
nowadays they briskly overwhelm the native flora wherever they are
introduced. And it's rational to let it happen. If people are to thrive
and multiply on new worlds as they are colonized, it's more convenient
to modify the worlds to fit the colonists than the colonists to fit the
worlds.

Therefore Bron Hoddan encountered no remarkable features in the
landscape of Darth as he rode through the deepening night. There was
grass, which was not luxuriant. There were bushes, wh