What have we come to? Morten thought. Surely the bright product of the generations of genetic engineering should have been able to do better than this. Arlee was consumed by a hatred of Free that would not let her go. And he, Morten, had been consumed by a dream that he could raise the poor creatures, the Grooks, to some semblance of civilization, and nothing in his experience or his inheritance had been able to tell him how to do it. He had been rejected by this primitive, ignorant tribe whose members would not even have been allowed to exist on Earth.
And he didn’t know for certain whether he had been tricked and deceived by Free or whether the poor, simple Retard had been deceived by the Grooks. In the end it mattered little. The result was the same. The patrol would come. They would s
