uld retort, she seemed to realize the monumental
irony of what she had just said, and she burst into laughter.

"I'm sorry," she said. "Go ahead and say it. I had no right to wake
_you_ up."

"Let's come back to that," said Kieran after a moment. "Why did you?"

Paula looked at him ruefully. "What I need now is a ten-volume history
of the last century, and time enough for you to read it. But since we
don't have either--" She broke off, then after a pause asked, "Your date
was 1981, wasn't it? It and your name were on the tag of your
pressure-suit."

"That's right."

"Well, then. Back in 1981, it was expected that men would spread out to
the stars, wasn't it?"

Kieran nodded. "As soon as they had a workable high-speed drive. Several
drives were being experimented with even then."

"One of them--the Flournoy principle--was finally made workable," she
said. She frowned. "I'm trying to give you this briefly and I keep
straying into details."

"Just tell me why you woke me up."

"I'm _trying_ to tell you." She asked candidly, "Were you always so
damned hateful or did the revivification process do this to you?"

Kieran grinned. "All right. Go ahead."

* * * * *

"Things happened pretty much as people foresaw back in 1981," she said.
"The drive was perfected. The ships went out to the nearer stars. They
found worlds. They established colonies from the overflowing population
of Earth. They found human indigenous races on a few worlds, all of them
at a rather low technical level, and they taught them.

"There was a determination from the beginning to make it one universe.
No separate nationalistic groups, no chance of wars. The governing
council was set up at Altair Two. Every world was represented. There are
twenty-nine of them, now. It's expected to go on like that, till there
are twenty-nine hundred starworlds represented there, twenty-nine
thousand--any number. But--"

Kieran had been listening closely. "But what? What upset this particular
utopia?"

"Sako."

"This world we're going to?"

"Yes," she said soberly. "Men found something different about this world
when they reached it. It had people--human people--on it, very low in
the scale of civilization."

"Well, what was the problem? Couldn't you start teaching them as you had
others?"

She shook her head. "It would take a long while. But that wasn't the
real problem. It was-- You see, there's another race on Sako be