With the Commodore Perry gone from the sky, with Atvar and the Americans from the Admiral Peary gone on the astonishing new starship, Home suddenly seemed a backwater to Ttomalss. Even though Big Uglies from the Commodore Perry remained behind, this was no longer the place where things happened. In ancientest history, the Race had believed that the sun revolved around Home. Males and females had known better for well over a hundred thousand years.

Even though they knew better, the idea had kept a kind of metaphysical truth ever since. Not only the sun seemed to spin around Home. So did the stars Rabotev and Halless, and the worlds that spun around them. And so had the star Tosev and its worlds, most notably Tosev 3.

No more. Now events had literally left the homeworld behind. The most important things that happened for a while wouldn’t happen on Home. They would happen on Tosev 3. Even now, not many members of the Race realized that. Most males and females went on with their lives, neither knowing nor caring that events might have passed their whole species by. Mating season was coming soon. If they worried about anything, it was getting ready for the spell of orgiastic chaos ahead.

As for Ttomalss, he did what any academic will do when faced with a stretch of time when nothing else urgently needs doing: he wrote reports and analyses of the dealings between the Race and the diplomats from the Admiral Peary. Even as he wrote, he understood that much of what he was recording was already as obsolete as one of the Race’s starships. He wrote anyhow. The record would have historical value, if nothing else.

No matter how dedicated an academic he was, he couldn’t write all the time. When he went down to the refectory for a snack one afternoon, he found Trir there ahead of him. The tour guide was in a foul temper. “Those Big Uglies!” she said.

A couple of Tosevites sat in the refectory, though some distance away. Trir made not the slightest effort to keep her voice down. “What is the trouble with them?” Ttomalss asked. He spoke quietly, hoping to lead by example.

A forlorn hope-Trir didn’t seem to notice the example he set. “What is the trouble?” she echoed at the top of her lung. “They are the most insulting creatures ever hatched!”

“They insulted you?” Ttomalss asked. “I hope you did nothing to cause it.”

“No, not me,” Trir said impatiently. “They have insulted Home.”

“How did they do that? Why did they do that?” Ttomalss asked.

“Why? Because they are barbarous Big Uglies, that is why.” Trir still did nothing to keep her voice down. “How? They had the nerve to complain about the lovely weather Sitneff enjoys, and that all the architecture here looks the same. As if it should not! We build buildings the right way, so they look the way they should.”

“I have some sympathy, at least in the abstract, for their complaints about the weather. It is warmer here than it is on Tosev 3. What is comfortable for us is less so for them,” Ttomalss said.

“I should say so!” Trir exclaimed. “The air conditioners they brought down from this new ship of theirs chill their rooms until I think I am back at the South Pole, or maybe somewhere beyond it.”

Ttomalss tried to figure out what on Home might be beyond the South Pole. He gave it up as a bad job. Trir didn’t care whether she was logical. Ttomalss said, “You see? You dislike the weather they prefer as much as they dislike ours.”

“But ours is proper and normal.” Trir was not the sort to think that several billion years of separate evolution could produce different choices. She judged everything from the simplest of perspectives: her own.

“As for architecture, they have more variety than we do,” Ttomalss said. “They enjoy change for its own sake.”

“I told you they were barbarians.” As if sure she’d made a decisive point, Trir got up and stormed out of the refectory.

Ttomalss sighed. Trir came closer to the average member of the Race in the street than any other male or female he knew. Her reaction to the Big Uglies wasn’t encouraging. How would the Race react to Tosevite tourists here on Home? Could simple dislike spark trouble where politics didn’t?

The tour guide hurried back into the refectory, as angry as when she’d left it. She pointed a clawed forefinger at Ttomalss. “And the horrible creatures had the nerve to say we were backward! Backward!” she added, and stormed out again.

“Did they?” Ttomalss said, but he was talking to Trir’s retreating tailstump.

His eye turrets swung to the Big Uglies in their specially made chairs. They’d paid no attention to Trir’s outburst. Did that mean they hadn’t understood it or hadn’t heard it? He didn’t think so, not for a moment. It meant they were being diplomatic, which was more than Trir could say. Who was the barbarian, then?

Ttomalss’ head started to ache. He hadn’t wanted that thought right now. Whether he’d wanted it or not, he’d got it.

So the Big Uglies thought Home was backward? Had the Americans from the Admiral Peary presumed to say such a thing, Ttomalss would have been as furious as Trir. The Tosevites from the Commodore Perry … Hadn’t they earned the right? From a Tosevite perspective, Home probably was a backward place. But it had proved it could prosper and stay peaceful for tens of millennia. If the Big Uglies dragged their competing not-empires and empires and the Empire into a string of ruinous wars, what price progress?

