 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. Of all his features, only his head had appreciable thickness and it was crowned with a dozen long though narrower ribbons. "There are at least a hundred kinds of humans, each supposedly originating in strict seclusion on as many widely scattered planets. 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. It's reasonable to assume that, if men were set down on a hundred such worlds, they'd seem to fit in with native life-forms on a few of them. "Something had to distribute one species so widely and it's not the result of parallel evolution—not when a hundred human races are involved, and only the human race." 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." "We're looking down on the plane of the Galaxy. This is one arm of it as it is today and here are the human systems." And while stars in a given region tend to remain together, there's also a random motion. And, of course, if it were a fast-moving star, it might be completely out of the field of our exploration. The Ribboneer glanced out the visionport, where another ship hung motionless in space beside them. We have men who could do the job in a makeshift fashion, but the region we're heading for, while mapped, is largely unknown. It was a paradox that some biologically higher humans hadn't developed as much as lower races and actually weren't prepared for the multitude of life-forms they'd meet in space.
 Halden and Meredith
 Kelburn and Halden  Meredith and Emmer  Halden and Meredith  Kelburn and Meredith