pt for the stumps of trees, and
watched the slow file of humanity that coursed along the valley, bearing
the hand-hewn ties that were being laid from the opening of the mine
shaft to the ore dump. Glittering ribbons of steel snaked along the
valley, and ended just below him, where a crew of workmen hammered
spikes under the watchful eye of a uniformed foreman. In the distance,
the central ring of grounded ships dominated the land. Spacers and
natives labored together, to lend an impression of egalitarian
cooperation under the autocracy of the officer class.

"How good it is for brethren to be reunited," Meikl's native interpreter
murmured, in the facile tongue devised by Semantics Section for use by
staff officers and Intelligence men in communicating with the natives.

He stared at her profile for a moment, as she watched the men in the
valley. Was she really that blind? Were all of them? Had they no
resistance at all to exploitation, or any concept for it?

Meikl had learned as much as he could of the socio-economic matrix of
the static civilization of the present Earthlings. He had gone into
their glades and gardens and seen the patterns of their life, and he
wondered. Life was easy, life was gay, life was full of idle play.
Somehow, they seemed completely unaware of what they had done to the
planet in twenty thousand years. One of the elders had summed up,
without meaning to, the entire meaning of twenty millenia, with the
casual statement: "_In our gardens, there are no weeds_," and it applied
to the garden of human culture almost as well as it applied to the fauna
and flora of the planet.

This "weedlessness" had not been the goal of any planned project, but
rather, the inevitable result of age-old struggles between Man and
Nature on a small plot of land. When Man despoiled Nature, and
slaughtered her children, Nature could respond in two ways: she could
raise up organisms to survive in spite of Man, and she could raise up
organisms to survive in the service and custody of Man. She had done
both, but the gardener with his weed-hoe and his insect spray and his
vermin exterminators had proved that he could invent new weapons faster
than Nature could evolve tenacious pests, and eventually the life forms
of Earth had been emasculated of the tendency to mutate into disobedient
species. Nature had won many bloody battles; but Man had won the war.
Now he lived in a green world that seemed to offer up its fruits to him