expedient, taking you off this
way. It was something I didn't contemplate. I forgot that orders would
be given out to shoot me on sight."

"It was Gross' idea."

"I don't doubt that. My conception, my plan, came to me as soon as you
began to describe your project, that day at my house. I saw at once
that you were wrong; you people have no understanding of the mind at
all. I realized that the transfer of a human brain from an organic
body to a complex artificial space ship would not involve the loss of
the intellectualization faculty of the mind. When a man thinks, he
_is_.

"When I realized that, I saw the possibility of an age-old dream
becoming real. I was quite elderly when I first met you, Philip. Even
then my life-span had come pretty much to its end. I could look ahead
to nothing but death, and with it the extinction of all my ideas. I
had made no mark on the world, none at all. My students, one by one,
passed from me into the world, to take up jobs in the great Research
Project, the search for better and bigger weapons of war.

"The world has been fighting for a long time, first with itself, then
with the Martians, then with these beings from Proxima Centauri, whom
we know nothing about. The human society has evolved war as a cultural
institution, like the science of astronomy, or mathematics. War is a
part of our lives, a career, a respected vocation. Bright, alert young
men and women move into it, putting their shoulders to the wheel as
they did in the time of Nebuchadnezzar. It has always been so.

"But is it innate in mankind? I don't think so. No social custom is
innate. There were many human groups that did not go to war; the
Eskimos never grasped the idea at all, and the American Indians never
took to it well.

"But these dissenters were wiped out, and a cultural pattern was
established that became the standard for the whole planet. Now it has
become ingrained in us.

"But if someplace along the line some other way of settling problems
had arisen and taken hold, something different than the massing of men
and material to--"

"What's your plan?" Kramer said. "I know the theory. It was part of
one of your lectures."

"Yes, buried in a lecture on plant selection, as I recall. When you
came to me with this proposition I realized that perhaps my conception
could be brought to life, after all. If my theory were right that war
is only a habit, not an instinct, a society built up apart from Terra
wit