(front blurb)

"A highly imaginative science fiction thriller . . . Four star rating." --Boston Traveler

"Mr. McIntosh has worked out with beautifully convincing detail the sociological and cultural develop- ments of his colony in space, and its conflict with a later shipload of des- perate authoritarians." --N.Y. Herald Tribune

"Thought-provoking as well as entertaining" --South Bend Tribune

WORLDS APART

Origintal title: BORN LEADER

J.T. McIntosh

Complete and Unabridged

AVON PUBLICATIONS, INC. 575 Madison Avenue -- New York 22, N.Y.

Copyright, 1954, by James MacGregor. Published by arrangement with Doubleday & Company, Inc. Printed in the U.S.A.

Worlds Apart

I

1

Marrying Toni was one of the formative experiences in the lives of young Mundans. She represented one of the anythings that everyone felt he had to try once.

But Rog Foley had tried it once. He had been Toni's second husband, when they were both seventeen. "And once was enough," he told Toni, without heat. "When we broke it up we had reasons that seemed perfectly good to both of us. They still seem good to me."

Toni sighed. "You sound almost as if you mean it," she said. "But I'll come along anyway."

"Do you know where I'm going?"

"Since there's nothing up here except what's left of New Paris, I suppose you must be going there."

"Have you any idea why?"

"No."

"There won't be anything interesting to see. And I promise you nothing interesting will happen."

"I suppose not," said Toni agreeably, making no move to turn back. Rog frowned at her as they started up the hill. "Why bother me?" he asked mildly. "With animal attraction like yours you should be able to marry pretty nearly anybody you like."

"Pretty nearly," Toni admitted without conceit, "but I want you, Rog."

"Why? The situation hasn't changed."

"Oh yes it has. You're on the Council now and that's only the start. You're going up, Rog, and I want to go with you."

Rog grinned but said nothing. That was one of the things he could appreciate about Toni. She was a realist. There were quite a few things he could appreciate about Toni, but there was one basic roason why they would never make a good pair. Toni was a game hunter -- the man who married her and stayed married to her would have to he a man who mattered, who was somebody, and who nevertheless had time and attention to spare for Toni.

Rog mattered, or was going to matter, and he was somebody. But he would never have much time or attention to spare for any woman, as a woman. She would have to fit in her domestic life with him here and there, in odd corners, when Rog didn't happen to be planning coups and shaping empires.

New Paris was only twenty years old, and the climate of Mundis was mild. If the village had been built well in the first place, the houses would still have been in quite good condition after twenty years, despite the rains. But it hadn't been built well. The people who built it had been hardly more than children when they left Earth, and few of them had had time to learn anything there about building.

The igneous rock of Mundis was light and easy to cut and shape -- too easy. Some of the walls that were built collapsed under their own pressure and because of their brittle inflexibilty. And though the wood of Mundis was strong and fine if properly seasoned, it was very difficult to season it. If it wasn't seasoned properly, it shrank and warped and split cantankerously. Few of the wooden or stone houses built by the founder colonists twenty years ago stood now as they had been meant to stand.

"You'll have to marry again soon, Rog," said Toni persuasively. "Even you won't be able to find a way out of it."

Toni certainly had a point there. For more than two years, while Toni by her process of trial and error had been looking for the right man -- still passionately sure he existed -- Rog had been single.

It couldn't be allowed to go on, in a community where one of the primary goals was maximum reproduction.

Rog considered the matter. Yes, he would certainly have to marry. Alice Bentley was the obvious choice of the girls who were old enough and still unmarried -- most of them only just old enough. But Rog had planned that Alice should marry Fred Mitchell, whatever anyone else said. And apart from Alice he could think of no girl who would make him a reasonable partner for life.

It would just have to be another interim marriage, then. He sighed. He didn't like the idea much. Like Toni, he felt there should be something better.

They were climbing the hill that was the eastern wall of the Lemon valley. Strictly, Lemon was the whole plain -- the name had been given to it because it was in exactly the shape of a lemon. But the township which was growing in one corner had no other name; it was Lemon, too. Already the name had lost most of its significance, for lemons wouldn't grow on Mundis. The young Mundans like Rog and Toni, who were both twenty-one and had been born in New Paris, had never seen a lemon.

There were many other things the young Mundans had never seen. Cities, mountains, seas, ships, trains, cars, bridges, rivers, snow, storms. Little things like paper clips and postage stamps and metal badges and Yale keys. Big things like skyscrapers and airliners and factories and the rearing mushroom of the atom bomb. Things you would fully realize they couldn't have seen, like streets and neon lights and traveling circuses and the devastation left by a tornado. Things you would be inclined to forget they couldn't have seen, things you might take it for granted they had in Lemon -- patent medicines, mistletoe, money, tobacco, alcohol, coal -- and skirts.

Rog and Toni were both tanned a clear, very light brown. The temperature on Mundis was fairly constant: sixty degrees before dawn, sixty-five soon after dawn, then seventy, seventy-five, eighty. Sometimes eighty-five or ninety, but not often. Then gradually back to sixty again. Sometimes as low as fifty-five during the night.

Rog wore only shorts and sandals. The shorts were cuffed in the Mundan fashion -- at the waist and legs the material was heavily starched and curved smoothly outwards as if half peeled off. This was supposed to be so that the restless air could get at the skin of the whole body and remove surplus moisture from it, but clearly it didn't have much effect in that direction. It was just a fashion, with no more apparent reason for it than fashions usually had.

For the rest, Rog had a striking, arresting face. His hair was black, neatly cut and parted, and his eyebrows were blacker. He was of average height and rather thin. His ribs showed plainly and his arms and legs were all muscle and bone, with no irregularities padded out. He looked young, but not too young for men to follow him.

Toni wore a green ket. No one knew where the name came from, not even the founder colonists, and certainly as far as the young Mundans were concerned there had always been kets. Kets weren't always the same, but the general pattern was a one-piece garment fitting the torso closely but not tightly, the trunks cuffed at the legs and sections scooped out elsewhere where this was decently possible. Toni's ket had a big oval cutout, split in two by a broad strip running from below the left breast to the right hip.

