em of a single race, I don't admire them any more. I'm
simply scared."

"Yeah. Well, we've got time."

"Not much. What's their space potential this time?"

"Still scragged on the mass-inertia-relativity barrier. Tailburners ...
er, chemical reaction engines. Manned and unmanned orbital flights. Half
a dozen landings on their sister planet. No," said Huvane as he saw the
chief's puzzlement, "I don't mean Number Two ... the one they call Venus
this time. I mean their co-orbital companion. _The_ Moon. They still
call it that."

The chief looked up wonderingly. "Do you suppose," he asked solemnly,
"that there is really something called a 'racial memory'?"

"It's against all the theory," objected Huvane. "But there seems to
be--" his voice trailed off absently. It returned after some thought:
"I've tried to sort it out, just as if I were one of them. The
recurrence of their ... er ... 'names of antiquity' as they call them,
seem to recur and recur. Their Planet Two, now called Venus, was called
Astarte last time, and before that it was Ishtar."

"Other way around."

"No matter. The names are still being used and, according to their
belief, merely parallel names culled out of local pagan religious
beliefs."

The chief nodded. "That's only part of the parallelism. The big thing is
the way they follow the same pattern. Savage, agrarian, urban, right on
up the ladder according to the rules of civic science but squabbling and
battling all the way right on up and out into space. Hell, Huvane,
warfare and conflict I can both understand and cope with, but not the
Terran flavor. They don't come out bent on conquest or stellar
colonialism. They come out with their little private fight still going
on and each side lines up its volume of influence and pits one against
the other until the whole section of that spiral arm is glittering like
a sputtering spark along a train of black powder. I wish," he said
savagely, "that we could cut off that arm and fling it deep into
extragalactic space."

Huvane shook his head. "And leave the problem for our children to
solve?"

"They'll have one to solve, I think," said Chelan. "In another twenty
thousand years the Terrans will be right back doing business at the same
old stand. Unless we can solve it for once and for all right now."

Huvane looked around as if he were seeking another door to the chief's
office. "How?" he asked sarcastically. "The first time we greeted them
and they to