“And it should have taken much longer to hatch, too,” Reffet said irritably. “The Big Uglies should still be building monuments much like these, as we were not long after we started gathering in cities?”
“Truth?” Atvar’s voice was sad. “They should have. In fact, we thought they had. You will have seen this picture of a Tosevite warrior in full battle regalia before you set out from Home, of course?”
He walked over to the hologram projector and called up an image. He had seen it countless times himself, both before reaching Tosev 3 and since. It showed a hairy Big Ugly in rusty chainmail, armed with sword and spear and iron-faced wooden shield and riding a four-legged beast with a long head, an unkempt mane, and a shaggy tail.
“Yes, of course I have seen that image,” Reffet said. “It is one of those our probe took sixteen hundred years ago. From it, we assumed the conquest would be easy.”
“So we did,” Atvar agreed. “But the point is, in those intervening sixteen hundred years-eight hundred of this planet’s revolutions-the Tosevites somehow developed industrial civilization. However much you and I and every other member of the Race may wish they had remained primitive, the sorry fact is that they did not. We have to deal with that fact now.”
“It was not planned thus.” Reffet made that an accusation. The Race moved by plans, by tiny incremental steps. Anything different came hard.
Atvar had been dealing with the Big Uglies for more then forty of his years. By painful necessity, he’d begun to adapt to the hectic pace of Tosev 3. “Whether it was planned or not, it is so. You cannot crawl back into your eggshell and deny it.”