``Such as?'' Moreland asked.

``Such as' sending the cat to guard the mice', or' the falcon to protect the dove', or most terribly sharp of all,' the human being to save humanity'.''

``You and I have fallen out of literature into politics,'' Moreland observed.

``What a nasty fall was there!'' I said.

Moreland went over to stare at his peacocks again, and then came back and sat down, restively. ``The world that was once foot-loose and fancy-free,'' he said, ``has now become screw-loose and frenzy free. In our age of Science and Angst it seems to me more brave to stay on Earth and explore inner man than to fly far from the sphere of our sorrow and explore outer space.''

``The human ego being what it is,'' I put in, ``science fiction has always assumed that the creatures on the planets of a thousand larger solar systems than ours must look like gigantic tube-nosed fruit bats. It seems to me that the first human being to reach one of these planets may well learn what it is to be a truly great and noble species.''

``Now we are leaving humor and comedy behind again,'' Moreland protested.

``Not in the largest sense of the words,'' I said. ``The other day Arnold Toynbee spoke against the inveterate tendency of our species to believe in the uniqueness of its religions, its ideologies, and its virtually everything else. Why do we not realize that no ideology believes so much in itself as it disbelieves in something else? Forty years ago an English writer, W. L. George, dealt with this subject in Eddies of the Day, and said, as an example, that' Saint George for Merry England' would not start a spirit half so quickly as' Strike frog eating Frenchmen dead'!''