“The room,” Skander pointed out to them, “is hexagonal—as the city is hexagonal, as is almost everything in it if you see it from the correct angle. The number six seems to have been essential to them. Or sacred. It is from this, and from the size and shape of the doorways, windows, and the like—not to mention the width of the walkways—that we have some idea of what the natives must have been like. We hypothesize that they were rather like a top, or turnip shape, with six limbs which may have been tentacles usable for walking or as hands. We suspect that things naturally came in sixes to them—their mathematics, their architecture, maybe they even had six eyes all around. Judging from the doors and allowing for clearance, they were about two meters tall on the average and possibly wider than that at the waist—which is where we believe the six arms, tentacles, or whatever were centered, and that must be why the doorways widen at that point.”
They stood there awhile, trying to imagine such creatures living in the rooms, moving up and down the boulevards.
“We’d best be getting back to camp,” Skander said at last. “You will have ample time to study here and to poke into every nook and cranny of the place.” They would, in fact, be there a year, working under the professor at the University station.
They walked quickly in the lighter gravity and reached the base camp about five kilometers from the city gates in under an hour.
The camp itself looked like some collection of great tents of a strange circus, nine in all, bright white like the pressure suits. Long tubes connecting the tents occasionally flexed as the monitoring computers continually adjusted the temperature and barometric pressure that kept each inflated. On such a dead world little else was needed, and the insides were lined to make punctures almost impossible. If any such did happen, though, only those in the punctured area would be killed; the computer could seal off any portion of the complex.
Skander entered last, climbing into the air lock after making certain that none of his charges or major equipment was left outside. By the time the lock equalized and allowed him into the entry tent, the others were already all or partially out of their pressure suits.
He stopped for a minute, looking at them. Eight representatives from four planets of the Confederation—and, except for the one from the heavy-gravity world, all looked alike.
All were exceptionally trim and muscular, they could be a gymnastic team without any imagination. Although they ranged in age from fourteen to twenty-two, they all looked prepubescent, which, in fact, they were. Their sexual development had been genetically arrested, and would probably continue that way. He looked at the boy, Varnett, and the girl, Jainet—both from the same planet, the name of which eluded him. The oldest and the youngest of the expedition, yet they were exactly the same height and weight, and, with heads shaved, were virtually identical twins. They had been grown in a lab, a Birth Factory, and brought up by the State to think as identically as they looked. He had once asked why they continued to make both male and female models, only half in jest. It was, of course, a redundancy system in case anything happened to the Birth Factories, he had been told.
Humanity was on at least three hundred planets, and of those all but a handful were on the same line as the world that had spawned these two. Absolute equality, he thought sourly. Look alike, behave alike, think alike, all needs provided for, all wants fulfilled in equal measure to all, assigned the work they were raised for and taught that it was the only proper place for them and their duty. He wondered how the technocrats in charge decided who was to be what.
He thought back to the last batch. Three in that number came from a world that had even dispensed with names and personal pronouns.
He wondered idly how different the human race was at this point from the creatures of the city out there.
Even on worlds like his own home world it was like this, really. True, they grew beards and group sex was the norm, something that would have totally shocked these people. His world had been founded by a group of nonconformists fleeing the technocratic communism of the outer spiral. But, in its own way, it was as conformist as Varnett’s home, he thought. Drop Varnett into a Caligristian town and he would be made fun of, called names, even, perhaps lynched. He wouldn’t have the beard, or the clothes, or the sex to fit into Caligristo’s life-style.
You can’t be a nonconformist if you don’t wear the proper uniform.
He had often wondered if there was something deep in the human psyche that insisted on tribalism. People used to fight wars not so much to protect their own life-style but to impose it on others.
That’s why so many worlds were like these people’s—there had been wars to spread the faith, convert the downtrodden. Now the Confederacy forbade that—but the existing conformity, world to world, was the status quo it protected. The leaders of each planet sat on a Council, with an enforcement arm capable of destroying any planet that strayed into “unsafe” paths and manned by specially trained barbarian psychopaths. But these weapons of terror could not be used without the actions of a majority of the Council.
It had worked. There were no more wars.
They had conformed the entire mass of humanity.
And so had the Markovians, he thought. Oh, the size and sometimes the color and workmanship of the cities had varied, but only slightly.
What had that youth, Varnett, said? Perhaps they had deliberately broken down the system?
Skander’s face had a frown as he removed the last of his pressure suit. Ideas like that marked brilliance and creativity—but they were unsafe thoughts for a civilization like the one the boy had come from. It revived those old religious ideas that after perfection came true death.
Where could he have gotten an idea like that? And why had he not been caught and stopped?
Skander looked after their naked young bodies as they filed through the tunnel toward the showers and dorm.
Only barbarians thought that way.
Had the Confederacy guessed what he was up to here? Was Varnett not the innocent student he was supposed to be, but the agent of his nightmares?
Did they suspect?
Suddenly he felt very chilly, although the temperature was constant.
Suppose they all were…
Three months passed. Skander looked at the picture on his television screen, an electron micrograph of the cellular tissue brought up a month before by the core drill.
It was the same pattern as the older discoveries—that same fine cellular structure, but infinitely more complex inside than any human or animal cell—and so tremendously alien.
And a six-sided cell, at that. He had often wondered about the why of that—had even their cells been hexagonal? Somehow be doubted it, but the way that number kept popping up he wouldn’t disbelieve it, either.
He stared and stared at the sample. Finally, he reached over and turned up the magnification to full and put on the special filters he had developed and refined in over nine years on this barren planet.
The screen suddenly came alive. Little sparks darted from one point in the cell to another. There was a minor electrical storm in the cell. He sat, fascinated as always, at the view only he had ever seen.
The cell was alive.
But the energy was not electrical—that was why it had never been picked up. He had no idea what it was, but it behaved like standard electrical energy. It just didn’t measure or appear as electricity should.