Toni wasn't beautiful; that wasn't the right word. She had long, lovely legs, true, but for the rest she was merely immensely attractive. She was no cold beauty. She would have been a torch singer, if Lemon had had any torch singers. Her hair was blond and her eyes jet black. The effect was explosive.

Abruptly, as they climbed the last stretch, Toni turned and dug Rog playfully in the stomach with her elbow. She was like that. He scuffled with her, almost as he was meant to. Not quite. The not quite showed Toni she was wasting her time. She broke free and walked on, laughing and unresentful

Rog wasn't at all averse to a stormy interlude with Toni, but one way or another it would be a weapon she could, and certainly would, use. It would enable her to make scenes and say things about him and generally make life difficult for him. Toni was an honest sort of girl, and people believed what she said.

They reached the top of the hill and wandered into the deserted village -- four lines of huts forming a square. The explanation for the formation had stood there for ten years, more gaunt and bare every month until at last there was nothing left of it.

The ship from Earth, also called the Mundis, had landed in the middle of the flat top of the hill twenty-two years before, and the first settlement had been built round it. Rog could remember it towering over the huts like a monument. That was what it was; a monument to Earth and the technology which had produced the ship.

Piece by piece, once it had been established that Mundis would support human life, the ship had been unloaded, stripped to a shell, and then broken up. Steel and iron were useful, and there had been a lot of steel in the hull of the ship. The steel had gone to make knives, wheel frames, ploughs; girders, and simple machines; it was all gone, and ironworking, meantime, was almost at a standstill. Not for scores of generations, if ever, would the Mundans be able to build anything like that ship.

Rog tapped walls, pushed open doors, and stamped on the floors inside. The houses were batter preserved than he had expected. Apart from the daily rain, hot, torrential, and usually brief, there was nothing in the climate of Mundis to destroy the works of man, Toni followed him around, at first not much interested in what he was doing, but later more and more curious.

"Thinking of starting a new settlement, Rog?" she asked.

"Yes," said Rog.

He spoke quite casually, as if it didn't matter, but Toni was startled.

"You don't mean that?" she demanded.

Rog shrugged. "All right, then," he said agreeably. "I don't mean it."

Toni wasn't reassured. "You /could/ mean it," she said suspiciously. "It's just the kind of tricky, crazy thing you might do, Rog."

"What's crazy about itP"

Toni, for once, was serious and earnest. "I know we have our disagreements with the old folks," she exclaimed, "but you can't split Lemon in two, Rog. You just can't! We're doing very well as we are. Surely you're not going to ruin all that's been done just for the sake of your own ambition -- "

"I thought you were ambitious too, Toni," interrupted Rog, amused.

"Yes, but I don't want anything that means splitting Lemon," retorted Toni. "Don't you see -- "

"Hold it, Toni," said Rog. "I'll promise you one thing. I won't do anything that only /I/ want."

He squinted along a wall to see how much the planks were warped.

"Whatever you've got in mind," said Toni, puzzled but no longer disturbed, "I don't see it."

"I didn't show you it," Rog murmured.

Mundis had plenty of vegetation, but no birds, reptiles, animals, or insects. Nor were there signs that there had ever been any. There were bacteria, as omnipresent as on Earth. No bigger, more complex form of life existed, except the plants.

The plants were complex enough, some of them, but neither mobile nor intelligent. A few were similar to Earth plants. None, naturally enough in view of the similarity in conditions, were startlingly dissimilar. Even the bacteria fell into the same classes. Human metabolism had no trouble in dealing with them, except for a mild fever at first when countless minor battles were going on in every founder colonist's blood stream.

Presently, having seen most of the houses, inside and out, Rog was satisfied. He threw himself on the coarse grass. "Let's rest," he said "and then go back."

Toni was going to drop beside him, but he put his hand flat on her diaphragm as she dropped and gently swung her a yard away, for safety. She laughed and tried to bite his hand.

"You know, Rog," said Toni frankly, going back to her earlier subject, "you encourage me by presenting no alternative. If you really didn't want me to bother you, you'd find some way -- "

"I found it long ago," said Rog casually. "The time isn't right for it yet, that's all."

"Oh," said Toni, half disappointed, half pleased. "What is it? Is it interesting? Or is it something I won't want to do?"

"It's wild enough for you. Nobody else would co-operate. You might."

Toni sat up excitedly. "Tell me."

"No." He cosed his eyes.

All the breath was knocked out of him and he opened his eyes again. Toni was kneeling astride him, bouncing on his stomach. "Tell me," she demanded. "Tell me, tell me, tell me." With each repetition she bounced again.

He heaved. Toni was strong, but he was stronger. She sailed over his head and turned with a lithe twist of her body to land on her shoulder.

"Would I spoil anything by letting it out too soon?" he asked.

She jumped up Hghtly. "No," she admitted.

"Then stop bothering me, and let's get back to Lemon before the rain starts."

2

Except for the township, the valley of Lemon was one vast farm. There were a few other cultivated fields outside the valley now, but all the cattle remained in and around Lemon. The Mundans wanted big herds, but they wanted to retain control of the world's new life cycle. Regretfully they had destroyed the rabbits they had brought. Sooner or later, if they were allowed to live, they would escape and overrun the planet. The complete absence of natural enemies, other living creatures of any kind, would mean that they would multiply to untold billions and strip the whole planet. Their numbers might be so vast that they would attack and destroy the human settlement.

The cats, likewise, had been destroyed, and all the insects. The cattle, horses, sheep, pigs, hens, and dogs had been retained, but a very careful check was kept on every animal, alive or dead. A bitch had merely to wander off and have her litter somewhere, and one day there would be wild dogs everywhere.

