"I could go on for hours. But you really have to see it. Take the case of people who want to have children. They want them born, naturally, at the time of the best possible aspects, so they consult an astrologer and he gives them a list of the best times for a baby to be conceived. These times are not always convenient, sometimes it's 4:18 in the morning and sometimes it's 2:03 Monday afternoon. Yet this is a legitimate excuse for getting out of work. A man goes in, tells his boss it's breeding time, and off he goes without a penny docked. Build a better race, they say. Of course the gestation period is variable, and they never do hit it right on the nose, and also there are still the natural accidents, so quite a few are born with terrible horoscopes—"
"Holy smoke!" Travis muttered. The possibilities of it blossomed in his mind. He began to understand what was coming.
"Now you begin to see?" Horton went on gloomily. "Look what an Earthman represents to these people. We are the unknown, the completely capital U Unknown. Everybody else is a certain definite quantity, his horoscope is on file and every man on Mert has access to all his potentialities, be they good, bad or indifferent. But not us. They don't know when we were born, or where, and even if they did it it wouldn't do them any good, because they haven't got any system covering Mars and Jupiter, the planets at home. Everybody else is catalogued, but not us."
"And just because they believe so thoroughly in their own astrology they've gotten used to the idea that a man is what his horoscope says he is."
"But us? What are we? They haven't the vaguest idea, and it scares hell out of them. The only thing they can do is check with one of the branches, what they call Horary Astrology, and make a horoscope of the day we landed. Even if that tells them nothing about us in particular at least it tells them, or so they believe, all about our mission to Mert. Because the moment our ship touched the ground was the birth date of our business here."
He paused and regarded Travis with woeful sympathy.
"With us, luckily, it was all right. The Mapping Command just happened to hit here on a good day. But you? Trav, old buddy, for once you came just too damn fast—"
"Oh my God," Travis breathed. "We landed on a bad day."
"Bad?" Horton sighed. "Man, it's terrible."