Yeah. Well, that was nice. But already I felt as crowded as a subway train with the power cut out at rush hour.
But there was no room for doubt either. I'd had it. I still did have it; had no chance at all of getting rid of it.
They went on then and told me their story.
I won't try to repeat it all verbatim. I couldn't now, since my memory—but that's something else. Anyway, I finally got the picture.
But I didn't get it all the same evening. Oh, no. At ten I had to knock it off to go to bed, get my sleep, keep up my health. They were insistent.
As they put it, even if I didn't care for myself I had to think about an entire population and generations yet unborn. Or unbudded, which was the way they did it.
Well, as they said, we had the whole weekend to work out an understanding. Which we did. When we were through, I didn't like it a whole lot better, but at least I could understand it.
It was all a perfectly logical proposition from their point of view—which differed in quite a number of respects from my own. To them it was simply a matter of survival for their race and their culture. To me it was a matter of who or what I was going to be. But then, I had no choice.
According to the Official History I was given, they came from a tiny planet of a small sun. Actually, their sun was itself a planet, still incandescent, distant perhaps like Jupiter from the true sun. Their planet or moon was tiny, wet and warm. And the temperature was constant.
These conditions, naturally, governed their development—and, eventually, mine.