"Oh granted, granted! But when do you start digging? And whatever can you possibly expect to find on this miserable heap of rubble?"
"I hope, if all goes well, to be able to set up camp in a few months. And as to this world-why, it's anything but a miserable heap. It is absolutely unique in the Galaxy."
"Unique?" said the Procurator stiffly. "Not at all! It is a very ordinary world. It is more or less of a pigpen of a world, or a horrible hole of a world, or a cesspool of a world, or almost any other particularly derogative adjective you care to use. And yet, with all its refinement of nausea, it cannot even achieve uniqueness in villainy, but remains an ordinary, brutish peasant world."
"But," said Arvardan, somewhat taken aback by the energy of the inconsistent statements thus thrown at him, "the world is radioactive."
"Well, what of that? Some thousands of planets in the Galaxy are radioactive, and some are considerably more so than Earth."
It was at this moment that the soft-gliding motion of the mobile cabinet attracted their attention. It came to a halt within easy hand reach.
Ennius gestured toward it and said to the other, "What would you prefer?"
"I'm not particular. A lime twist, perhaps."
"That can be handled. The cabinet will have the ingredients...With or without Chensey?"
"Just about a tang of it," said Arvardan, and held up his forefinger and thumb, nearly touching.
"You'll have it in a minute."
Somewhere in the bowels of the cabinet (perhaps the most universally popular mechanical offspring of human ingenuity) a bartender went into action-a non-human bartender whose electronic soul mixed things not by jiggers but by atom counts, whose ratios were perfect every time, and who could not be matched by all the inspired artistry of anyone merely human.
The tall glasses appeared from nowhere, it seemed, as they waited in the appropriate recesses.
Arvardan took the green one and, for a moment, felt the chill of it against his cheek. Then he placed the rim to his lips and tasted.
"Just right," he said. He placed the glass in the well-fitted holder in the arm of his chair and said, "Thousands of radioactive planets, Procurator, just as you say, but only one of them is inhabited. This one, Procurator."
"Well"-Ennius smacked his lips over his own drink and seemed to lose some of his sharpness after contact with its velvet-"perhaps it is unique in that way. It's an unenviable distinction."
"But it is not just a question of statistical uniqueness." Arvardan spoke deliberately between occasional sips. "It goes further; it has tremendous potentialities. Biologists have shown, or claim to have shown, that on planets in which the intensity of radioactivity in the atmosphere and in the seas is above a certain point life will not develop...Earth's radioactivity is above that point by a considerable margin."
"Interesting. I didn't know that. I imagine that this would constitute definite proof that Earth life is fundamentally different from that of the rest of the Galaxy...That should suit you, since you're from Sirius." He seemed sardonically amused at this point and said in a confidential aside, "Do you know that the biggest single difficulty involved in ruling this planet lies in coping with the intense anti-Terrestrialism that exists throughout the entire Sirius Sector? And the feeling is returned with interest on the part of these Earthmen. I'm not saying, of course, that anti-Terrestrialism doesn't exist in more or less diluted form in many places in the Galaxy, but not like on Sirius."
Arvardan's response was impatient and vehement. "Lord Ennius, I reject the implication. I have as little intolerance in me as any man living. I believe in the oneness of humanity to my very scientific core, and that includes even Earth. And all life is fundamentally one, in that it is all based upon protein complexes in colloidal dispersion, which we call protoplasm. The effect of radioactivity that I just talked of does not apply simply to some forms of human life, or to some forms of any life. It applies to all life, since it is based upon the quantum mechanics of the protein molecules. It applies to you, to me, to Earthmen, to spiders, and to germs.
"You see, proteins, as I probably needn't tell you, are immensely complicated groupings of amino acids and certain other specialized compounds, arranged in intricate three-dimensional patterns that are as unstable as sunbeams on a cloudy day. It is this instability that is life, since it is forever changing its position in an effort to maintain its identity-in the manner of a long rod balanced on an acrobat's nose.
"But this marvelous chemical, this protein, must be first built up out of inorganic matter before life can exist. So, at the very beginning, by the influence of the sun's radiant energy upon those huge solutions we call oceans, organic molecules gradually increase in complexity from methane to formaldehyde and finally to sugars and starches in one direction, and from urea to amino acids and proteins in another direction. It's a matter of chance, of course, these combinations and disintegrations of atoms, and the process on one world may take millions of years while on another it may take only hundreds. Of course it is much more probable that it will take millions of years. In fact, it is most probable that it will end up never happening.
"Now physical organic chemists have worked out with great exactness all the reaction chain involved, particularly the energetics thereof; that is, the energy relationships involved in each atom shift. It is now known beyond the shadow of a doubt that several of the crucial steps in the building of life require the absence of radiant energy. If this strikes you as queer, Procurator, I can only say that photochemistry (the chemistry of reactions induced by radiant energy) is a well-developed branch of the science, and there are innumerable cases of very simple reactions which will go in one of two different directions depending upon whether it takes place in the presence or absence of quanta of light energy.