"I won't say I didn't have some such thought, but I accept your ruling," smiled Lampert. There was silence for a moment; then Krendall reverted to the earlier subject.
"You know," he said, "if this thing we've found does turn out to have been intelligent, it will hardly solve any of the existing problems about Viridis."
"Why not?" asked Sulewayo in some surprise.
"We still won't know whether it's native to the planet or not, unless we can establish a relatively complete evolutionary sequence leading to this form. If we do that, the question of speed of evolution here gets worse than ever; if we don't no one will be sure whether or not we ought to look for buried spaceports or send out expeditions to find the planet they might have come from."
"The latter would be something of a waste of time," remarked McLaughlin. "Hunting one planet in the galaxy is like hunting one log of wood on Viridis." No one contradicted this. All had seen the galactic star clouds from outside planetary atmosphere.
"It seems to me, speaking as an amateur in your fields, gentlemen," said Mitsuitei, "that the mere discovery of an intelligent creature in the Viridian fossil deposits would, on the basis of our present knowledge of the mechanisms of evolution, strongly support the idea that this world was stocked from others. I realize that our knowledge may not be sufficient to justify us in that conclusion. But it is certainly not great enough to justify any other."
"You seem to have something there, Take," admitted Krendall. "If this thing does turn out to have room for a brain in its skull, I suppose the next ten conventions of the Interstellar Archaeological Society, or whatever you call it, will be meeting at Emeraude."
"I shouldn't be at all surprised. So far, my profession and yours have not overlapped, due to a considerable factor of difference in the time spans covered. But it is just possible that we would be holding joint meetings, in the event you describe."
"This meeting is changing from discussion to speculation," Lampert said drily. "I would be the last to decry the value of imagination; but actually we are as likely to face the need for entirely new hypotheses as the result of our work here, as to find support for any now in existence. I can speculate with the best of you, but for goodness sake let's not take any speculation too seriously. I don't really believe that some big-headed descendants of Ndomi's fossil are listening in on me right now!"