still unbroken, provided a broad view of the highway and the clearing in front of the building.

The restaurant was bitterly cold. Tchassen pulled the rough, fibrous clothing tight around his shoulders, but it felt irritating rather than warm. He looked out on the ice and the snow and the pines, and he was acutely conscious of the savage alienness of Earth.

Snow he knew as a scientific curiosity; he had seen it created in laboratory experiments. Nowhere in the civilized galaxy did it exist as a natural phenomenon. The teeming billions of people crowding every world could not survive unless every square inch of soil was occupied and exploited. Science regimented the temperatures in the same way that it controlled rainfall. For more than twenty centuries neither deserts nor Arctic wastes had existed. All animal species had disappeared. Trees survived only as ornamental growths in city parks. The Earth was a relic of the past, a barbaric museum piece. The strong, individualistic genius of its people had evolved in no other society; and that genius had created a technology which mushroomed far beyond the capacity to control it. It gave this savage world atomic power before it had planetary unity.

For that reason, the civilized galaxy had invaded the Earth. They could do nothing else. The decision had been made long before Tchassen was born. The galactic council of scientists studied the Earth and argued the meaning of their observations for a quarter of a century before they ordered the invasion. War, to the civilized galaxy, was unthinkable; yet the government had no alternative. For, with even their primitive form of atomic power, the Earth people could blow their world to dust. The planet had to be occupied to save the natives from the consequences of their own folly.

But what does it matter, Tchassen thought bitterly, if our intentions were noble and unselfish? It's what Earth thinks we meant to do that counts. And by that standard we've failed. We have no right to be here.

Alone in the cold darkness of the abandoned restaurant, Tchassen faced the fear gnawing at his soul. The drug he had taken warped his depression into a crushing weight of melancholy. The occupation of the Earth had gone wrong—or so it seemed to him—because the council of scientists misjudged the native mentality. True, these people had created a brilliant technology, but it didn't follow that they would comprehend the social forces at work in the civilized galaxy. Their emotional reactions were at best on an adolescent level; intelligence 

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