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the scarcity wouldn’t have bothered the Captain.) “That’s why I was on New Chicago when the rebellion broke out.”
    Nods of acceptance from Sinclair and Sally Fowler; Blaine with his posture too still and face too blank; Whitbread nudging Staley— Wait’ll I tell you —gave Bury most of what he wanted to know. Suspicions, but nothing confirmed, nothing official. “You have a fascinating vocation,” he told Sally before the silence could stretch. “Tell us more, won’t you? Have you seen many primitive worlds?”
    “None at all,” she said ruefully. “I know about them only from books. We would have gone on to visit Harlequin, but the rebellion—” She stopped.
    “I was on Makassar once,” said Blaine.
    She brightened instantly. “There was a whole chapter on that one. Very primitive, wasn’t it?”
    “It still is. There wasn’t a big colony there to begin with. The whole industrial complex was smashed down to bedrock in the Secession Wars, and nobody visited the place for four hundred years. They had an Iron Age culture by the time we got there. Swords. Mail armor. Wooden seagoing sailing ships.”
    “But what were the people like?” Sally asked eagerly. “How did they live?”
    Rod shrugged, embarrassed. “I was only there a few days. Hardly time enough to get the feel of a world. Years ago, when I was Staley’s age. I remember mostly looking for a good tavern.” After all, he wanted to add, I’m not an anthropologist.
    The conversation drifted on. Rod felt tired, and looked for a polite opportunity to bring the dinner to a close. The others seemed rooted to their seats.
    “Ye study cultural evolution,” Sinclair was saying earnestly, “and perhaps that’s wise. But could we nae have physical evolution as well? The First Empire was verra large and sparsely spread, with room enough for almost anything. May we no find somewhere, off in some neglected corner of the old Empire, a planet full o’ supermen?”
    Both midshipmen looked suddenly alert. Bury asked,
    “What would physical evolution of humans bring, my lady?”
    “They used to teach us that evolution of intelligent beings wasn’t possible,” she said. “Societies protect their weaker members. Civilizations tend to make wheel chairs and spectacles and hearing aids as soon as they have the tools for them. When a society makes war, the men generally have to pass a fitness test before they’re allowed to risk their lives. I suppose it helps win the war.” She smiled. “But it leaves precious little room for the survival of the fittest.”
    “But suppose,” Whitbread suggested, “suppose a culture were knocked even further back than Makassar? All the way to complete savagery: clubs and fire. There’d be evolution then, wouldn’t there?”
    Three glasses of wine had overcome Sally’s black mood, and she was eager to talk of professional matters. Her uncle often told her she talked too much for a lady, and she tried to watch herself, but wine always did it to her—wine and a ready audience. It felt good, after weeks of nothingness.
    “Certainly,” she said. “Until a society evolved. You’d have natural selection until enough humans got together to protect each other from the environment. But it isn’t long enough. Mr. Whitbread, there is a world where they practice ritual infanticide. The elders examine children and kill the ones who don’t conform to their standards of perfection. It’s not evolution, exactly, but you might get some results that way—except that it hasn’t been long enough.”
    “People breed horses. And dogs,” Rod observed.
    “Yes. But they haven’t got a new species. Ever. And societies can’t keep constant rules long enough to make any real changes in the human race. Come again in a million years— Of course there were the deliberate attempts to breed supermen. Like Sauron System.”
    Sinclair grunted. “Those beasties,” he spat. “‘Twas they started the Secession Wars and nearly