That is, an ant wanders up to a strange anthill—zok! No discussion, he’s chopped down at the entrance. And the sentry ants react even faster if it’s a creature of another genus. So despite the Eoti science, which in too many respects was more advanced than ours, they were psychologically incapable of the kind of mental projection, or empathy, necessary if one is to realize that a completely alien-looking individual has intelligence, feelings—and rights!—to substantially the same extent as oneself.

Well, it might be so. Meanwhile, we were locked in a murderous stalemate with them on a perimeter of never-ending battle that sometimes expanded as far as Saturn and occasionally contracted as close as Jupiter. Barring the invention of a new weapon of such unimaginable power that we could wreck their fleet before they could duplicate the weapon, as they’d been managing to up to now, our only hope was to discover somehow the stellar system from which they came, somehow build ourselves not one starship but a fleet of them—and somehow wreck their home base or throw enough of a scare into it so that they’d pull back their expedition for defensive purposes. A lot of somehows.

But if we wanted to maintain our present position until the somehows started to roll, our birth announcements had to take longer to read than the casualty lists. For the last decade, this hadn’t been so, despite the more and more stringent Breeding Regulations which were steadily pulverizing every one of our moral codes and sociological advances. Then there was the day that someone in the Conservation Police noticed that almost half our ships of the line had been fabricated from the metallic junk of previous battles. Where was the personnel that had manned those salvage derelicts, he wondered…

And thus what Blondie outside and her co-workers were pleased to call soldier surrogates.

I’d been a computer’s mate, second class, on the old Jenghiz Khan when the first batch had come aboard as battle replacements.