Part 2

"I haven't forgotten Hanlon," Geddes said. "That's why I wanted to talk to you in private. Because we've been given a chance, by a miracle, to start over again from scratch, this time with knowledge enough not to make the old deadly mistakes. We're stable, and Hanlon isn't--that's why the Foundation chose us and rejected him. And we can't take the chance of having Hanlon cutting in here with his carping hedonism and his way with women, don't you see? We can't risk letting a wild strain like his into the new race. It isn't going to be easy, because we're conditioned against personal violence, but we've got to get rid of Hanlon."

They stared at him, digesting the idea.

"It doesn't have to be violent," Geddes argued. "He's under hypnol already. We've only to keep him that way."

Lowe shook his head. "I couldn't do it, Ged. I couldn't force myself to it."

Hovic was tougher. "It's the only way. Hanlon begged a handout from us and then stole our chronos to smuggle himself here. He'd never let us alone. He'd make such trouble that we'd have to kill him in the end. Why not now, when it's easier?"

"Then it's settled," Geddes said. "Two of us, the winners, stay here. The loser goes back to the ship and to Hanlon. Ready?"

They nodded. Geddes held out his closed fist, the tips of his twigs barely showing.

Lowe, his underlip bitten palely between even dentures, drew the first long straw. Hovic drew the other. Geddes opened his hand and stared down at the short twig on his palm. Somehow it had not seemed possible that _he_ should lose; it was like death, a thing that happened only to others.

"Good enough," he said. "After all it was my idea, wasn't it?"

He moved away with the twig still clutched in his hand. By nightfall he had retraced his way to the river and the _Terra IV_.

* * * * *

He was sitting on the dew-wet turf with his back against the personnel ladder when he heard them coming. A cone of light fanned into the darkness from the open port above him, poking a yellow finger into the mists and shedding a diffuse glow that reached to the river below.

Hanlon lay on the grass beside him, shaved and bathed and dressed in clean shorts and singlet. He had eaten enormously after Geddes woke him from the hypnol, and under the tedium of their waiting he had dozed off, his chest rising and falling in the even rhythm of sleep.

Hovic and Lowe splashed through the water and came up out of the darkness, their hair streaming, eyes shining whitely in pinched faces. They were muddy and dirty--and beaten.

"You didn't do it," Hovic said hoarsely when he saw Hanlon. "Thank Heaven for that. How did you guess?"

"I've sat here all night, thinking about it," Geddes said. "I thought about the two of you up there claiming your rights as winners, and I should have gotten a vicarious excitement out of it. But I didn't, and finally I knew why. They threw you out, didn't they?"

They avoided his eyes. "It was awful," Lowe said miserably. "They were--furious. I wanted to die."

"So Hanlon was right again," Geddes said. "Doesn't that mean something to you, that he was right every time? He knew instinctively from the start that a man's natural belligerence springs directly from his sex, and that the Foundation wouldn't risk its making trouble among us on the trip. So they--eliminated it. That's why I brought Hanlon out of hypnol, because they hadn't gotten that far with him before he washed out. Because he is our last hope of keeping the race alive."

The three of them stood and watched the play of dreams across Hanlon's sleeping face with something like awe in their eyes.

"I was just wondering," Lowe said, "if something like this may have happened before? If the whole thing may not be like one of those old parchment writings the archaeologists dig up, where an earlier story has been erased and a newer one written over it? A palimpsest, I think it's called.... How do we know where _we_ came from, in the beginning?"

Geddes stooped and shook Hanlon awake. "You'll find the boat by the river," he said. "You're starting out fresh with a new world, Hanlon. Take care of it."

* * * * *

They had climbed the personnel ladder and were closing the port behind them when they heard the splashing of water as Hanlon swam the river. A moment later his high, ringing yell drifted back and was lost without echo on the plain.

"He didn't waste time on the boat," Hovic said, enviously.

They were strapping themselves in for the _Terra IV's_ final flight when Geddes laughed for the first time since the blast-off.

"I think Lowe's right," he said when they stared at him. "I wish I could come back again, after a few hundred generations. I wonder what a whole planet of Hanlons would look like?"

* * * * *

_"... and therefore we can say with certainty that we did not descend from Earthmen," Mach Bren concluded his report to the Venusian Archaeological Society. "For how can we possibly conceive of kinship with a people whose skin and hair are_ black_?"_

_The meeting was widely televised, and over the face of the Silver Planet a hundred million other red-haired Venusians shook their heads in shocked wonderment and agreed with him._