The Adults

Told largely from the viewpoint of Phssthpok, a Pak Protector who has crossed a thousand light-years at sublight speed to reach Earth, the novella lays out the premise Niven would soon expand into his novel Protector: that Protectors are what Homo sapiens becomes at full maturity, and Phssthpok has come to find and awaken a colony he believes his own kind abandoned on Earth ages ago.