ny progress."

"Yes, but of course planets are probably pretty much the same
everywhere--Tellus-type ones, I mean, of course. Is all the Xenology as
cockeyed as I'm afraid it must be?"

"Check. The one basic assumption was that there are no human beings
other than Tellurians. From that they derive the secondary assumption
that humanoid types will be scarce. From there they scatter out in all
directions. So I'll have to roll my own. I've got to see Atterlin,
anyway. I'll be back for supper. So long."

* * *

At the Port Office, Grand Lady Neldine met him even more
enthusiastically than before; taking both his hands and pressing them
against her firm, almost-bare breasts. She tried to hold back as Garlock
led her along the corridor.

"I have an explanation, and in a sense an apology, for you, Grand Lady
Neldine, and for you, Governor Atterlin," he thought carefully. "I would
have explained yesterday, but I had no understanding of the situation
here until our anthropologist, Lola Montandon, elucidated it very
laboriously to me. She herself, a scientist highly trained in that
specialty, could grasp it only by referring back to somewhat similar
situations which may have existed in the remote past--so remote a past
that the concept is known only to specialists and is more than half
mythical, even to them."

He went on to give in detail the sexual customs, obligations, and
limitations of Lola's purely imaginary civilization.

"Then it isn't that you don't want to, but you _can't_?" the lady asked,
incredulously.

"Mentally, I can have no desire. Physically, the act is impossible," he
assured her.

"What a shame!" Her thought was a peculiar mixture of disappointment and
relief: disappointment in that she was not to bear this man's
super-child; relief in that, after all, she had not personally
failed--if she couldn't have this perfectly wonderful man herself, no
other woman except his wife could ever have him, either. But what a
shame to waste such a man as that on _any_ one woman! It was really too
bad.

"I see ... I see--wonderful!" Atterlin's thought was not at all
incredulous, but vastly awed. "It is of course logical that as the power
of mind increases, physical matters become less and less important. But
you will have much to give us; we may perhaps have some small things to
give you. If we could visit your Tellus, perhaps...?"

"That also is impossible. We four in the _Pleiades_