 Of the four main crew members, who are focused on the most in the story?
His four flat legs looped out and in, the ends tucked under his wide, thin body, which constituted the knot at the middle. Obviously there was no contact throughout the ages before space travel— and yet each planetary race can interbreed with a minimum of ten others ! "Outside of your own world, there's nothing like your species, except superficially, and that's true of all other creatures, intelligent or not, with the sole exception of mankind. Actually, the four of us here, though it's accidental, very nearly represent the biological spectrum of human development. Man was the most numerous though not always the most advanced—Ribboneers had a civilization as high as anything in the known section of the Milky Way, and there were others—and humans were more than a little feared. When we project back into time those star systems on which humans existed prior to space travel, we get a certain pattern. "It would be easier if we knew all the stars in the Milky Way, but though we've explored only a small portion of it, we can reconstruct a fairly accurate representation of the past." This is one arm of it as it is today and here are the human systems." We have men who could do the job in a makeshift fashion, but the region we're heading for, while mapped, is largely unknown.
 Halden and Meredith
 Kelburn and Halden  Meredith and Emmer  Halden and Meredith  Kelburn and Meredith