An unlikely team begins a mission to open trade routes into a deadly and forbidden land on a dark planet beyond the edge of the solar system.They find an ancient society whose religious priests demand a terrible sacrifice.Beyond the sacred Temple of the Stars lies the Web. And the Web is alive!"Look at Botomatil. Our maidens wed at thirteen years; and thereafter at each nine months or ten, their babies nuzzle them with milky mouths. Within each ten months, our population adds a half. Within thirteen years our people would be eight times as numerous as at present. During the fourteenth year, with new marriages, our people could increase three fourths our whole number; the next year it would double, and so with increasing strides to twice, thrice, fourfold, and Botomatil is but a little space, the width of a stride, imprisoned in moveless bounds. How could we house or feed or clothe so huge a press of life?"The rhythm of the naked man's address held the ear, and now he was not sure whether this were a rhetorical pause or a question to be answered. However, presently he said: "Gogoma, the civilized way, the merciful way to deal with the question of excess population is to allow lack of food to starve... ." Then the hideousness of his own solution brought him to silence. Never before had he put the conditions of modern life so simply and frankly before himself."That is true, and for many years such was our custom in Botomatil before the arrival of Pachacamac. We allowed hunger to reduce our numbers, but hunger is much more cruel. Moreover it demoralized our people. It made of them murderers, liars, lechers, and beggars. The strong abused the weak. Armies rose up and fought for food and starved other armies. Starvation became part of military tactics."Such horrors took place that no human being could imagine it, had not our forefathers knotted all this lore in the quippus which you or any literate ool may unknot for himself. When our forefathers saw all these terrible things, the priests, together with Pachacamac, made a law that all babies, save the first two, should either die or be sold into slavery, whichever Pachacamac chose."Stan had leaned against the back of the archiepiscopal throne. He nodded faintly."But it was a crude law. Our women hid their babies, and when found they fought the priests; they tore their flesh, and when their babies were taken, some sat on their babies graves and wept, some driveled to the Stars, some flung away all modesty and stalked the day as naked as I, and many died."And then the high priest, Valhue, talked and prayed to Pachacamac to send some means to take our babies to the bright mansions of the Stars and keep them there until the mothers came. One morning he awoke to find the Web of the Stars spread where it is today; a miraculous net, and as the Constellations dip beneath the lake, babies in the Web are transported to its effulgent halls, and the women are content."