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have a vitally important mission to think of, far from home, with never enough people and slender resources. We can't afford the kind of agitation that we see in the news from back home. We don't bring people this distance to spend their time promoting disruptive agendas that have no place here. I trust that we can count on you to watch for any signs, and if necessary impress whatever cautions are necessary to nip them in the bud."

    "Of course." Kyal nodded that he understood.

    His own position on such matters was divided. On the one hand, who could disagree with the suggestion that more efficient use of resources in a harsh environment like that of Venus, and a fairer recognition of talents constituted desirable aims? He didn't see that concerted moves to bring about improvement could ever be a bad thing. At the same time, he couldn't deny holding a certain respect for the values enshrined in the traditional principles of open debate, freedom of individual choice, and in the end letting everyone follow the direction that their reason and their consciences dictated. Such things hadn't come to be accepted lightly, but only after generations of trial and experience. They shouldn't be thrown away lightly or impetuously either. It was the kind of attitude that Jarnor had brought to his science: using the tried and tested methods for as long as they seemed favored,, but not hesitating to abandon them when facts, evidence, and not uncommonly feelings and an indefinable intuition too, said the time had come to move on. It was also the way he lived his life—and no doubt, too, one of the strongest influences that had guided Kyal in forming his own view of the world.

CHAPTER FOUR

    Although there had apparently been some who tried to point out the obvious, the mainstream of Terran science had refused to recognize that Venus was a much younger planet than Earth—even after sending down surface probes of their own when its surface and atmosphere were still forming. The maturer conditions of Earth had proved so much more hospitable that several Venusian researchers had suggested, not always jokingly, that they should consider moving their whole culture there.

    The Terrans' error was another consequence of their assumption of gravity being the sole means of shaping the Solar System, and missing the importance of electrical forces involved in causing ejection of lesser objects from gas giants by fission. This led them to construct a theory in which all bodies had formed together out of a collapsing dust cloud, and hence had to be the same age. When data started coming back from Venus clearly telling of the hot, primordial conditions there, they invented a notion of a runaway atmospheric greenhouse to account for it.

    In this they revealed an extraordinary capacity for self-delusion that resulted from their tendency to twist the evidence to fit a theory that they had convinced themselves had to be right—as if fervency of belief could somehow affect the fact. This typified the negation of science as it was taught on Venus, and as Kyal had learned it from Jarnor, where one of the essential disciplines to be mastered at the outset was learning to recognize and suppress desires and preconceptions, and simply follow where the evidence led.

    Emur Frazin, the psychobiologist among the company on the ship out, had held this to be the most significant psychological difference setting Terrans and Venusians apart. Looking for reasons for it was a big part of the work that had brought him here. The same underlying philosophy pertained too to the managing of Venusian political and social affairs. Or at least it did traditionally. And this would explain Sherven's reservations toward militant demands for changes in public policy from quarters he saw as allowing thinking to be dominated more by ideologies of how things ought to be, instead of by the simple and practical lessons that experience taught of what worked and what didn't.

     

    Even