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could hardly have been more different. We had to talk. We’d been pitched into a situation which seemed desperate. For the Dendran colonists this was the eleventh hour, or maybe later. Maybe too late. We had to talk—to attack the situation with all the intellectual artillery at our disposal.
    â€œThere are just ninety-two left,” said Nathan. “Originally, there were more than fourteen hundred.”
    â€œWe don’t know that both ships made it,” objected Linda Beck. “There could have been a disaster in ultraspace.”
    Nathan shook his head. “I’ve looked around the village, the core of the settlement. The original ships were cannibalized in order to provide the initial shelters. There are bits of both ships built into the structure of the buildings.”
    â€œCan you be sure that there are bits of two ships, not one?” This questions came from Pete Rolving. The point did need pressing.
    â€œWe’ll take a closer look in good time,” said Nathan. “But I think there are two.”
    â€œWhat about the people?” I asked.
    Nathan looked at Conrad. Conrad deferred to Mariel. She had been sitting with her elbows on the table and her head cupped in her hands. She looked unhappy, but she sat up straight.
    â€œA few years ago,” she said, “they tried to use my talent in psychiatry. I was only ten...eleven...it lasted six months or so. The idea was that I could get inside people’s problems, find out why they were really screwed up, instead of why they thought they were. It worked, after a fashion. But I didn’t like it. I didn’t have much contact with extreme psychosis—usually it was personal problems, depression, dislocation. Crazy people—really crazy people—made me sick. My father, and some of the doctors, thought I was in danger. The whole thing never really got off the ground. They tried to teach me some theory, but I was too young. I didn’t get it. And it didn’t seem to fit with the kind of thing I read anyhow.
    â€œWhat I’m trying to lead up to is this. Those people aren’t just simple. They’re mad. They’re sick.”
    â€œThey’re schizoid,” said Conrad, cutting in quickly. “Dislocated from their surroundings. Out of contact with the environment. But it’s something that’s arisen quite naturally out of the way they’re living. They haven’t ‘gone insane.’ They’re not psychotic. I don’t believe there’s any physical damage to their brains. It’s a matter of the way they’ve grown up, in a depleted environment. Not only physically depleted but mentally. They talk, but they don’t really communicate. They’re living half-lives, having lost virtually everything the original colonists had: all the knowledge, all the values, the sense of identity. Their humanity has simply drained away, over the years and the generations. They retain enough to survive—just. The population is imbalanced, incidentally; there are twice as many females as males, and the ratio is much higher in the higher age-groups. It seems the women cope better than the men, or the girls than the boys.”
    â€œCan we get through to them?” asked Linda.
    â€œIn time,” said Nathan. Mariel confirmed what he said with a nod. “Especially the children,” he went on. “They may be the ones to concentrate on. They can learn. They can be re-educated.”
    â€œAnd then?” I said.
    Nathan looked at me, and waited.
    â€œWhat are we going to try to do?” I said. “You say they can be re-educated, but what’s the aim of the re-education? To turn them back into decent human beings, like the original colonists? To wind them up like clockwork toys, and then to let them go so they can repeat the whole process? There are less than a hundred! If fourteen hundred able and knowledgeable people couldn’t cope,