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named Bel Arvardan has come to Earth to find evidence to support his theory that humanity originated on Earth and radiated to other planets and to disprove the "merger" theory that humanity was the natural climax of evolution on any world with a water-oxygen chemical base and that each independent strain of humanity could intermarry. |
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Arvardan believes that life could not develop on planets that were naturally radioactive. Since only one radioactive planet is inhabited, Earth must have turned radioactive after life developed. Outsiders are forbidden to read the sacred book of Earthmen, The Book of the Ancients, but Arvardan has obtained parts of it and read statements that support his theory. He hopes to discover evidence of prior human habitation in areas now so intensely radioactive that humans cannot survive in them. His task is complicated by the anti-Terrestrialism that exists everywhere else in the Galaxy. Earthmen are considered dirty and diseased, ignorant and superstitious. Earth has a corresponding anti-Outside prejudice that counters the feelings of the rest of the Galaxy with an equally violent hatred of everything non-Terrestrial. Arvardan considers himself free of prejudice, but in an episode in which he travels in an airplane with a group of Earthmen his belief is challenged. |
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Earth is so poor that everyone, with a few exceptions for unusual service or distinction, must submit to euthanasia at the age of sixty or when no longer productive. The law is called "the Sixties" and is so much a part of Earth culture that though it may be evaded, like taxes, acceptance is universal. |
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In another plot line, an Earth scientist named Affret Shekt has invented a Synapsifier, which reduces the resistance of non-nervous tissue between adjoining nerve cells and improves the quickness and effectiveness of thought. The process by which people undergo the treatment, however, is believed to be dangerous, often fatal. A farm family with whom Schwartz finds himself volunteer Schwartz, who is considered feeble-minded, for the Synapsifier in the hope of rendering him capable of helping meet their farm quota for produce, for they are sheltering from euthanasia the wife's father, Grew, who has suffered a paralysis of the legs. The process makes Schwartz weak and confused, but as he recovers he learns the language quickly and then slowly develops the Mind Touch, the ability to read minds and then the ability to kill with the mind, and finally the ability to immobilize others and even to control their gross physical movements. |
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Meanwhile, Arvardan, Schwartz, Shekt, and Shekt's daughter Pola find themselves enmeshed in a plot by the Society of Ancients to revenge themselves upon the rest of the Galaxy for the long history of |
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