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theprowess of their machines. If so, theirs must be a hungry breed. One could see it. Hans Demetrios was physically not in the least like Jacob Chen, and yet the thing they had in common showed in their starving-bright eyes, their tense cheek-muscles, their ability to attain utter repose when their minds were engaged in the sort of analysis no one else would dare to tackle.
    Pantologists, they were called. The name meant, approximately, students of everything. Hans was young but already outstanding in their company. He would go far. Already he was out of reach of Fay Logan, who had thought she loved him.
    She had tried to keep in touch. She knew the tools with which people investigated the cosmos; she understood the superimbecility of computers, which generations of cunning disguise had transformed into what ordinary folk mistook for superior intelligence. She worked with them all the time. With terrible exhausting concentration and provided she was not disturbed by so much as the drift of a dust-mote across her vision, she could voice-program a computer to the extent of a few thousand words before there came the inevitable mild inquiry concerning an implicit contradiction, to be verified and remedied. Whereas, so rumour held, Jacob Chen could speak a program of a million words or more without an error, taking a month over it, and never ask for prompting or even make a note. All in the head. All at once.
    As for Hans… Today she had seen him finish the program for the Ipewell Bridge, not because it had been contracted for but purely to keep himself occupied. He had spent a fortnight on it, ten hours a day, pausing for meals and sleep, and made not a single error. Not even one, that might have helped to prove he was still human.
    One could walk into the room where he was atwork, and he would look up when he had adjusted to the need to be distracted, and nod and smile, and keep right on going.
    He lives in a different universe, Fay thought. And it’s so unfair that he can still come back and talk to us, and I can’t reach out to where he’s gone…
    “I’ll explain,” Hans was saying confidentially to the two boys. “I suppose you’ve wondered how people so much like yourselves can come down from the sky-yes? Well, to put it as simply as possible, it’s because those lights you see in the night sky are actually suns, like the one which warms this planet by day. You know about planets, yes? Good! I wasn’t sure how much boys get told around here!” And a warm chuckle which made them visibly relax.
    Unfair! Unfair!
    “We started to spread out from our first planet, the Earth, many centuries ago. I won’t try and give you all the reasons—sometimes they were political, sometimes economic, but mainly they were just a case of good old-fashioned restlessness. After all, our ancestors had been stuck on one ball of mud for millions of years, and it sort of felt like time for a change. And Ipewell is one of the places people came to, determined to colonise and change it. But a planet is big, and human beings are small. You need a lot of people to conquer a new world, many more than can be kept alive in a single starship. So usually the colonists took with them sperm and ova banks and artificial wombs, so as to be able to breed very rapidly as soon as they found a habitable world.
    “As we’ve pieced it together, some terrible disaster—perhaps an earthquake, or a tidal wave—destroyed all this kind of equipment shortly after the first landing here on Ipewell. Which was a real tragedy, because this is one of the most ideal planets we’ve ever come across: no major natural predators, no seriouslocal diseases, nothing that couldn’t be handled with ordinary enterprise and common sense. In fact, this is
the
most Earthlike planet out of the forty we so far know about.”
    Impressed, the boys gave simultaneous nods.
    “But to colonise it, your ancestors desperately needed a large-scale population. Given that they