At one corner of the village, well clear of it, was the laboratory. It was a solid, square building, made of porous stone but faced with cement. By now the colonists had learned how to make cement from chalk and clay; every so often a kiln was heated and enough clinker was made to last for the next year or so.

The laboratory wasn't used much for research. In the building was a little room which contained, on microfilm, most of what a world had learned of the secrets of the universe. Until the ground covered by the microfilm library was consolidated again, there seemed little point in taking in fresh fields for study. Science was back to the level of elementary chemistry, elementary physics, elementary everything except the things which were no longer studied at all, and mathematics, which was fairly advanced. One could study high mathematics in a primitive culture, and that was what Lemon, for the most part, was.

No, the main purpose of the laboratory was teaching and manufacture, not research. The near scientists among the founder colonists were trying to pass some information on to their children before they died, and some of the understanding of how to use the information.

Except in one field, where they were trying to pass on understanding without any information.

Dick swallowed and coughed nervously before speaking. He and Jim Bentley were alone in the laboratory. They had worked together since Dick was eight, ten years ago. Dick's father, Lionel Smith, had been a biologist and one of the doctors of the original party, and Bentley's friend. Even at the age of eight Dick had been obviously more useful as an assistant to Bentley than working in the fields, tending cattle, or helping to build homes.

All the actual information young Mundans would need for hundreds of years was stored on the microfilm; what Bentley was doing with Dick was ensuring that at least one of the native Mundans would know what to do with those reels of microfilm.

"I've been thinking about atomic theory," Dick said.

"Yes?" murmured Bentley absently. He wasn't primarily a chemist, but he was making up a doctor's prescription as Dick spoke. Bentley always had to be doing something. "Thinking is a good thing, Dick," he said whimsically. "I'm always glad to hear about a boy of your age doing it."

"But look," said Dick impulsively. "There's gaps in what I know. Naturally. And there are gaps in the microfilm data. Some of them wouldn't bother me, some I could forget about if I had the very slightest knowledge of what you call nuclear fission . . . "

Abruptly Bentley stopped being abstracted and became very keen and alert.

" . . . and some still would," Dick went on hastily. "But what I mean is -- how am I supposed to know what's legitimate research and what isn't? I can work freely on nearly everything I like, but some things I'm not supposed to touch. And I'm not told enough to know when I'm touching them! I can appreciate why you think we'd be much better off without atomic energy -- "

"It's debatable," said Bentley quietly, "whether you're better off without atomic energy. But we decided long ago there was no question that you'd all be much better off /alive/. Atomic energy means death, one way or another, sooner or later. If we don't help you to find it, you won't -- not for a long time. It took thousands of years back on Earth. Maybe by the time it's found again, people will know better how to use it. We're hoping so, anyway."

"Yes, but don't you see?" said Dick eagerly, encouraged by the mild reception. "You won't be here always. Neither will I."

The last three words came out involuntarily. He hadn't meant to say them. It had never occurred to him that he too would grow old and die. But the idea somehow fired his imagination.

"Suppose I believe that I shouldn't try to discover anything about atomic power. Suppose I try to pass on that caution. What force is it going to have for the next Dick Smith?"

Bentley smiled. Like all the founder colonists, he was fifty-four. He was small and spare, his thick, coarse hair iron gray. "None, I suppose," he said. "But . . . "

He laughed outright. Dick smiled nervously. Bentley didn't often laugh. He had a strong sense of humor, but he usually kept his amusement to himself. "Dick." he said, "I have to be careful what I tell you about atomics. You know that, don't you? I'm not only keeping things back because I personally don't think you should know them, though I don't, but because I'd be on the carpet before the Council if I did tell you them."

"But you're on the Inner Council." said Dick.

"A lot of good that would do me. John Pertwee was President, once, and you know what happened to him."

He looked down thoughtfully at the waxed table top. Finally he said: "I don't want to tell you anything that would be a clue, Dick, but you can take it from me that if we changed our minds now and went all out for atomic power, telling you young people all we know, it wouldn't be accomplished any sooner than in the time of your grandchildren."

Dick was sensitive and reserved. And like many sensitive, reserved people, he was also intuitive. His head came up at that as he sensed an evasion. Bentley hadn't hesitated; he spoke confidently and decisively enough. Yet there was evasion. As if what he said was true, but unimportant.

Bentley went on, however, interrupting Dick's thought that if it was true it didn't mean much, considering that the same thing could probably be said of the production of high- grade steel or camera lenses.

"Atomic power." said Bentley, "is discovered and used in a culture that has hundreds of high-precision factories, unlimited electric power -- for, of course, you can't use atomic power to discover atomic power -- technicians trained in a little bit of a little bit of a branch of one section of knowledge, and economic competition. You don't even know what economic competition is, Dick, for we've never used money here.

"That's why I laughed. When you're older, passing on some of what you've learned as I'm doing, you won't really have to prohibit atomic power."

"But it's prohibited in the Constitution."

"And rightly. Because if we wrote down all we know, and your children and their children worked on the problem, it would be solved one day. We hope it never is.

"Before you were born, Dick, we even wondered if we should strangle all physical science, as a safeguard. Men can live quite well in a primitive state. They can even build a high culture without physics and chemistry and mathematics.

"Well, you know we decided against that. But we were quite definite on this -- no atomic energy. Not now or ever. Don't talk about this again, Dick. I understand, but others won't. They'll start talking about the death penalty whenever you mention atomics. They'll mean it, too. Understand?"

Dick understood. He wasn't a hero. He shivered at the thought of dying, as one or two people had died, for violating the Constitution.

He talked rapidly of something else.

About half an hour later, just before the rain, he left the laboratory and went home. He had his own house. His father had died when he was nine, his mother six years earlier. Since their father died, Dick and his sister had lived alone. He should have married a year, possibly two years since, but he had used the fact that he had to look after June, as an excuse not to.

Lemon was quite a handsome littie township. When they began to build it the founder colonists had had the experience of building New Paris. They knew some of the things not to do, and they knew what a merely functional collection of dwellings would look like. Also, there had been no hurry to build Lemon. The men and women who were building it were still living in New Paris, and only when several families could move to Lemon did New Paris begin to die.

