(Or was the Aristarchy that old? The Guesser had a feeling that the government at that time had been of a different sort, but he couldn't for the life of him remember what it was. Perhaps it had been the prototype of the Aristarchy, for certainly the present system of society had existed for four or five centuries--perhaps more. The Guesser realized that his knowledge of ancient history was as confused as anyone's; after all, it wasn't his specialty. He remembered that when he was a boy, he'd heard a Teacher Exec talk about the Geological Ages of Earth and the Teacher had said that "cave men were _not_ contemporary with the dinosaur." He hadn't known what it meant at the time, since he wasn't supposed to be listening, anyway, to an Exec class, but he had realized that the histories of times past often became mixed up with each other.) At any rate, the process had gone along smoothly, even as the present process of using Class Sevens and Declassified citizens did. But in the early days there had not been the organization that existed in the present Aristarchy; planets had become lost for generations at a time. (The Guesser vaguely remembered that there had been wars of some kind during that time, and that the wars had contributed to those losses.) Some planets had civilized themselves without the intervention of the Earth government, and, when the Earth government had come along, they had fought integration with everything they could summon to help them. Most of the recalcitrant planets had eventually been subdued, but there were still many "hidden planets" which were organized as separate governments under a loose confederation. These were the Misfits. Because of the numerical superiority of the Aristarchy, and because it operated in the open instead of skulking in the darkness of space, the Misfits knew where Aristarchy planets were located, while the Aristarchy was unable to search out every planet in the multimyriads of star systems that formed the galaxy. Thus the Misfits had become pirates, preying on the merchantships of the Aristarchy. Why? No one knew. (Or, at least, The Guesser corrected himself, _he_ didn't know.) Such a non-sane culture would have non-sane reasons. The Aristarchy occupied nearly all the planets of the galaxy that could be inhabited by Man; that much The Guesser had been told. Just why Earth-type planets should occur only within five thousand light-years of the Galactic Center was a mystery to him, but, then, he was no astrophysicist. But the Sixer woman said she had heard that the Aristarchy was holding back facts; that there were planets clear out to the Periphery, all occupied by Misfits; that the legendary Earth was one of those planets; that--