went on with the language lesson.
Now it was Weaver who taught, and they who learned. This, Weaver felt,
was as it should be. These creatures were not men, he told himself; he
would give himself no illusions on that score; but they might still be
capable of learning many things that he had to teach. He could do a
great deal of good, even if it turned out that he could never return to
Earth.

He rather suspected that they had no spaceships. There was something
about their life--the small villages, the slowly drifting aircars, the
absence of noise and smell and dirt, that somehow did not fit with the
idea of space travel. As soon as he was able, he asked them about it. No
they had never traveled beyond their own planet. It was a great marvel;
perhaps he could teach them how, sometime.

As their command of written English improved, he catechized them about
themselves and their planet. The world, as he knew already, was much
like Earth as to atmosphere, gravity and mean temperature. It occurred
to him briefly that he had been lucky to hit upon such a world, but the
thought did not stick; he had no way of knowing just how improbable his
luck had been.

They themselves were, as he had thought, simple beings. They had a
written history of some twelve thousand of their years, which he
estimated to be about nine thousand of his. Their technical
accomplishments, he had to grant, equalled Earth's and in some cases
surpassed them. Their social organization was either so complex that it
escaped him altogether, or unbelievably simple. They did not, so far as
he could discover, have any political divisions. They did not make war.

They were egg-layers, and they controlled their population simply by
means of hatching only as many eggs as were needed to replace their
natural losses.

* * * * *

Just when it first struck Weaver that he was their appointed ruler it
would be hard to say. It began, perhaps, that afternoon in the aircar;
or a few days later when he made his first timid request--for a house of
his own. The request was eagerly granted, and he was asked how he would
like the house constructed. Half timidly, he drew sketches of his own
suburban home in Schenectady; and they built it, swarms of them working
together, down to the hardwood floors and the pneumatic furniture and
the picture mouldings and the lampshades.

Or perhaps the idea crystallized when he asked to see some of their
nativ