himself treated, not merely as an equal, but as an important equal. His entire professional existence had been devoted to routinely polishing the cultural boots of his instructors. Suddenly he was translated into a situation where his casual whim was everyone’s command, where his opinions were energetically sought after, and where, at conferences that touched on cultural matters, his colleagues could be surprised watching him curiously, as though in hope of catching him practicing a parlor trick.
It was all very unsettling, because the base staff obviously was as mystified about the presence of a Cultural Survey trainee as Farrari was to be there. On the infrequent occasions when he managed to wrench himself away from his work, he paced the plastic-lined corridors of the comfortable aerie that the IPR Bureau had bored into the mountaintop wondering just what it was that he was supposed to be doing.
He made friends. Anyone would have made friends at this base, where the doorless workrooms invited a constant influx of visitors who familiarly looked over one’s shoulder, examined work projects with interest, and asked questions. When he walked through the corridors he was likely to be hailed at any door, asked what he thought of something or other, and invited to share a ration package.
His most constant visitor was old Heber Clough, whose workroom was across the corridor from Farrari’s. An elderly wisp of a man with a mischievous, cherubic face ringed with thinning red hair and the faint red fuzz of a sparse beard, he came stumbling into Farrari’s workroom on that first afternoon, when Farrari was despondently studying a teloid projection and wondering how he should begin.
“Getting organized?” Clough asked.
“Ha! I should start classifying this stuff, but I don’t have a single reference base.” Farrari fed another cube into the projector. “These bas-reliefs are excellent, but I don’t know whether they were produced yesterday or a thousand years ago.”
“Oh, well,” Clough said. “If that’s all that’s bothering you—this one is a carving of the kru Feyvt and his family. He was the grandfather of the present kru, and here he has—” Clough pointed a stubby finger into the projection and counted. “Here he has seventeen children, and that would date this carving—mmm—at a hundred and sixty-two or a hundred and sixty-three years ago. I’d have to check my records to say which. Those are Branoff IV years, of course.”
“How do you know?” Farrari exclaimed.
Clough beamed at him. “I’m a genealogist. I know the kruz as far back as we’ve found records. These carvings are as exact as photographs.”
“That’s wonderful!”
“Not quite as wonderful as it might be,” Clough said gloomily. “Take a close look at the children.”
“They all look like their father.”
“They all are their father. It’s some confounded artists’ tradition. A child, of either sex, is always wearing a miniature of its father’s face. Then when the children leave their father’s home and become adults in their own right, it’s all but impossible to figure out who they are. It makes a pretty problem for a genealogist—a pretty problem.” He shrugged and added cheerfully, “But I know all the kruz. If you need some kind of temporal guide for classifying art styles, you couldn’t find a better one than that. If you have any questions about them, just ask me.”
The walls of Clough’s own workroom were covered with charts, which had, unfortunately, a great many blank spaces. His cherubic countenance would go wide-eyed with fascination over the discovery of a new genealogical detail, however minor.
Branoff IV’s aristocracy was a relatively small, tightly knit group, and IPR had been unable to work agents into it or even close to it. In Clough’s most critical area of study, the potential heirs to the throne, he was stymied because no one knew for certain whom they might be. The old kru’s reign antedated IPR on the planet, and the field team had not yet had an opportunity to observe a succession. Clough was delighted when Farrari proved, with bits of a literary epic, that the throne did indeed descend to one of the kru’s sons.
“I assumed as much,” he chortled. “Oh, yes indeed, I assumed it. It’s so common that one always assumes it. But one of the first things one learns in IPR is that assumptions do not go into reports. One records them in a workbook until there are sufficient facts to support them. Now suppose you tell me who the present kru’s sons are and which of them is the most likely heir apparent.”
Farrari failed on both points, but he was able to fill in several of Clough’s blank spaces from the results of his careful study of the amazingly graphic temple bas-reliefs. He also succeeded in identifying an elder brother of the kru, thus proving that the throne did not inevitably go to the oldest son, and that discovery forced Clough to dejectedly rip a page of assumptions from his workbook.
But the old man was tremendously pleased, and he often brought his lunch to Farrari’s workroom so that the two of them could study Branoff IV art while they ate and attempt to establish blood relationships through physiognomical similarities.
Adjoining Farrari’s two rooms was the huge laboratory of Thorald Dallum, a young botanist. Branoff IV plants flourished there under a blaze of artificial sunlight. Farrari, unaccustomed to confinement, found the vast dimensions and garden-like atmosphere a welcome relief from the relentlessly impinging walls of rooms and corridors, and he quickly seized upon the excuse of identifying trees and plants portrayed in Branoff IV art and began to visit the place daily.
Dallum offered a weekly luncheon at which he served dishes he had concocted from Branoff IV plants. He was attempting to discover new sources of food, and many of his concoctions were derived from plants that the natives did not recognize as nutritious. Unfortunately, neither did the base personnel who came to eat them. They cautiously accepted small servings and sampled them in the manner of a person who had been ordered to discover by oral ingestion the lethal dose of a known poison, while Dallum hovered nearby scrutinizing their faces anxiously. His luncheons were not well attended. His own special favorite among these exotic dishes was zrilmberry tea, and he enthusiastically recited the long list of nutrients that it contained. Farrari was not surprised to learn that no native had ever been known to eat a zrilmberry. The tea tasted dreadful.
Dallum had scarcely been aware that Branoff IV possessed an art. He was eager to assist Farrari, and in time he began to confide his own problems.
“The main trouble,” he said despondently, “is that the agriculture can’t support the population. Branoff IV grains and tubers are the most miserable excuses for food plants that I’ve ever encountered. The olz live out their lives on the verge of starvation, and very short lives they are. If only I could develop some strains that produce more food…”
“Olz?”
“Slaves.”
Farrari found for him the teloid of an ancient carving of a kru inspecting a grainfield, and Dallum gazed at the projection dumbfounded. “There are five times too many ears!” he exclaimed. “It must be artistic license!”
“That’s possible,” Farrari conceded, “but in everything I’ve been able to check the realism is superb.”
“How old is it?”
“Roughly a thousand years.”
Dallum moved the projection closer to his specimen plants. “At least five times too many. I’ve never heard of a situation where the inherent productivity of a food plant deteriorated so drastically. The soils, yes, but a people will learn to use fertilizers or rotate their crops, and very
