Lowe's right," he said when they stared at him. "I wish I could come back again, after a few hundred generations. I wonder what a whole planet of Hanlons would look like?"

"... and therefore we can say with certainty that we did not descend from Earthmen," Mach Bren concluded his report to the Venusian Archaeological Society. "For how can we possibly conceive of kinship with a people whose skin and hair are black?"

The meeting was widely televised, and over the face of the Silver Planet a hundred million other red-haired Venusians shook their heads in shocked wonderment and agreed with him.

 Prev. P 13/13