ADAPTATION
By
MACK
REYNOLDS
Illustrated by Schoenherr
When a man has a great deal of knowledge, it becomes extremelyeasy for him to confuse "knowledge" with "wisdom" ... and forgetthat the antonym of "wisdom" is not "ignorance" but "folly."
Forward
Hardly had man solved his basicproblems on the planet of his originthan he began to fumble into space.Barely a century had elapsed in theexploration of the Solar System thanhe began to grope for the stars.
And suddenly, with an all but religiouszeal, mankind conceived itsfantasy dream of populating the galaxy.Never in the history of the racehad fervor reached such a peak andheld so long. The question of whywas seemingly ignored. Millions ofEarth-type planets beckoned and witha lemming-like desperation humanityerupted into them.
But the obstacles were frighteningin their magnitude. The planets andsatellites of Sol had proven comparativelytractable and those that weresuited to man-life were quicklybrought under his dominion. Butthere, of course, he had the advantageof proximity. The time involved inrunning back and forth to the homeplanet was meaningless and allEarth's resources could be thrown intoeach problem's solving.
But a planet a year removed intransportation or even communication?Ay! this was another thing andmore than once a million colonistswere lost before the Earthlings couldadapt to new climates, new flora andfauna, new bacteria—or to factorswhich the most far out visionary hadnever fancied, perhaps the lack ofsomething never before missed.
So, mad with the lust to seed theuniverse with his kind, men soughtnew methods. To a hundred thousandworlds they sent smaller colonies, asfew as a hundred pioneers apiece, andthere marooned them, to adapt, ifadapt they could.
For a millennium each colony wasleft to its own resources, to conquerthe environment or to perish in theeffort.
A thousand years was sufficient. Invariablyit was found, on those planetswhere human life survived at all, manslipped back during his first two orthree centuries into a state of barbarism.Then slowly began to inch forwardagain. There were exceptionsand the progress on one planet neverexactly duplicated that on another,however the average was surprisinglyclose to both nadir and zenith, interms of evolution of society.
In a thousand years it was deemedby the Office of Galactic Colonizationsuch pioneers had largely adjusted tothe new environment and were readyfor civilization, industrialization andeventual assimilation into the rapidlyevolving Galactic Commonwealth.
Of course, even from the beginning,new and unforeseen problemsmanifested themselves ...
from "Man In Antiquity"
published in Terra City, Sol
Galactic Year 3,502.
I.
he Co-ordinator said, "Isuppose I'm an incurableromantic. You see,I hate to see you go."Academician AmschelMayer was a man in early middleyears; Dr. Leonid Plekhanov, his contemporary.They offset one another;Mayer thin and high-pitched, his colleagueheavy, slow and dour. Nowthey both showed their puzzlement.
The Co-ordinator added, "Withoutme."
Plekhanov kept his massive fac