A race so young could not possess a civilized culture. The Terrans were--he searched for a suitable description--barbarians in spaceships. They lacked the refinement and wisdom of the Tharnarians; they were a dangerous and unpredictable race. It could be seen in their history; could be seen in the way the two Terrans had reacted to their capture. He pressed one of the many buttons along the edge of his desk and a three-dimensional projection appeared; the scene that had taken place one hundred and eighty days before when the Terrans were brought to Tharnar. The ship of the Terrans stood bright silver in the sunlight, slim and graceful against the bulk of the Executive Building behind it. The Terrans descended the boarding ramp, the left wrist of the man chained to the right wrist of the girl. Two armed robots walked behind them, their faces metallically impassive, and four armed Tharnarian guards waited at the bottom of the ramp to help take the Terrans to their place of imprisonment. The Terrans approached the guards with a watchfulness that reminded him of the old films of the coast wolves that had once lived on Vendal. They did not walk with the studied, practiced, leisure of the Tharnarians but as though they held some unknown vitality barely in check. The face of the man was lean and hard, the black eyes inscrutable as flint. The girl looked at the guards with a bold nonchalance, as though they were really not formidable at all. Somehow, by contrast with the Terrans, the guards appeared to be not grimly vigilant but only colorless. There seemed to be a menace in the way the man watched the guards; there was the impression that he would overpower them and sieze their weapons if given a shadow of a chance. And the girl--what would she do, then? Would she flash in beside him to help him, as the female coast wolves always helped their mates? He switched off the projection, feeling a little repugnance at the thought of executing the Terrans. They were living, sentient beings, and intelligent, for all their lack of civilization. It would have been better if they had been of some repulsive and alien physical form, such as bloated, many-legged giant insects. But they were not at all repulsive; they were exactly like the Tharnarians. Exactly? He shook his head. Not exactly. The similarity was only to the eye--and not even to the eye when one looked closely, as he had looked at the images. There was a potential violence about them, lurking close beneath their deceptively Tharnarian physical appearance. The Terrans were not like the Tharnarians. There was a difference of fifty thousand years between them; the difference between savage barbarianism and a great and peaceful civilization. He looked again across the City, listening to its softly murmuring voice. In hundreds of centuries the City had known no strife or violence. But what if the barbarians should come, not two of them, but thousands? What would they do?