n from Earth, strung out one
behind the other like jewels on a velvet string, they hurtled across
the heavens.

They were the six ships on which the original Loire Valley Frenchmen
had sailed out into space, seeking a home on a new planet. They had
been put into an orbit around New Gaul and left there while their
thirty thousand passengers had descended to the surface in
chemical-fuel rockets. Mankind, once on the fair and fresh earth of
the new planet, had never again ascended to re-visit the great ships.

For three hundred years the six ships had circled the planet known as
New Gaul, nightly beacons and glowing reminders to Man that he was a
stranger on this planet.

When the Earthmen landed on the new planet they had called the new
land _Le Beau Pays_, or, as it was now pronounced, _L'Bawpfey_--The
Beautiful Country. They had been delighted, entranced with the fresh
new land. After the burned, war-racked Earth they had just left, it
was like coming to Heaven.

They found two intelligent species living on the planet, and they
found that the species lived in peace and that they had no conception
of war or of poverty. And they were quite willing to receive the
Terrans into their society.

Provided, that is, they became integrated, or--as they phrased
it--natural. The Frenchmen from Earth had been given their choice.
They were told:

"You can live with the people of the Beautiful Land on our terms--war
with us, or leave to seek another planet."

The Terrans conferred. Half of them decided to stay; the other half
decided to remain only long enough to mine uranium and other
chemicals. Then they would voyage onwards.

But nobody from that group of Earthmen ever again stepped into the
ferry-rockets and soared up to the six ion-beam ships circling about
Le Beau Pays. All succumbed to the Philosophy of the Natural. Within a
few generations a stranger landing upon the planet would not have
known without previous information that the Terrans were not
aboriginal.

He would have found three species. Two were warm-blooded egglayers who
had evolved directly from reptiles without becoming mammals--the
Ssassarors and the Amphibs. Somewhere in their dim past--like all
happy nations, they had no history--they had set up their society and
been very satisfied with it since.

It was a peaceful quiet world, largely peasant, where nobody had to
scratch for a living and where a superb manipulation of biological
forces ensured v