"But it was turned down, I bet," Jean concluded.

Dalt nodded. "I had quite a row with my superiors but they held firm and I stalked out in a rage and quit."

"Maybe they thought you were too easy on the planet."

"They knew better. I had no qualms about proscribing Kwashi, for instance. No, their reason was fear that the psi society was not mature enough to be exposed to galactic civilization, that it would be swallowed up. They wanted to give it another century or two. I thought that was unfair but was powerless to do anything about it."

Jean eyed him with a penetrating gaze. "I notice you've been using the past tense. Change your mind since then?"

"Definitely. I've come to see that there's a very basic, very definite philosophy behind everything the Federation does. It not only wants to preserve human diversity, it wants to see it stretched to the limit. Man was an almost completely homogenized species before he began colonizing the stars; interstellar travel arrived just in time. Old Earth is still a good example of what I mean; long ago the Eastern and Western Alliances fused— something no one ever thought would happen—and Earth is just one big faceless, self-perpetuating bureaucracy. The populace is equally faceless.

"But the man who left for the stars—he's another creature altogether! Once he got away from the press of other people, once he stopped seeing what everybody else saw, hearing what everybody else heard, he began to become an individual again and to strike out in directions of his own choosing. The splinter groups carried this out to an extreme and many failed. But a few survived and the Federation wants to let the successful ones go as far as they can, both for their own sake and for the sake of all mankind. Who knows? Homo superior may one day be born on a splinter world."