rywhere."

"There were----?"

"What you would call microbes. Bacteria. Fungi. Viruses. Terrible
devouring wild creatures everywhere. You were a howling wilderness. Of
course, we have cleaned those things up now. Today you are civilized--a
fine, healthy individual of your species--and our revered Fatherland.
Surely you have noted the vast improvement in your condition!"

"Yes, but----"

"And we pledge our lives to you, oh Barthland. As patriotic citizens we
will defend you to the death. We promise you will never be successfully
invaded."

Yeah. Well, that was nice. But already I felt as crowded as a subway
train with the power cut out at rush hour.

But there was no room for doubt either. I'd had it. I still did have
it; had no chance at all of getting rid of it.

They went on then and told me their story.

I won't try to repeat it all verbatim. I couldn't now, since my
memory--but that's something else. Anyway, I finally got the picture.

But I didn't get it all the same evening. Oh, no. At ten I had to knock
it off to go to bed, get my sleep, keep up my health. They were
insistent.

As they put it, even if I didn't care for myself I had to think about
an entire population and generations yet unborn. Or unbudded, which was
the way they did it.

Well, as they said, we had the whole weekend to work out an
understanding. Which we did. When we were through, I didn't like it a
whole lot better, but at least I could understand it.

It was all a perfectly logical proposition from their point of
view--which differed in quite a number of respects from my own. To them
it was simply a matter of survival for their race and their culture. To
me it was a matter of who or what I was going to be. But then, I had no
choice.

According to the Official History I was given, they came from a tiny
planet of a small sun. Actually, their sun was itself a planet, still
incandescent, distant perhaps like Jupiter from the true sun. Their
planet or moon was tiny, wet and warm. And the temperature was
constant.

These conditions, naturally, governed their development--and,
eventually, mine.

Of course they were very small, about the size of a dysentery amoeba.
The individual life span was short as compared to ours but the
accelerated pace of their lives balanced it out. In the beginning,
something like four of our days was a lifetime. So they lived, grew,
developed, evolved. They learned to communicate. They became
civilized