Trehearne read with the most intense interest, trying to pry between the stiff factual lines for whatever force it was that made men like Edri fly in the face of their own best interests. Orthis had no intention of limiting the Vardda race to his own world. He would share his mutational process with the other planets of Aldebaran, and eventually with the star-worlds the original expedition had visited, and which were highly civilized. He wished them all to share in the great new future of star-travel--they and all races that might be discovered in the galaxy with sufficiently high culture-levels to be worthy of it. But when this became known to the embryo Starmen it started a most violent reaction. All sorts of objections were raised, ranging from the selfish but, to Trehearne, quite sensible argument that the Llyrdians had the best right to the mutation, having taken all the chances and done all the work, and therefore they should keep it, at least for a while, to the solemn threat of war on a galactic scale. "Remember," said the President of the Council, "how we helped the more backward worlds of our own solar system to achieve interplanetary flight, and how they repaid us. Remember the wars we have already fought! Let us take thought before we scatter this great power broadcast among the stars." They took thought, and in spite of the impassioned arguments of Orthis and his followers they would not be hurried into a decision. The situation became so tense that Orthis' laboratory ship was sealed and impounded, and Orthis himself placed under virtual arrest. The battle in the Council Hall dragged on for years, and from the accounts it seemed to Trehearne that those fathers of the Vardda-to-be had not acted entirely from a selfish desire to hang on to a good thing. They were faced with a tremendous problem for which there was no precedent, nothing to go on but their own thoughts and feelings. Some of the Council members--the Llyrdian Congressmen--were obviously motivated by sheer hard-headed self-interest. But there were others who tried honestly to be just, and justice to their own people came first. They were afraid to share the mutation, and the control of it, with anyone. They were afraid to throw open all the unknown doors of space onto Aldebaran. The Orthists were defeated.