Then he went on to describe the way he had tried, in his feeble, mechanical way to do that which he had been ordered to do. When he had finished his apologetic summary, he said, "But time grows ever shorter and I fear that even my carefully made cortex is beginning to go bad. Listen closely for I have no idea when I will cease to function. "The mistakes I have made, have been errors of commission not omission. When I have failed it was because not even the scientists who made me could foretell what was to be, as no man can. "I was told, just before the death of the scientist who finished me, that the reason all our people were driven from earth was because they were vestigial hangovers from what he called an inner-directed culture. An inner-directed culture is always the result of an historical period when the death rate is higher than the birth rate. This kind of culture possesses certain attributes which serve pioneers well, because these inner-directed people have a strong sense of right and wrong, they believe implicitly in black and white evils and virtues. But in our world the birth rate is now, because of my machinations, about equal to the death rate, our people live longer, few children are lost at birth, there is enough food to go around, and so it is time to evolve from an inner-directed culture to a more sophisticated one which has been called an other-directed culture. "Such a culture is hesitant to make value judgments, it can no longer appraise the foibles of other human beings; the righteousness of the inner-directed person gives way to the more adult approach that right and wrong are after all purely subjective concepts. "These people can be more objective and since they can, they must inevitably be less prone to throw the first stone. "There are many concommittants of such a culture, but to you will be the wonder and the glory of discovering them. This is your next step. "Take it wisely." * * * * * It was long before all that The Grandfather said made any sense to his hearers, but all of them remembered the words until the time came that they became understandable. The last thing that The Grandfather said was, "In the old world from which we came, the earliest known culture was one called an ancestor-directed culture. This was understandable in a period when the death rate was so high and old age rare. Old age became magical since so few possessed it. Then as the elderliness alone ceased to be unique they ascended to the next culture pattern, the one I have described as the inner-directed culture. When your ancestors were sent away from earth almost all the earth people had become other-directed. What has happened in this long hiatus in which we've been out of touch with mother earth I cannot hazard an opinion.