"Nevertheless, I reserve the right granted to me to explore any world we land on, for a period of at least one hundred sixty-eight hours," Leopold returned implacably. Exasperated, Mattern burst out, "Dammit, _why_? Just to spite me? Just to prove the innate intellectual superiority of the scientist to the man of war?" "Mattern, I'm not injecting personalities into this." "I'd like to know what you are doing, then? Here we are on a world that's obviously useless to me and probably just as useless to you. Yet you stick me on a technicality and force me to waste a week here. Why, if not out of spite?" "We've made only the most superficial reconnaissance so far," Leopold said. "For all we know this place may be the answer to many questions of galactic history. It may even be a treasure-trove of superbombs, for all--" "Pretty damned likely!" Mattern exploded. He glared around the conference room, fixing each of the scientific members of the committee with a baleful stare. He was making it quite clear that he was trapped into a wasteful expense of time by our foggy-eyed desire for Knowledge. Useless knowledge. Not good hard practical knowledge of the kind _he_ valued. "All right," he said finally. "I've protested and I've lost, Leopold. You're within your rights in insisting on remaining here one week. But you'd damned well better be ready to blast off when your time's up!" * * * * * It had been foregone all along, of course. The charter of our expedition was explicit on the matter. We had been sent out to comb a stretch of worlds near the Galactic Rim that had already been brushed over hastily by a survey mission. The surveyors had been looking simply for signs of life, and, finding none (of course), they had moved on. We were entrusted with the task of investigating in detail. Some of the planets in the group had been inhabited once, the surveyors had reported. None bore present life. None of the planets we had ever visited had been found to hold intelligent life, though many had in the past. Our job was to comb through the assigned worlds with diligence. Leopold, leading our group, had the task of doing pure archaeological research on the dead civilizations; Mattern and his men had the more immediately practical job of looking for fissionable material, leftover alien weapons, possible sources of lithium or tritium for fusion, and other such militarily useful things. You might argue that in a strictly pragmatic sense our segment of the group was just dead weight, carted along for the ride at great expense, and you would be right. But the public temper over the last few hundred years in America has frowned on purely military expeditions. And so, as a sop to the nation's conscience, five archaeologists of little empirical consequence so far as national security mattered were tacked onto the expedition. Us.