of years after the pyramids had been built. Diocletian, the Roman emperor, made all occupations hereditary. The Soviets are trying that sort of thing at this moment, if they haven't been overthrown since we left. The Zolotoyans were unlucky: their attempt succeeded."

He shrugged. "When one individual is made exactly like another—when independent thought is no longer needed, is actually forbidden—what do you expect? Evolution gets rid of organs which have stopped being useful. That includes the thinking brain."

"But all that you saw—space travel, police functions, chemical analysis and synthesis, maintaining those wonderful machines—it is all done by instinct?" protested Ximénez. "No, I cannot believe it!"

"Instinct isn't completely rigid, you know," said Holbrook. "Even a simple one-loop homeostatic circuit is amazingly flexible and adaptive. Remember ants or bees or termites on Earth. In their own way, they have societies as intricate as anything known to me. They even have a sort of stylized language, as do our neighbors here. Actually, I suspect the average ant faces more variety and challenge in his life than does the ordinary Zolotoyan. Remember, they have no natural enemies any more; and for tens of thousands of years, all the jobs on that highly automated planet have been stereotyped.

"The mine guards on Novaya ignored our rocket trails beyond the mountains because—oh, to their perception it couldn't have been very different from lightning, say. But they had long ago evolved an instinct to shoot at unknown visitors, simply because large Novayan animals could interfere with operations. At home, they have little or no occasion to fight. But apparently they, like the green technicians, have an inborn obedience to the computer signals."

"Yes," said Ximénez. "The computer, what was it?"

Holbrook sighed. "I suppose it was built in the last dying age of reason. Some atavistic genius (how lonely he must have been!) realized what was happening. Sooner or later, visitors from space were sure to arrive. He wanted to give his descendants at least a little defense against them. He built that machine, which could try to identify them, could give a few simple orders about their disarmament and care and feeding, that sort of thing. He used some controlled-mutation process to breed the technicians that serviced it, and the obedience of the guards. Or perhaps it was enough to institute a set of laws. There'd be natural selection toward an instinct.... It really wasn't much he could do. 

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