Orena and Xeluchli meant well. But had
they obeyed the rules, had they remained
bodiless observers, they would have saved
BUP, that .O2F star, a hellaceous catastrophe.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories March 1952.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
It was a perfectly conventional tour, once around the Milky Way withstops at several of the major stars. It was supposed to take abouteighty-eight million years so they planned to be back for supper.
In the beginning the students had remained in a fairly close knotaround mundo Karftahiti, their instructor, but as the tour progressedsome of the more venturesome strayed further and further from the restof the class.
Dro Orena and Dro Xeluchli had wandered a greater distance than usualfrom the crowd and were jamming experimental thought webs into a largespace vortex when Xeluchli signalled to Orena to tune her mind off thelecture frequency. It was against the rules, of course, but then Orenasupposed Xeluchli would take the blame for her if they were caught, soshe switched over to the conversational band.
"Want to have some fun?" asked Xeluchli.
Orena continued to stare into the space vortex. "How?" she asked.
Xeluchli waved a visible thought fragment in a circle about him. "Thestars," he said. "Let's explore a little on our own. They never hit thereally good spots on these tours."
Orena had been thinking for a long time of doing that very thing so shehardly argued at all before letting Xeluchli convince her.
"We'll be gone only a little while and they'll never miss us," saidXeluchli as they headed for a nearby star-cluster.
Everything would have been all right if they had obeyed the rules."Hands off the planets," the rules said, and that was really areasonable and intelligent demand. In all fairness to them, it must beadmitted that Orena and Xeluchli had no intention of breaking that rulewhen they strayed away from the rest of the crowd.
They found this little planet which was listed in the textbook as"BuP"; an .02F star with nine planets. By a lucky chance they were justin time to see a transient little civilization spring into being on itsthird planet. This was too wonderful a chance to miss so they decidedto stay a few hundred thousand years and see how it would end. Theywould catch up with the rest of the tour afterward.
The creatures entering into civilization were bipeds and of a physicalappearance rather low on the aesthetic scale but Orena and Xeluchlisoon discovered that they were bi-sexual. This pleased them very muchand made them feel that they had something in common with this littlecivilization, for Orena and Xeluchli were bi-sexuals too, and bi-sexualcivilizations were rare. Orena and Xeluchli had, in fact, been theonly bi-sexuals in the touring group, which had been composed mostlyof the slow-moving amoeboids from Procyon and the emotionally unstablepenta-sexuals from Antares.
It was a land civilization which they had found and, just as thetextbooks said, it was having its beginning in the river deltas ofthe continents. The bipeds were both herbivorous and carnivorous andthe duration and bloodiness of their early wars was almost exactly aspredicted by Globnung's food-war formula. The speed of advance of thecivilization was a little slow, but still comfortably within the lowerlimits of the Atati equation.
Everything went well for the first five thousand years, but then Orenaand Xeluchli began to catch signs of Gibrait's anachronism. Theywatched anxiously for a while, and soon they saw that their fearshad