I learned of them all in the days of their youth—together with the struggles and pain that went into their taming. Wolverton's words were wings that sent my spirit soaring. His tales—filled with courage and adventure, of blood and treachery, of honor and fair dealing, made me proud of my race. We were not perfect, we men—but there was within us the seed of greatness that would perhaps flower into the true bloom. It made me proud to learn the past glories of our race. Almost I could feel that Wolverton was a brother in the great brotherhood of man.
And then he killed the dream—brought it crashing to the ground in a brutal series of horridly frank solidograph projections. These were real people that bled and died and performed unspeakable brutalities upon each other and upon the worlds where they lived.
"On the average," Wolverton said bitterly, "it takes five to six thousand years, but we have been in space longer than that, and some societies last longer than others, but the end is always inevitable."
He showed me all—a solid month of it.
Earth: A world of legalized cannibalism where men were bred for food—a world of wrecked glory swiftly returning to jungle and desert.
Mars: Redying in slow bitter agony as technology failed under the pressure of excessive population, with legal infanticide, eugenics laws, and tyranny.
Proxima: Bloody and torn—waging suicidal war whose ultimate end would be virtual annihilation of all life.
Fanar: Dead and radioactive.
Kungtze: A huge, monolithic state that owned and controlled everything down to the last living unit, where the population swarmed and jostled in huge collectives that were neither cities nor farms, but something of both—where everything was used even down to the dead bodies of those too old to work, slain by the state to make room for others.
Samar: A matriarchate ruled by the few—filled by the many, where women outnumbered men twenty to one, and the men ruled by the sly and subtle tyranny of sex, and where—despite the disparity of sexes—people swarmed and teemed, and struggled for possession of a place to live and the partial possession of a man.