There was no need for paved or tarred streets. The Mundan rains were so regular, so predictable, that they hardly affected the life of Lemon at all. Everything was hot and dry in the early afternoon; you got under cover about three o'clock and for an hour or two the heavens poured warm, clear water everywhere in a solid sheet. Then abruptly the rain stopped, and by the time the people appeared in the streets again there were dry spots here and there.

Apart from the rains, Mundis's water was almost all underground. None of the young Mundans had ever seen a lake or even a pool. The idea of a sea was a very difficult thing to get across to them, even with the aid of pictures. That was one of the many gaps of understanding between the founder colonists and their children. There was not one of the old people who could not swim; there was not one of the young people who could.

The street was hard earth, and as the years went by, the rains wearing it down and the sun baking it, it became harder and harder. Mundan soil was a sort of two-way valve. When there was too much water the soil let it drain straight through, easily and rapidly. But when the rain stopped and drying stared, the soil cracked, became a far better capillary agent than the soil of Earth, and sucked back moisture from the underground springs.

In laying the street the colonists had simply reversed the procedure of Earth. It wasn't necessary to lay drains to lead the water down or away; instead, they had laid traps to prevent its coming up again. The soil itself was a better drain than they could construct, All they had to do was prevent its drawing the water back again when it dried.

Few people talked to Dick as he made his way home. They didn't greet him because, sunk in his thoughts, he wasn't likely to notice them. To some extent people were already a little in awe of Dick. He knew more than anyone else of his generation. He was supposed to be brilliant. When he was silent merely because he was shy, he was often given credit for thinking deep thoughts.

He looked up when he was still some distance from his house and saw Rog Foley at the door. He stopped abruptly and hid in the shadow of the nearest hut. That was done automatically -- Dick didn't work out why he should hide from Rog or why he shouldn't. He saw June open the door, but Rog didn't go in. He merely spoke to June for a few seconds and then went down the road.

Dick waited for him to get clear, then hurried to his house and went inside. June was shaking out a party dress she was making.

"You just missed Rog," she said. "We're having a party here tonight."

"Oh." Dick's heart sank. He would have to tell Rog he hadn't dared to pursue the question of atomic power with Bentley. It didn't occur to him to object to Rog's inviting a party to Dick's house, That was normal. Dick's house was the usual place for parties, for it was one of the few where no older people lived. Rog's was too small.

He noticed suddenly that June was reddening under his gaze. He hadn't even been thinking about her; he had been staring at her simply because she was the brightest thing in the room, and the only thing that moved. Now he looked more closely. He didn't see what she had to blush about. Then something struck him about the ket she was working on. "Oh," he said. "Like that, is it?"

June bent her head over her work, but he could see her ears flush.

New conventions grew up with the children born and maturing on the new world. The young people were expected to have children as soon as they could, and brought up in the knowledge that it was a great thing, an honor. But it was left to every girl to deride when she was no longer a child and ready to accept womanhood. She generally did it quietly, easily and naturally by her appearance, what she wore, what she did, what she said -- without ever having to say, in so many words, that she was ready.

June still wore the white shorts and loose blouse of a child as she worked. But the party ket on which she was working had starched blinkers, and blinkers were definitely not for children. It was trimmed with lace, and children didn't wear lace. The cuffs at the bottom were very full and graceful, and the whole thing was in pink and cherry -- not the most subdued hues possible.

The outfit said quite plainly that June was ready.

"Abner?" asked Dick.

"No," said June almost inaudibly, not looking up. "Nobody in particular. And shut up."

"All right. But you could do worse than Abner. and I think he's sort of counting on you."

"No one has any right to count on me."

Dick stared at her bent head, a little puzzled.

3

On the second planet, Secundis, things were quite different -- naturally.

The people on the Mundis had thought they were the last to leave Earth. The people on the Clades knew they were the last to leave Earth.

And it was a very different Earth they left.

Phyllis Barton had never seen Earth, but she was as much a product of its frenzied, despairing death agonies as all the rest of the Clades. As she stood before the officer of the watch aboard the ship and saluted smartly, there wasn't a hint in her expression that such a thing as emotion existed.

"Routine survey at the observatory completed, sir," she reported. "No sign of life on Mundis. And we're at closest approach -- less than eight million miles. Nothing observed that suggests a settlement."

"Of course not," said Captain Worsley. "From the surface of Secundis we can't expect to see anything smaller than a large city. It's high time Corey made up his mind, took up the ship, and went and had a look. Oh, it's all right," he went on easily, as Phillis stared at him, "there's no recording and the spy-eye here is dead, just at the moment. I know the wiring of the whole ship, which is useful sometimes."

Phyllis was tense, a pulse in her temple throbbing a warning of danger. Worsley had belonged to the technical section until recently, and naturally was used to more lax discipline, more freedom to express opinions. Technicians had to express opinions in their work, and they tended to carry this independence into their thoughts and even their speech.

"No," said Worsley regretfully, "I just can't convince you I'm not an informer, can I? Very likely you'll go straight to Sloan or Corey and repeat every word I've said. It won't do you any good. I cover up well."

He waited. Phyllis stood straight, silent. He sighed. "Whoever does listen to me," he said, "may soon be glad he did. Think it over, Lieutenant. I'd like you with me."

Phyllis saluted again and left the room. Rapidly she tried to work out her course of action.

Worsley had said nothing, really. Dangerous as it might be to speak as he had, he had nevertheless been very careful to say nothing concrete, nothing but general disagreement on policy. It was no use reporting that. Technically one reported everything of that sort, but if one wanted to retain the rank and position one had, let alone rise, one always worked out very carefully what the probable effect would be.

Phyllis had risen by knowing what to report and what to keep to herself. She had risen high -- only a dozen women on the ship were so useful in one way or another, so indispensable, that their sex was forgiven them. That, of course, was why Worsley had spoken to her. She clearly had talent and efficiency for which he had a use.

