"One day you will come to the end of the block," said Guy, "and find that the grass is no greener anywhere, with the exception that you now have no more grass to look at, plus the sorry fact that you cannot return. A million galactic years from now, Ertene will have passed through the galaxy and will find herself looking at intergalactic space. Then what?" "Then our children will learn to live in a starless sky for _a_ hundred thousand generations. Solarians live in a sky of constant placement; Ertene's sky is ever changing and all sky maps are obsolete in thirty or forty years. You must remember that to us, wandering is the normal way of life. Some of us believe that we may eventually return to our parent sun. We may. But all of us believe that we would find our parent sun no more interesting than others. No Guy, I doubt that we will stop there either." "You are assuming that you will not remain at Sol?" "We are a shy planet. We do not like to change our way of life. You are asking us to give up our life and to accept yours. It is similar to a man asking a woman to marry. But a woman is not completely reversed in her life when she marries. Here you are asking us to cleave unto you forever--and there is no bond of love to soften the hard spots." "I did mention the bond of brotherhood," said Guy. "Brotherhood with what?" asked Terokar. "You ask us to enter a bond of twinship with a planet that is the center of strife. You ask us in the name of similarity to join you--and help you gain mastery over the Solar System." "And why not?" "Which of you is right? Is the Terran combine more righteous than the Martian alliance?" "Certainly." "Why?" Guy asked for a moment to think. The room was silent for a moment and then he said, slowly and painfully: "I can think of no other reason than the trite and no-answer reason: 'We're right because we're right!' The Martian combine fights us to gain the land and the commerce that we have taken because of superiority in space." "A superiority given merely because of sheer size," said Baranon. "The Martians, raised under a gravity of less than one third of Terra's find it difficult to keep pace with the Terrans, who can live under three times as much acceleration. Battle under such conditions is unfair, and the fact that the Martians have been able to survive indicates that their code is not entirely wrong." Charalas nodded. "Any code that is entirely in error will not be able to survive." "So," said Terokar, "you ask us to join your belligerent system. You ask us to emerge from our pleasure and join you in a struggle for existence. You ask that we give up the peace that has survived for a thousand years, and in doing so you ask that we come willingly and permit our cities to be war-scarred and our men killed. You ask that we join in battle against a smaller, less adapted race that still is able to survive in spite of its ill-adaption to the rigors of space." Guy was silent.