"How can 'death' be hurled?" Meikl shook himself. He was saying too much. These are the children of the past, he reminded himself, the same past that had begotten the children of space. The same traces of the ancient _kulturverlaengerung_ would live in their neural patterns, however recessive and subliminal. One thing he knew: sometime during the twenty millennia since the Exodus, they had carefully rooted out the vestigial traces of strife in their culture. The records had been systematically censored and rewritten. They were unaware of war and pogroms and persecution. History had forgotten. He decided to explain to her in terms of the substitute concepts of her understanding. "There were twelve worlds, Letha, with the same Geoark. Five of them wished to break away and establish their separate Geoark. There was a contention for property." "Was it settled?" she asked innocently. He nodded slowly. It was settled, he thought. We razed them and diseased them and interpested them and wrecked their civilizations, and revolutions reduced the remains to barbarism. If a ship landed on a former planet of the empire, the crew would be lynched and murdered. Under ven Klaeden, the ships of the Third Fleet were going to seek out an alleged colony in Ursa, to sell ships, tools, and services to a minor technology that was approaching its own space-going day, in return for immigration and nationalization rights--a young civilization full of chaotic expansion. "There is much you could not understand, Letha," he told her. "Our cultures are different. All societies go through three phases, and yours has passed through them all--perhaps into a fourth and final." "And yours, Meikl?" "I don't know. First there is the struggle to integrate in a hostile environment. Then, after integration, comes an explosive expansion of the culture--_conquest_, a word unknown to you. Then a withering of the mother-culture, and the rebellious rise of young cultures." "We were the mother-culture, Meikl?" He nodded. "And the Exodus was your birth-giving." "Now we are old and withered, Meikl?" He looked around at the garden-forests in the distance. A second childhood? he wondered. Was there a fourth phase?--a final perpetual youth that would never reach another puberty? He wondered. The coming of the sky-fleet might be a cultural coitus, but could there be conception? * * * * * A pair of junior officers came wandering along the ridge, speaking in low tones and gazing down toward the valley. There was a casual exchange of salutes as they approached the girl and the analyst. The officers wore police armbands, and they asked for Meikl's fraternization permit, using the spacer's tongue. "Deserter troubles?" he asked, as they returned his papers. "Nineteen last week," said one of the officers. "We've lost about three hundred men since we landed." "Found any of them?" "Justice Section got sixty-three. The rest are probably hopeless."