He had hinted, too, that he would approach her on the same subject again. What was the subject? In particular she had no idea, but in general he must need her help for his own advancement, and he must think he could make her believe that in this there would be advancement for herself.

She decided slowly but quite definitely on her course of action. For the moment, at any rate, she could do nothing, since Worsley must have ensured that a challenge would only strengthen him and weaken the challenger.

But she wasn't going to follow Worsley. He wasn't a man to follow. He wasn't hard enough, ruthless enough. Most important, he didn't have the necessary experience of the politics of the Clades to be successful in any scheme of insurrection. That, almost certainly, was why he wanted her. She had that experience. She was only twenty-four, and to rank as she did at twenty-four she must have all the qualities Worsley needed and didn't have.

She went to the gymnasium and found it, as she hoped, deserted. The ship was at rest on the surface of Secundis, with less than half its full operational crew aboard.

Among the Clades sex was duty. It was not supposed to be enjoyed. Naturally in some ways the pretence was rather shallow. The essential part of the pretence, among the masculine, militaristic, 100 per cent efficient Clades, was that women were not to be elevated to the rank of partners in the act. What any woman thought, did, or said was unimportant, save only her function of producing male Clades.

Women who became officers like Lieutenant Fenham and Phyllis, were different, not in degree, but in kind, Since they were useful, intelligent, and responsible, they were not women. Obviously, however, they weren't men.

Their position was entirely anomalous. They were forced into it by an iron logic working on false premises. They must not have children, since they were officers and had to give orders, even to men. Creatures who bore children were an inferior form of life, females, and couldn't possibly give orders.

So Phyllis, who was an officer, a woman (practically inadmissible), and attractive (inadmissible) had to ensure that none of several ex hypothesi impossibilities happened. She must not permit any woman to think she was like her in any way. She must not allow any man, officer or otherwise, to regard her as he regarded Clade women. And she must not allow any man, officer or otherwise, to want her.

If there had been others in the gymnasium she would have had to remain fully clothed, for one thing. As it was, she stripped to trunks and shirt and began to go through an exercise routine.

She still wasn't satisfied about Worsley. The Clades had left a terrified, agonized, bleeding, dying world. She had been born four years out in space, at nearly the speed of light, but she had grown up in a hard, grim society. The laws of the community should have become milder and less militaristic; instead they became harder, more purposeful. The Clades had seen a world dying, and by God they weren't going to die.

Soon it wasn't by God -- Christianity went the way of most religions under totalitarianism. Survival became a business of toughness, single-mindedness, determination.

But it was determination about nothing in particular. It was toughness, not with an enemy but with one's friends -- so they soon ceased to be friends. It was single-mindedness about a way of life.

It was a fanatic drive towards unity. Acceptance of the same nebulous goals, the same reality, Submergence of individuality. /Unity is strength./

If the first ship from Earth had reached and colonized Mundis safely -- and the Clades knew no reason why it shouldn't have done -- the Mundans would have to learn and adopt the same way of life. It was unlikely that they would recognize at once the Clades' overwhelming superiority in strength and determination and all the other things that counted; but that could soon be clearly demonstrated. The Clades as a whole were looking forward to demonstrating it.

A powerful, well-trained fighting unit must have something on which to test itself . . .

Phyllis fell into the rhythm of the exercises. They had been designed long ago to strengthen the internal muscles for the day when young bodies which had never known gravity would have to bear the killing pull of Secundis.

The plan had been made early, and like most Clade plans was inflexible. It became not the best way to act, but the only way to act.

Someone came in. Phyllis looked round -- it was Lieutenant Mathers. She continued with the exercise, but instead of going he hesitated and then came in.

It wasn't all Phyllis's respousibllity, of course, that she should attract no sexual interest. It was also the responsibility of every Clade male to have no sexual interest in any female officer. She pulled on her slacks and continued exercising. She had done all that was expected of her.

Yet Mathers' eyes still strayed to her.

She made two mental notes, coldly. 'Worslsy, disloyal but probably careful. Mathers, potential sex criminal.' And being what she was, trained as she was, she began to explore possibilities of turning the two judgments to her own advantage.

4

At first glance it looked quite a wild party. The phonograph in one corner was blaring a hot number recorded on Earth nearly fifty years earlier, and there were occasional high squeals of laughter. Toni had just finished singing a fast blues. Various couples lay around in various abandoned attitudes. There was no drink, of course, but nobody missed it. The young Mundans knew about liquor but had never tasted it.

Closer inspection would have shown, however, that everyone was pretending hard that the party was much hotter than it really was, for no reason except that young people always did.

"I can't, Rog," Dick was saying uncomfortably. He was squatting on the floor, thinner and bonier than Rog. "Old Bentley made it pretty clear to me I'd better not go any further. Some of the other old boys would have had me before the Council for saying what I did."

Rog looked down his long nose. "Suppose you go before the Council?" he said. "Aren't there a few of us on it?"

Dick knew that by "us" he meant the native Mundans, the children of the founder colonists. "Nearly half the Council now," he admitted. "But you know some of them will vote with the old folk. I'm not taking the chance, Rog."

Rog left that alone. He had a way of assuming that his will would he done. If it was obvious that it wouldn't, he seemed to lose interest, as if he hadn't been too sure that whatever it was had been a good idea anyway.

"Fred. Alice. Come here," he said. Fred was huge, angular, lazy-looking. He didn't look too clever and wasn't. Alice was a small, sharp girl. Even her party dress couldn't make her look pretty. Perhaps, however, her vivacity was worth more than prettiness. Rog thought so. So did Fred.

They squatted on the floor beside him. Most of the young Mundans had grown up while their elders were too busy building houses and planting crops to make chairs. There were chairs now, but not all the youngsters used them.

"You two going to get married?" he asked bluntly.

