Originating as a social-colonizing lichen, on a heavy planet, with--even at its prime--a barely adequate atmosphere, the Arlemites combined smallness of individual size with limited locomotive powers and superior air and water retentive ability. They developed, inevitably, as a highly psioid culture--as far to one end of the psichophysical scale as the Terrans are to the other. (My spelling up there. I think it represents true meaning better than "psycho".) The constantly thinning choice between physical relocation and a conscious evolutionary measure which this mature psioid race was far better equipped to undertake: the Arlemites now exist as a planet-wide diffusion of single-celled entities, comprising just one individual, and a whole species. * * * * * (Visual stuff here helps establish concept--as if you or I just extended the space between cells.) * * * * * It seems especially ironic that the Arlemites were not only one of the oldest and most psioid of peoples--so that they had virtually all the accumulated knowledge of the Galaxy at their disposal--but were also symbiote products. This background might have enabled them to comprehend the Terran mind and the problems confronting the visitors--except for the accidental combination of almost total psi-blindness in the Terrans, and the single-sexed complement of the ship. The visitors could not perceive their hosts. The hosts could find no way to communicate with the visitors. The full complement of the ship, eventually, came down in launches, and lived in them, hopelessly, while they learned that their viability had indeed been completely lost in space. There was no real effort to return to the ship and continue the voyage. The ranks thinned, discipline was lost, deaths proliferated. Finally, it was only a child's last act of rebelliousness that mitigated the futility of the tragedy. The last child saw the last adult die, and saw this immobility as an opportunity to break the most inviolable of rules. She went out of the launch--into near-airlessness that killed her within minutes. But minutes were more than enough, with the much longer time afterwards for examination of the dead brain. It was through the mind of this one child, young enough to be still partially free of the rigid mental framework that made adult Terrans so inaccessible to Arlemites, that the basis was gained for most of the knowledge we now have. Sorrowingly, the Arlemites generated an organism to decompose the Terrans and their artifacts, removing all traces of tragedy from the planet's surface. Meanwhile, they studied what they had learned, against future needs. * * * * *