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that if people went on computing the odds of trouble when medical facilities were inadequate, no one would take any risk at all.
    Yet… there were nevertheless perplexities. Why, for instance, had he come upon this knowledge only through purposeful inquiry? Basic information about human reproduction was not obscure, and the sexual customs of the Six Worlds were known to any Scholar familiar with material about the vanished culture; there were allusions to them even in dreams. Scientific details, on the other hand—and especially those related to genetics—received practically no mention. It was almost as if references to the topic had been deliberately omitted from the reading matter of the Scholars themselves. And that was strange. Not only was access to knowledge supposed to be unrestricted, but genetics was the very thing most pertinent to understanding of the alien world’s limitations.
    Guardianship of the City was justifiable only because it was the sole alternative to genetic damage: so the Founders had believed, so all Scholars since had agreed. There was no question about this fact. But why was it thought sufficient to know that it was true if the computers had detailed information about why it was true, about the biological mechanism that produced the damage? And why hadn’t the First Scholar’s recorded thoughts dealt with the subject more fully?
    Having raised these issues, Noren could not fail to pursue them; it was not in him to let such things ride. CAN THE PROBABLE CAUSE OF THE MOTHER’S DEATH BE ESTIMATED WITHOUT HER GENOTYPE? he asked.
    NOT ACCURATELY. A ROUGH APPROXIMATION CAN BE MADE.
    That was better than nothing. SHE CONSUMED UNPURIFIED WATER, he keyed. FOR CHEMICAL ANALYSIS REFER TO MEMORY . The computers had more information about what was in it than he did, after all.
    AMOUNT AND TIME OF CONSUMPTION?
    MINIMUM DAILY RATION, FIRST SIX DAYS OF PREGNANCY OR LESS.
    FOOD DURING THIS PERIOD?
    NONE AT ALL . They had agreed to starve—there’d been no safe food, so he, Brek and Talyra had calmly discussed it and decided that starvation would be preferable to an adaptation that would lead to production of subhuman offspring. Had she even then been carrying a defective baby?
    QUALITY OF PRENATAL MEDICAL CARE?
    Again, NONE.
    ANY EXPOSURE TO RADIATION?
    No, Talyra hadn’t entered the power plant; and though he himself had worked both there and in nuclear research labs, any failure of the shielding would have been detected. No case of radiation exposure had occurred since the accident that had killed Stefred’s wife. But wait… radiation?
    There had been the mystifying radiation given off by the alien sphere.
    It had brought about their rescue. They’d found the little sphere in the mountains, an artifact from some other solar system, long ago abandoned by the mysterious Visitors who’d mined and depleted this planet’s scant metal resources before humans from the Six Worlds had arrived. He had manipulated it, made it radiate—an alarm had been triggered in the monitoring section of the computer complex. Thus an aircar had been sent out from the City and had located them. But he’d been unable to walk after retrieving the sphere from the rock niche where it had lain; it had been Talyra who, at his instructions, had carried it to the open plateau and turned it on.
    Since then, the sphere had been studied at the research outpost. It had been pronounced harmless; the radiation it emitted was of a previously unknown sort and no one could tell what it was for, but it didn’t seem to hurt anybody. It caused no mutations in fowl, the only creatures available to test it on. There were no facilities for taking it apart or attempting its duplication, but as the only artifact of the Visitors ever discovered, it had been observed with great fascination by the few Scholars fortunate enough to draw duty at the newly built outpost. Were any of those Scholars pregnant? One thing was sure—no woman who’d touched