There was no surprise. It was an old subject Fred looked uncomfortable, but Alice, frank and completely unself-conscious, shook her head. She was Jim Bentley's daughter. She might disagree with his way of looking at life, but there was a lot of Jim Bentley in her.

"You know it can't be marriage. Rog," she said. "It's either living together in secret, or leaving Lemon and going out into the plains somewhere to he hermits. We're not doing either." She cast a challenging glance at Fred and then back at Rog. "/I/ say so."

"You agree you should be kept apart like this?"

The founder colonists had wanted to breed as strongly as possible. Lionel Smith, the bidogist, had split them up and laid down rules. Alphas could marry anybody except Epsilons. Betas, Gammas, and Deltas, anyone outside their own group except Epsilons, Epsilons only within their own group. Epsilons, of course, were the men and women who were barren. The divisions only concerned marriage; it was of no importance to anyone, outside marriage, to what group anyone belonged.

Mundan marriage was almost, but not quite, free love. There was no contraception. Any man could marry any woman who agreed to marry him, outside two classes of prohibition. They were married when they said they were married. There was never any doubt about the matter, for whenever the first rumor arose, everyone asked: "Is it true?"

Couples broke it up, too, whenever they wanted to break it up. That freedom was practically forced on the community by the insistence that people should marry as early as possible, One could hardly make a man marry at seventeen and tie him to it for life.

Hence there was interim marriage. A man who couldn't find the right girl and a girl who couldn't find the right man would come to an agreement and marry, since the community frowned on their staying single; but only on the understanding that if the man ever did find the right girl, or vice versa, the marriage was dissolved. Legally there was no difference between an interim marriage and any other. Such couples, however, behaved differently toward each other -- often better than the other kind. And it went a long way toward keeping friendly relations in Lemon if rushed, doubtful marriages were always on that easy basis from the start.

But Alice and Fred were in one of the two classes of prohibition. They were both Betas. Now that Smith was gone, no one really knew how much it mattered that his rules be followed. But the motto of the colony might have been: 'Take no chances.'

No one was going to agree to let Fred and Alice marry -- none of the older people, anyway.

"What are you afraid of, Alice?" asked Rog.

"Dying of anything but old age," said Alice promptly.

"You won't, ~ said Rog, He could almost feel Dick's gaze on the back of his head. It would be a puzzled gaze. Two defeats, and Rog was not only taking them, but apparently looking for more. Dick's thought must be on those lines. Something would have to be done about Dick before the evening was out. Rog looked about him casually as he went on talking to Alice and Fred.

"You'll have half the Council behind you," he said.

His eyes rested for a moment on Toni, then passed on to June.

Rog had no more than heard of psychology, but he knew people. From what be had seen of June earlier in the evening, and from a study of her now, he knew exactly what she was feeling. She was miserable. Things hadn't gone as they were supposed to go at all. Everyone had exclaimed about her new dress, and no doubt noted what they were supposed to note, but that was all. Instead of being the center of attraction, as she had both hoped and feared she would be, she was noticed for a moment, and then forgotten, as usual. Abner Carliss wasn't there, so she didn't even have a chance to reject his attentions, or decide, after all, not to reject them.

"Look, Rog," said Alice frankly, "you can pull some people around with strings, but not me. I'm not a pawn in your chess game."

"No," Rog agreed. "You're my queen."

He spoke so matter-of-factly, still looking past her, that he both compelled belief and knocked the confidence out of Alice.

"Surely it's obvious?" he said. "Among the girls, you're the one who counts, Alice. We know it and the old folk know it, You're not the prettiest, or the cleverest, or the strongest, or the bravest. You're just the one who matters most. The one who's consulted, You're the Jessie Bendall of this generation. They can't afford to do anything to you."

Alice was silent for a long time.

June was pretty, and she must have brains. Rog had never thought of her before, and he suspected that neither had anyone else except Abner. She was just Dick's kid sister. Even Abner probably hada't thought of her as a girl to marry. Now that she had stepped into the spotlight, she would be noticed by more and more people until she began to be included in the register of cute chicks headed by Toni, Helen Hulton, and Bertha Doran (n�Mitchell). But so far, Rog suspected, only he had noticed her.

She was rather small, and very slim. The word for June, everything about her, was dainty. Though she was sleek and firmly muscled, she gave the impression of fragility. She had one compelling attribute of real beauty. In looking at her one didn't look at any part of her, even her face; she was a surprisingly alluring whole, and it seemed silly to take notice of her arms or her waist or her legs. One looked at Toni's legs. June one noticed only as a girl.

No, as a woman.

Alice was saying: "I wish I knew whether we should follow you to the death, Rog, or bury you alive."

Rog sighed. "We've talked about the Constitution for hours at a time, day in, day out, since we were old enough to have ideas of our own. It's wrong, isn't it?"

"Yes, I think so. But it isn't bad -- it isn't evil Just silly and shortsighted. Mistaken, not criminal. Sincere, though wrong."

"But wrong, nevertheless?"

"Yes."

"Then let's change it."

"By refusing to obey it?"

"By making a challenge, forcing a division, and winning it."

Things were clicking into place smoothly. The fact that he had only just noticed June as a woman was of no importance. He had to marry; he wanted to make quite sure of Dick; June must have some sense, being Lionel Smith's daughter and Dick's sister; and if he were married it would be easier to persuade Toni to play her part in the plan.

It would be an interim marriage, of course. He didn't want June as a permanent wife, and he didn't think it fair to ask her, at seventeen to make a decision at a moment's notice for the rest of her life.

"We must do it now," Rog insisted, "because the longer you leave a thing like that the more difficult it is. People vote for a thing not because it's good or bad but because it's been going on for twenty years. They vote for the status quo just because it's the status quo."

"True," Alice admitted. "That's one way of looking at it. There's another way. This way: you're power-mad, Rog. You see how you can rule Lemon, hence Mundis, hence the human race, hence the galaxy. You can be the most important living thing. That's it, isn't it?"

