"They're ready to go," he said. "I hope you haven't made a mistake in what you did. The other Terrans will learn of us now, and when they come...." He let the sentence trail off, unfinished. "We have a great deal to gain by the coming of the Terrans," Tal-Karanth said, "and little to lose." "Little to lose?" Vor-Dergal asked. "We have Tharnar and the City to lose; we have our lives and our civilization to lose." "Yes, our civilization," Tal-Karanth said. "Our god that we worshipped--our civilization. Look, Vor--listen to what I have to say: "I did some thinking the night the Terrans were waiting to be executed. I'm afraid it was probably one of the few times for thousands of years that a Tharnarian ever tried to critically examine the Tharnarian way of life. I started from the beginning, more than fifty thousand years ago, when the interstellar ships of Tharnar were actually interstellar and were manned by men instead of robots. "It was a good start we made in interstellar exploration, but it didn't last very long. We wanted to associate with our cultural peers, and there weren't any. We didn't attempt to make any contact with the primitive races we found. We felt that there would be no point in doing so. Tharnar possessed the highest--and the only--civilization in all the explored regions of the galaxy and younger races had nothing to offer us. "The time came when no more exploration ships were sent out. We retired to Tharnar and Vendal and surrounded them with a robot-operated fleet, to keep out the inferior races when they finally did learn how to build spaceships. We devoted ourselves to our social culture and became imbued with self-satisfaction, with the assurance that we of Tharnar possessed the full flowering of culture and progress. We withdrew into a shell of complacency and each generation lived out its life with comfortable, methodical, sameness. And our robot-operated fleet was on guard to prevent any other race from annoying us, from disturbing us in the wisdom and serenity of our way of life. "Fifteen thousand years ago, the last of us on Vendal returned to the more ideal world of Tharnar. And there was plenty of room for them on Tharnar by then. The population had been decreasing for thousands of years--it's decreasing right now. Women don't want to have children anymore--it's an inconvenience for them. They want comfort; the full stomach, the soft couch, the attention of their robots. And men are the same. "There is no longer any incentive for living on Tharnar other than to duplicate the lives of our ancestors. There is nothing new, nothing to be done that has not already been done better. So we lapse into an existence of placid satisfaction with the status quo--we vegetate. We're like plants that have been seeded in the same field for so many centuries that the fertility of the soil is exhausted. This barren field in which we grow is our own form of culture. "Do you see what the ultimate end will have to be, Vor?"