Folsom’s Planet, according to Stark’s best deductions, was uniformly in an agrarian or (in the isolated sectors) preagrarian stage. The age of the civilization which we had observed could have been more than five thousand years and internal evidence provided indicated that it was quite a typical society; that Folsom’s Planet was composed of two to three hundred tribes living throughout the thinly populated corridors of the planet, these tribes only in most marginal communication with each other. Occasionally nomads or madmen exiled from their cultures would wander a far distance but by definition nomads or madmen had little to communicate, were of low credibility. The tribes existed virtually independently of one another. Stark speculated that they were all within similar levels of agrarian achievement; none of them had entered the state of technology. If they had, there would have been inferences of cross-cultural seeding. That was how he put it. “Cross-cultural seeding.”
The tribes probably averaged a thousand or two in population. The one with which we were dealing was probably typical in that regard; the natives were shy but Stark calculated from evidence of land use and landscaping that they composed a population of approximately fifteen hundred. More than two thousand in a tribe or village, Stark had speculated, would probably be unwieldy in the simple hierarchial social units which had been devised and there probably would have been a splitting off of one part of the tribe against the next, a war leading to disbanding. But the hierarchial system and crude methods of birth control were functional to keep the tribes within controllable limits. Stark felt that actually the societies were extremely functional and well-integrated; granted that Folsom’s Planet would be left alone, that there would be no induction of technology from the outside, functional elements, primitive myths and anti-technological superstition might contrive to keep them in this state of moderate barbarism for several thousand more years. Eventually there would be population overrun, eventually one tribe or another, after a war might stumble into technology, but Stark saw little indication of change deduced from the external evidence in several thousand years. In truth, he considered the present social mix to be extremely stable.
The hierarchical system was similarly functional; the aliens were a patriarchy, leadership descending through inheritance of no more than three or four male lines within a given tribe. The leaders worked under the divine right scheme of course, but according to Stark, they were held in check by the mythos which held that their function was only to work the will of the minor gods and one did not, eternal life being at issue, go around offending those gods. It was a neatly functional system. Stark’s handwriting broke into spirals of pleasure when it made these comments. Above all, it worked: something which for a sociologist must have been engaging. So little else did.
The only interesting element according to Stark was the monotheism. Tribes at this level of agrarian or preagrarian development tended to have a whole host of gods for various duties, gods for various aspects of their lives and yet these people—who of course did have a galaxy of gods which in their language were known as the “lesser”—did believe in a strong, unifying superstructive force observing all of their activities, controlling some of them and this one was indeed known as “God” as opposed to “the gods,” an important distinction of which the natives themselves were quite aware. Stark could not understand this. It seemed out of kilter to the culture; it indicated a level of sophistication which was present in no other facet. Yet the observance of, the belief in, this God was absolute.
It hinted, Stark speculated in his rather disjointed sociologist’s handwriting, it hinted of perhaps an earlier technological civilization which had disappeared without a trace of its machinery or accomplishments but which had managed to leave behind as legacy this religious vision, the only characteristic of the more sophisticated culture to survive. Monotheism in one or another of its various forms was an inevitable concurrent of a technological society; it did not exist independent of some technology . . . except in the case of Folsom’s Planet. Stark admitted to some puzzlement. So did I.
Not a reflective or contemplative man, however, I put aside the matter of Stark’s conundrum and considered my own situation. Research had its virtues of course and it was interesting to see in Stark’s writings the output of a competent, thoughtful sociologist; it also was highly illuminating in its insights into his rather tedious but accessibly obsessive personality, good material to transmit to the Bureau at some later date . . . but I had my own situation to consider. Tossing aside his notes, leaving them in a rather disorderly pile atop the abcess from which I had taken them, I stalked through the spaces of the communications shack to ponder my position.
In some ways it was good and in other ways it was bad. This is one of the characteristics, it must be said, that I have noted about life itself; sometimes good, sometimes bad, but always, at least in my case, dotted with a certain low consistency which means that I am never at a loss for the best way to deal with a situation, having seen it before in some other way in the past. Life is merely a matter of successfully recalling past experiences for referent. (This is why I have a commander’s facility I might note.) The good things about the situation were that I had assumed total control, that I had stopped allowing the crew and the natives to push me around and was once again where I belonged on top of the situation, the other good part was that I had communicated to the Bureau the urgency of my request for the termination of mission and it would only be a matter of time now until the Bureau responded with permission. It would be unprecedented for a commander in the field to be balked. This is part of the clear policies and procedures of the Bureau as established through hundreds of years in interstellar scouting for the Federation: that the field commander is supreme.
These were the good parts of my situation, that and the fact that my own mood had improved so enormously once I had seized control. Truly I felt like myself again. But there were bad aspects as well and I had to confront them straight-on: whisking little clusters of dust from untended parts of the shack clearing away a little space in the alcoves where Stark and Closter had heaped the residue of their scholasticism, vigorously stroking certain random itches which smote my genitals much as random and uncoordinated reflex activities might overtake one in the coils of paraplegia, I was ready to confront those as well.
For one thing the mission had clearly failed. Contact with the stage three civilization, their amalgamation into the great Galactic Federation, the successful continuance of permission to seed the stars with the fruits of our civilization . . . that had been aborted. Our relations with the natives, our establishment of contact had hit against a wall of failure and there was no way that this could be denied: in our essential purposes we had been frustrated. There were reasons for this of course and the reasons when communicated to the Bureau would fully explain the reasons behind this and would release me from any culpability for the failure: they would, in fact, when explained, probably render me fit for commendation . . . still, from the Bureau’s point of view the aborting of the mission had to be considered in an unfavorable light and they could hardly be pleased with the turn that events had taken: at this moment clerks and superiors were undoubtedly shouting at one another, copies of my request dangling from the hands of the clerks as they made little explicatory thrusts with their palms; the faces of the superiors would be livid with rage as the clerks tried to make them understand that according to the manual they had no right to do other than to grant the permission to debark . . . oh, it was very unpleasant at the Bureau now for sure, I was grateful thinking of this not to be a part of it. Eventually all would come right, they could not deny the strength, the grace, the sheer courage of my gesture, but that would be later. After our return. After we had been in flight for three years of unconsciousness by which time Bureau would have had another one of its devastating transitions of personnel anyway and we would have to start the explanations from the beginning. That was the trouble. You could never quite get it right.