Common Denominator

The story follows Earth's encounter with a pleasant, humanlike civilization discovered on three planets of Argus Ten, whose visitors and devices quickly spark commerce and curiosity. A social scientist, head of a neglected Bureau of Racial Maturity, obtains the expedition's films, dictionaries and twelve thousand books, devotes scarce resources to learning their idiom, and distills a hundred and ten works into a master chart intended to teach cultural lessons about reducing instinctual aggression and accelerating social maturity. Bureaucratic indifference, popular novelty, and political maneuvering complicate efforts to persuade leaders to apply alien knowledge to human social problems, even as trade and everyday gadgets alter daily life.