Written by A. Bertram Chandler
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

John Grimes arrives on the forgotten planet Sparta, where a birth machine produces men generation after generation. The strangely shaped "men" on his ship have a catastrophic effect.

And they named the planet Sparta. Long ago the humans had settled this planet - too long ago for anyone to remember.
Slowly the civilization had developed, and now it was complete. A civilization of war and violence. A civilization of crude pleasures. A civilization in which human beings were produced by birth machines - and women were unknown.
It was a civilization whose terrible secret only the doctor-priests knew - a secret that a desperate man named Brasidus decided to penetrate, even at the risk of something worse than death.