brought it back to Terra. Of course, nobody knew what it was, and
before the epidemic ended, it had almost depopulated this planet.
Since the survivors knew nothing about germs, they blamed it on the
anger of the gods--the old story of recourse to supernaturalism in the
absence of a known explanation--and a fanatically anti-scientific cult
got control. Of course, space travel was taboo; so was nuclear and
even electric power. For some reason, steam power and gunpowder
weren't offensive to the gods. They went back to a low-order
steam-power, black-powder, culture, and haven't gotten beyond that to
this day. The relatively civilized regions are on the east coast of
Asia and the west coast of North America; civilized race more or less
Caucasian. Political organization just barely above the tribal
level--thousands of petty kingdoms and republics and principalities
and feudal holdings and robbers' roosts. The principal industries are
brigandage, piracy, slave-raiding, cattle-rustling and intercommunal
warfare. They have a few ramshackle steam railways, and some
steamboats on the rivers. We sell them coal and manufactured goods,
mostly in exchange for foodstuffs and tobacco. Consolidated Outtime
Foodstuffs has the sector franchise. That's one of the companies
Thalvan Dras gets his money from."

They had run down through the civilized Second and Third Levels and
were leaving the Fourth behind and entering the Fifth, existing in the
probability of a world without human population. Once in a while,
around them, they caught brief flashes of buildings and rocketports
and spaceports and landing stages, as the conveyer took them through
narrow paratime belts on which their own civilization had established
outposts--Fifth Level Commercial, Fifth Level Passenger, Industrial
Sector, Service Sector.