Rog didn't seem interested. "Let's stick to the flaws in the Constitution," he said.

"Oh, we know all about /them/. But the answer is still the same. I'm not marrying Fred." She went on quickly before Fred could speak: "Not yet."

"Not yet? That means you will when what happens?"

"How would I know?" She grinned. "When you do something, Rog, damn you. I don't know what, but I expect you'll do it."

"You mean you'll do it when I show you good and sufficient reason, and can promise you it's safe?"

"I suppose so. I mean, I expect that's what I mean."

Rog grinned in return. They respected each other, he and Alice, and neither was likely to underrate the other. Having been, always, the leading boy and the leading girl among their contemporaries, they had spent their whole lives now in competition, now in alliance, now in a secret understanding, now at war. Rog didn't have to marry Alice to cement their understanding -- nothing could, break it.

He climbed to his feet. "All right," he said, and raised his voice slightly. "June!"

Everybody turned and looked at June. Taken by surprise, she put her chin up and came a step forward. Rog liked that. In a girl who would always be quiet and reserved, it was a good sign that when something startled her she came to meet it instead of retreating from it.

"Never mind me, folks," he said. "Go back to your necking or whatever you were doing. June, let's take a walk, shall we?"

June went pale. Rog wasn't really throwing his weight about. He had made a sort of preliminary announcement, and now everyone knew that Rog Foley was just about to ask June Smith to marry him. There was a buzz of talk as Rog took her arm and they went out. June was glad to get out in the open, even if that was a step nearer a proposal that was going to scare the life out of her.

It was obvious to her as to everyone else that Rog could have any girl in Lemon. It had never occurred to her to work out what she would do if he asked her to marry him.

It was flattering but terrifying. It was like being acclaimed as a heroine -- but having to commit the act of heroism first.

It was the kind of thing that didn't happen to June Smith.

5

Mundan night was the only spectacle on the planet which transcended the Terran variety in grandeur. Mundan air was usually clearer than Earth's. When one raised one's eyes to the night sky, the stars exploded in one's face. They were bright and clear and warm, a million little fires burning in the fabric of space.

Mundis had no moon, but often at night a glorious orange star would compensate for a dozen moons. The orange star wasn't a star at all, but Secundis, the sun's second planet. Brinsen's Star was a small sun, practically invisible from Earth, though the distance was oniy fourteen light-years. It hadn't been seen until the first observatory had been set up on the moon, clear of Earth's fog of air. Then very little attention had been paid to it, for it was a thing among the new glories that the lunar observatory revealed.

It wasn't until a century later, when Earth was dying, and Venus and Mars were soon going to be dying, and the first interstellar flight was absolutely essential, that the astronomers checked the predictions of the chemists and physicists and said yes, it seemed they were right in suggesting that there was an Earth-type planet going round Brinsen's Star, though no one would ever see it even from the moon, and that even if it didn't have conditions close enough to those of Earth to support human life, very likely the second planet had. It was possible that both planets would be suitable; highly probable that one at least of them would be.

The Mundis had never investigated Secundis. One planet was more than enough. It would be centuries before the Mundans, for all they knew the only human beings left in the galaxy, would be interested in another world.

From the surface of Mundis, Secundis was usually a splendid sight. It was always predominantly orange, but it was shot with yellows and pinks and rubies and crimsons which changed as one watched. And Secundis had two satellites which shared in the spectacle. Secundis was occasionally less than eight million miles from Mundis, as at present, and it was considerably larger than the first planet.

The silence of Mundis was relieved, for June and Rog, by the noise of the cattle close at hand and the muffled chuf-chuf-chuf of the steam engine which worked twenty-four hours a day pumping up water from an underground spring. The sounds of cattle brought fourteen light-years to a world which had never had animal life of its own didn't seem in the slightest strange to them. The cattle were much more at home on Mundis than they had been in space. The horses and pigs and sheep had never taken to free fall.

The hens had. For a few generations the hens had become once more birds of the air, flying gracefully and competently about their pens on the spaceship, as if they had been created for free fall. There was no opportunity to see what real birds would have made of it. The Mundis carried none.

Rog wondered whether June would like him to get it over with, or to allow her to think, to get used to the idea that Rog Foley was going to propose to her -- to get used to Rog Foley. He decided that if she wanted him to hurry she could hurry him, but if he rushed the affair she could hardly stop him. So he took her arm and just walked.

"It's funny to think of all the other birds and animals and insects Earth had," June ventured, for something to say. "Thousands of species, and only a few given a chance to live."

"There were too many," said Rog. "Hundreds of different kinds of cats alone, without considering other animals."

"Yes, but the other ark took two of everything, and every animal had a chance."

"That just couldn't be done this time. Anyway, June, what seems to me more important than the end of a lot of different kinds of animals is the end of the different kinds of men."

"Of men?" June echoed, stopping abruptly.

"Haven't read about that? Yes, black men, red men, yellow men, brown men -- and the corresponding women."

"But they weren't really . . . "

"Yes, they were black, red, yellow, and brown. It's in the records. But there's nothing about why there's none of them here. Nobody knows. I asked John Pertwee about it. He said nobody told him about it, and now we'll never find out how it came about."

"It's just as well we're all the same, isn't it?" said June diffidently. "I mean, we don't agree so terribly well as it is, and if there were a lot of different races represented . . . "

"True enough. But I wonder what a yellow man's point of view on it would be. I wonder if the whites fought off the yellows and blacks, or refused to let any of them go in the Mundis, or if the other races were big enough to agree that only one should go."

"They'd have to be big for that."

"Wouldn't they? Imagine half a dozen different races of men coming together and agreeing it would be better for the future of mankind if only one of them went forward. One to represent them all."

"I hope it was like that!" exclaimed June.

"So do I. I'm afraid it's hardly likely. I expect the whites were just tougher and stronger and further advanced, and brushed off all the others. If it really /was/ agreement -- if the blacks worked so that the whites could carry on the race -- there should have been some record of it, so that we'd know about it . . . "

There was silence for a while. Then June said: "But no one would care, Rog. Except a few like you."