The psychologist could see what the price of progress would be: higher than anyone in his right mind wanted to pay.

But, now, he could also see what the price of backwardness was. Having moved forward technologically at such a slow pace over the millennia, the Race was vulnerable to a hard-charging species like the Big Uglies. With hindsight, that was obvious. But no one here had imagined a species like the Big Uglies could exist. We knew ourselves, and we knew the Rabotevs and Hallessi, who are like us in most ways, and we extrapolated that all intelligent species would be similar. That was reasonable. Based on the data we had, it was logical.

And oh, how wrong it was!

He glumly finished his food and left the refectory. No histrionics from him. His swiveling eye turrets noted the Big Uglies turning their heads so their eyes could follow him out. Oh, yes, they’d heard what Trir had to say to him, all right.

Escaping the hotel was a relief, as it often was. He walked down the street toward the public telephone he’d used before. Every time he passed a male or female wearing a fuzzy wig or what the Big Uglies called a T-shirt, he wanted to shout. Members of the Race had taken to imitating Tosevites out of amusement. Would they keep on doing it now that the Tosevites were no longer amusing but powerful?

He thought the Race’s power was the main reason so many Big Uglies on Tosev 3 had shaved their heads and started wearing body paint that showed ranks to which they were not entitled. Would power attract more males and females here now that the situation was reversing? He wouldn’t have been surprised. Monitoring such things would make an interesting experiment-for someone else.

When he got to the phone, he swung his eye turrets in all directions. If that ginger-tasting female and her hoodlum friends were around, he would take himself elsewhere as fast as he could go. He did not see any of them. Feeling safe because he didn’t, he telephoned Pesskrag. Impatience and worry overwhelmed the careful logic of a few days before.

The phone hissed several times in his hearing diaphragm. He was afraid he would have to record a message. But then she answered: “This is Pesskrag. I greet you.”

“And I greet you. This is Ttomalss,” he said.

“Ah. Hello, Senior Researcher,” the physicist said. “Let me tell you right out of the eggshell, we have made no dramatic breakthroughs since the last time I talked with you.”

“All right.” Ttomalss might have been hoping for such a breakthrough, but he hadn’t counted on one. He gave himself that much credit, anyhow. Science seldom worked so conveniently. “I hope you have not gone backwards, though.”

“Well, no, or I also hope not,” Pesskrag answered. “We may even have taken one or two tiny steps forward. Once we devise some new experiments, we will have a better notion of whether we have. We have opened a door and entered a new room. So far, it is a dark room. We are trying not to trip over the furniture.”

“The Big Uglies charged all the way through to the other side,” Ttomalss said. “Why can we not do the same?”

“It is less simple than you think,” Pesskrag said. “What we have are only the early hints that appeared in the Tosevite literature. I gather the Big Uglies stopped publishing after that. We have to reconstruct what they did after they stopped giving us hints. No matter how provocative the early experiments, this is not an easy matter. We do not want to waste time going down blind alleys.”

“And so we waste time being thorough,” Ttomalss said.

The physicist let out an angry hiss. “I fear I am wasting time talking to you, Senior Researcher. Good day.” She broke the connection.

As Ttomalss was unhappily walking back to the hotel, a male wearing the body paint of a bus repairer accosted him. “Hello, friend,” the stranger said, so heartily that Ttomalss’ suspicions kindled at once. “Want to buy some ginger?”

“If you do not mind selling to an officer of the police,” Ttomalss answered. The repairmale disappeared in a hurry. Ttomalss wished he were a police officer. He would have been glad to arrest the petty criminal.

Kassquit was standing in the hotel lobby when Ttomalss came in. “I greet you, superior sir,” she said, sketching the posture of respect.

“And I greet you,” he said. “I hope you are feeling well?”

“I am as well as can be expected, anyhow,” Kassquit answered. “This new Tosevite physician says the same thing Dr. Blanchard did-my gravidity seems normal to them, however nasty it is for me.”

“How are you emotionally?” Ttomalss said. “You do seem less distressed at Frank Coffey’s departure than you did when Jonathan Yeager first returned to Tosev 3.”

“I am less distressed,” she said. “Most of the time I am, anyhow. My moods do swing. The wild Big Uglies say this has to do with hormone shifts during gravidity. But I have experience now that I did not have when Jonathan Yeager left me. And Frank Coffey may come back, where Jonathan Yeager entered into that permanent mating contract. So yes, I remain more hopeful than I was then.”