Xeluchli waved a visible thought fragment in a circle about him. "The stars," he said. "Let's explore a little on our own. They never hit the really good spots on these tours."
Orena had been thinking for a long time of doing that very thing so she hardly argued at all before letting Xeluchli convince her.
"We'll be gone only a little while and they'll never miss us," said Xeluchli as they headed for a nearby star-cluster.
Everything would have been all right if they had obeyed the rules. "Hands off the planets," the rules said, and that was really a reasonable and intelligent demand. In all fairness to them, it must be admitted that Orena and Xeluchli had no intention of breaking that rule when they strayed away from the rest of the crowd.
They found this little planet which was listed in the textbook as "BuP"; an .02F star with nine planets. By a lucky chance they were just in time to see a transient little civilization spring into being on its third planet. This was too wonderful a chance to miss so they decided to stay a few hundred thousand years and see how it would end. They would catch up with the rest of the tour afterward.
The creatures entering into civilization were bipeds and of a physical appearance rather low on the aesthetic scale but Orena and Xeluchli soon discovered that they were bi-sexual. This pleased them very much and made them feel that they had something in common with this little civilization, for Orena and Xeluchli were bi-sexuals too, and bi-sexual civilizations were rare. Orena and Xeluchli had, in fact, been the only bi-sexuals in the touring group, which had been composed mostly of the slow-moving amoeboids from Procyon and the emotionally unstable penta-sexuals from Antares.
It was a land civilization which they had found and, just as the textbooks said, it was having its beginning in the river deltas of the continents. The bipeds were both herbivorous and carnivorous and the duration and bloodiness of their early wars was almost exactly as predicted by Globnung's food-war formula. The speed of advance of the civilization was a little slow, but still comfortably within the lower limits of the Atati equation.
Everything went well for the first five thousand years, but then Orena and Xeluchli began to catch signs of Gibrait's anachronism. They watched anxiously for a while, and soon they saw that their fears had been justified. Sociological advance had fallen so far behind technological advance that the Law of Socio-Martial Flux had been brought into play. The little civilization would almost certainly die a premature death.
Orena and Xeluchli watched the invention of greater and greater weapons and the hopeless retardation of the social system and were saddened. They had hoped to watch a real civilization and this one was not even going to go past the one-planet stage. They did not see how it could last half a century more.