organized beings like men could not live where there was no other life.

So the Survey-Ship Tethys made sure that the world had no life upon it. Then it made routine measurements of the gravitational constant and the magnetic field and the temperature gradient; it took samples of the air and water. But that was all. The rocks were familiar enough. No novelties there! But the planet was simply useless. The survey-ship put its findings on a punched card, six inches by eight, and went hastily on in search of something better. The ship did not even open one of its ports while on the planet. There were no consequences of the Tethys' visit except that card. None whatever.

No other ship came near the planet for eight hundred years.

Nearly a millenium later, however, the Seed-Ship Orana arrived. By that time humanity had spread very widely and very far. There were colonies not less than a quarter of the way to the Galaxy's rim, and Earth was no longer over-crowded. There was still emigration, but it was now a trickle instead of the swarming flood of centuries before. Some of the first-colonized worlds had emigrants, now. Mankind did not want to crowd itself together again! Men now considered that there was no excuse for such monstrous slums as overcrowding produced.

Now, too, the star-ships were faster. A hundred light-years was a short journey. A thousand was not impractical. Explorers had gone many times farther, and reported worlds still waiting for mankind on beyond. But still the great majority of discovered planets did not contain life. Whole solar systems floated in space with no single living cell on any of their members.

So the Seed-Ships came into being. Theirs was not a glamorous service. They merely methodically contaminated the sterile worlds with life. The Seed-Ship Orana landed on this planet—which still had no name. It carefully infected it. It circled endlessly above the clouds, dribbling out a fine dust,—the spores of every conceivable microörganism which could break down rock to powder, and turn that dust to soil. It was also a seeding of moulds and fungi and lichens, and everything which could turn powdery primitive soil into stuff on which higher forms of life could grow. The Orana polluted the seas with plankton. Then it, too, went away.

More centuries passed. Human ships again improved. A thousand light-years became a short journey. Explorers reached the Galaxy's very edge, and looked estimatingly across the emptiness toward other island universes. 

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