"It should be," said Kormt. "I've been their Speaker for almost a hundred years. And my father Gerlaug was before me, and his father Kormt was before him." He took a brand from the fire and held it over his pipe, puffing hard, looking up at Jorun through tangled brows. "Who was your great-grandfather?" "Why--I don't know. I imagine he's still alive somewhere, but--" "I thought so. No marriage. No family. No home. No tradition." Kormt shook, his massive head, slowly, "I pity you Galactics!" "Now please, good sir--" Damn it all, the old clodhopper could get as irritating as a faulty computer. "We have records that go back to before man left this planet. Records of everything. It is you who have forgotten." Kormt smiled and puffed blue clouds at him. "That's not what I meant." "Do you mean you think it is good for men to live a life that is unchanging, that is just the same from century to century--no new dreams, no new triumphs, always the same grubbing rounds of days? I cannot agree." * * * * * Jorun's mind flickered over history, trying to evaluate the basic motivations of his opponent. Partly cultural, partly biological, that must be it. Once Terra had been the center of the civilized universe. But the long migration starward, especially after the fall of the First Empire, drained off the most venturesome elements of the population. That drain went on for thousands of years. Sol was backward, ruined and impoverished by the remorseless price of empire, helpless before the storms of barbarian conquest that swept back and forth between the stars. Even after peace was restored, there was nothing to hold a young man or woman of vitality and imagination here--not when you could go toward Galactic center and join the new civilization building out there. Space-traffic came ever less frequently to Sol; old machines rusted away and were not replaced; best to get out while there was still time. Eventually there was a fixed psychosomatic type, one which lived close to the land, in primitive changeless communities and isolated farmsteads--a type content to gain its simple needs by the labor of hand, horse, or an occasional battered engine. A culture grew up which increased that rigidity. So few had visited Earth in the last several thousand years--perhaps one outsider a century, stopping briefly off on his way to somewhere else--that there was no challenge or encouragement to alter. The Terrans didn't _want_ more people, more machines, more anything; they wished only to remain as they were. You couldn't call them stagnant. Their life was too healthy, their civilization too rich in its own way--folk art, folk music, ceremony, religion, the intimacy of family life which the Galactics had lost--for that term. But to one who flew between the streaming suns, it was a small existence.