exchanged.

The small animal, its humanlike front pawhands dangling over its
creamy vest, came out fully into the open, black eyes flicking from
the motionless Dalgard to the bright beads on the rock. But when one
of those paws shot out to snatch the treasure, the traveler's hand was
already cupped protectingly over the hoard. Dalgard formed a mental
picture and beamed it at the twenty-inch creature before him. The
hopper's ears twitched nervously, its blunt nose wrinkled, and then it
bounded back into the brush, a weaving line of moving grass marking
its retreat.

Dalgard withdrew his hand from the beads. Through the years the Astran
colonists had come to recognize the virtues of patience. Perhaps the
mutation had begun before they left their native world. Or perhaps the
change in temperament and nature had occurred in the minds and bodies
of that determined handful of refugees as they rested in the frozen
cold sleep while their ship bore them through the wide, uncharted
reaches of deep space for centuries of Terran time. How long that
sleep had lasted the survivors had never known. But those who had
awakened on Astra were different.

And their sons and daughters, and the sons and daughters of two more
generations were warmed by a new sun, nourished by food grown in alien
soil, taught the mind contact by the amphibian mermen with whom the
space voyagers had made an early friendship--each succeeding child
more attuned to the new home, less tied to the far-off world he had
never seen or would see. The colonists were not of the same breed as
their fathers, their grandfathers, or great-grandfathers. So, with
other gifts, they had also a vast, time-consuming patience, which