" The wingsman snorted. "How could things like that get passed
along from father to son. If you people'd stop the mystical gibberish,
and deal in facts...."

"Do you regard parent-child rapport as a fact?" Meikl turned to stare
absently out a viewing port at the trees.

"You mean the telepathic experiments with infants? I don't know much
about it."

"Seventy years ago. On Michsa Three. A hundred parents were given
intensive lessons and intensive practice in playing a very difficult
skill game ... before they became parents. They did nothing but play the
game for three years. Then their babies were taken away from them at the
age of one year. Brought up institutionally. There was a control
group--another hundred whose parents never heard of the skill game."

"Go on."

"So, when the children were ten years old, they did learning-speed tests
on all two hundred."

"Learning the game, you mean?"

"Right. The children whose parents had learned it came out way ahead. So
far ahead that it was conclusive. Sometime during pregnancy and the
first year, the kids had picked up a predisposition to learn the
patterns of the game easily."

"So?"

"So--during infancy, a child is beginning to mirror the patterns of the
parental mind--probably telepathically, or something related. He doesn't
'inherit it' in the genes, but there's an unconscious cultural
mechanism of transmittal--and it's an analog of heredity. The
kulturverlaengerung--and it can linger in a family line without becoming
conscious for many generations."

"How? If they hadn't taught the children to play the game...."

"If they hadn't, it'd still be passed on--as a predisposition-talent--to
the third and fourth and Nth generation. Like a mirror-image of a
mirror-image of a mirror-image ... or a memory of a memory of a
memory...."

"This grows pedantic, and irrelevant," the baron growled. "What are the
chances of utilizing native labor?"

"_And whatten penance will we dree for that,
Edward, Edward?
Whatten penance will ye dree for that?
My dear son, now tell me, O."
"I'll set my feet in yonder boat,
Mither, mither;
I'll set my feet in yonder boat,
And I'll fare over the sea, O._"

--ANONYMOUS

* * * * *

Phase-A had been accomplished, after six months of toil. Baltun Meikl,
Analyst Culturetic of Intelligence Section stood on the sunswept hill,
once forested, but now barren exce