Adaptation

Two inhabited planets near Rigel become testing grounds for competing ideas about government and economic development. After leaving small colonies to fend for themselves for a thousand years, Earth sends a team of sixteen specialists to bring their descendants into the Galactic Commonwealth. Academician Amschel Mayer and Dr. Leonid Plekhanov face a fifty-year assignment with enormous advantages in technology and little outside supervision. Their disagreement over methods turns the mission into a contest between two models of progress.

Mack Reynolds builds the science fiction around arguments that grow less comfortable as the specialists gain power. Claims about freedom meet practical decisions about controlling wealth, directing political change and withholding longer lives from the people they advise. The dialogue makes expertise itself a problem: knowing more does not necessarily mean judging well. Readers interested in the politics of space settlement will find a story concerned with who defines progress and who bears its costs.