He had not fired many bolts into the computer when its siren went quiet. He assumed that the orders it had been giving were thereby canceled. He took the woman and they walked away from the pathetically scurrying greens, out into the hallway, past a few guards who ignored them, and so to a flying platform. CHAPTER VII Under the tall fair heaven of Novaya, Holbrook spoke to the chief of the human outpost. "You can call them back from the _Rurik_," he said. "There is no more danger." "But what are the Zolotoyans?" asked Ximénez. His eyes went in fear toward the mountains. "If they are not intelligent beings, then who ... what ... created their civilization?" "Their ancestors," said Holbrook. "A very long time ago. They were great once. But they ended up with a totalitarian government. A place for everyone and everyone in his place. The holy society, whose very stasis was holy. Specialized breeds for the different jobs. Some crude attempts at it have been made on Earth, too. Egypt didn't change for thousands of years after the pyramids had been built. Diocletian, the Roman emperor, made all occupations hereditary. The Soviets are trying that sort of thing at this moment, if they haven't been overthrown since we left. The Zolotoyans were unlucky: their attempt succeeded." He shrugged. "When one individual is made exactly like another--when independent thought is no longer needed, is actually forbidden--what do you expect? Evolution gets rid of organs which have stopped being useful. That includes the thinking brain." "But all that you saw--space travel, police functions, chemical analysis and synthesis, maintaining those wonderful machines--it is all done by instinct?" protested Ximénez. "No, I cannot believe it!" "Instinct isn't completely rigid, you know," said Holbrook. "Even a simple one-loop homeostatic circuit is amazingly flexible and adaptive. Remember ants or bees or termites on Earth. In their own way, they have societies as intricate as anything known to me. They even have a sort of stylized language, as do our neighbors here. Actually, I suspect the average ant faces more variety and challenge in his life than does the ordinary Zolotoyan. Remember, they have no natural enemies any more; and for tens of thousands of years, all the jobs on that highly automated planet have been stereotyped. "The mine guards on Novaya ignored our rocket trails beyond the mountains because--oh, to their perception it couldn't have been very different from lightning, say. But they had long ago evolved an instinct to shoot at unknown visitors, simply because large Novayan animals could interfere with operations. At home, they have little or no occasion to fight. But apparently they, like the green technicians, have an inborn obedience to the computer signals." "Yes," said Ximénez. "The computer, what was it?"