Rog turned in surprise. There was a strange warmth in her tone. "Too few of us have any imagination," she said. "We don't see the other point of view. The old folk don't see our problems. And I suppose," she added reluctantly, "we don't always see theirs."

It was strange love-making. But it /was/ love-making. June wasn't gasping with admiration and saying how strong Rog was, but she was talking herself into admiring him a little more.

Rog looked down at her. He could see her quite plainly in the starlight, though every shadow was black. The contrasting light made her skin white, the pink of her ket gray, and the cherry jet black. She was lovely. He said so, tentatively.

But she still wasn't ready. She moved on rapidly, and he had to hurry to catch up with her. She talked quickly, nervously, of Toni and how she became a different person when she sang; then she remembered that Rog had been married to Toni and changed the subject hurriedly. She talked of Dick, the first person she thought of.

"Yes, Dick is a genius," Rng agreed dutifully. "He has to understand without demonstration, without experiment. And yet, really, he's more a practical man than Bentley. I think when Dick's in charge of the lab we'll really begin making things again."

"But we are making things!" June was rather indignant, for she spent hours each day weaving cloth. The Mundans had no money, but the Council doled out work that had to be done all the same. Otherwise the supply of eggs and meat and bread might stop; unless you happened to bake bread, when it would be the supply of eggs and meat and cloth.

"Yes, but only the things we must make. Doing only the things you must do isn't living -- just existing. The old people are to blame for that. When they could, they didn't explore, found no mines, set up no machines -- "

"They made the pumps and the looms!"

"The things they had to make. They didn't dig for stone or coal or iron or nickel -- "

"How do you know these things would have been there if they'd dug for them?"

Rog laughed. "Well, certainly they'll never find them if they don't. Besides, you don't really look for anything in particular, at first. You just look, and see what you get. If you don't find iron, you get copper or silver or tin . . . "

Just as he was going to carry on the discussion, he had one of his flashes of insight. Though June would keep putting off his talking about him and her, she really wanted him not to take no for an answer, and sweep her off her feet.

"June, listen," 'he said. "You know why we're here."

She seemed to know that by turning her head just a fraction her face was in black shadow and Rog couldn't see her expression. "Yes," she whispered.

"It's only interim marriage I'm suggesting," he said softly. "It's not irrevocable. You needn't feel you're going to be tied to me forever."

"How serious are you? Do you already mean it to be only a few weeks? Have you planned that?"

"I think," said Rog with the gift of compelling sincerity that was one of his most useful talents, "I mean it forever, June."

June said: "I'll marry you, Rog."

There was silence for ten seconds.

Then as he was reaching for her shoulders to turn her lips to his she turned abruptly. "Let's go back and tell them."

Rog understood. She wanted time to realize it now. Dick congratulating her, people talking to her, Rog standing with her in other people's presence, so that she could gradually begin to believe it.

He was right, but only half right. For when Dick had been staring at her bent head, puzzled, earlier in the day, she had been thinking that same wild, fantastic thing: perhaps that evening would be the evening of her life, and Rog Foley would notice her as something more than Dick's kid sister, and . . . But she hadn't gone further than that. That made it all the more difficult, now, to accept the impossible truth.

She was Rog Foley's wife.

II

1

It was just an informal meeting at Jessie Bendall's house. It wasn't an Inner Council sitting; but the fact remained that Jessie was the President of the Council since John Pertwee had been stripped of office, and Brad Hulton, Jim and Mary Bentley, Tom Robertson and Henry Boyne were all Inner Council members. It was a gathering of the leaders of the founder colonists, however informal.

"I'm sorry we have to hold this meeting," Mary said. At fifty-four she was better-looking than her daughter. Alice had vivacity and youth and a certain piquancy of feature, but Mary, alone among the founder colonists, was left with some of the regal beauty of maturity, end none of the youngsters had reached that stage yet. "We're going behind our children's backs, reaching our own conclusious independently, and then voting in a block at the official sittings. That's the unpleasant truth, isn't it?"

"Yes, said Robertson vehemently, "because they re doing the same adjective thing!"

Boyne winced and closed his eyes in protest. "Clean thy mouth, infidel," he muttered. But he was careful to say it so that Robertson couldn't hear him.

No violence of expression could stir Mary to answering violence. "And whose fault is that?" she asked quietly. "Who brought them up? Who told them all they know?"

There was no reassuring answer to that. The parents of the past, in other circumstances, could blame a thousand influences for things they considered wrong in their children, or other people's children -- films, shows, books, newspapers, schools, teachers, comic sections, advertisements, graft, poverty, alcoholism, the color bar, the Democrats or the Republicans. Blame wasn't so easy to dole out now. Everything that had influenced the children had been instituted or promulgated or permitted by the founder colonists as a group.

Except: "The Gap is what's at the root of this trouble, and that wasn't our fault," Jessie Bendall remarked.

Everybody's thoughts slid back thirty-eight years. No, nobody had consulted the people who were actually to leave the dying Earth. They were told practically nothing about it. They had no choice about anything, not even the world they were going to. They could go or not, that was all. They were all sixteen, hardly more than children. They hadn't selected each other.

They were selected, trained, tested, crammed each with the essence of some branch of knowledge, conditioned, toughened, taken to pieces and put together again. Lionel Smith had been packed with all the biology he could take and told to get the rest from the microfilm library. Bentley had had physics hammered into him by the cubic foot. Will Hunter had been made a reasonable facsimile of a medical doctor and told to get the experience he needed where and when he could. Unfortunatdy he had died while he was still getting it.

It was almost true to say that no one knew less about Project Survival than the adolescents who were detailed to survive. From the moment they were chosen, their last few months on Earth were such a whirl of conditioning of one kind or another that not one of the two hundred of them had ever been able to sort it out completely.

"We should have had kids on the way," Robertson declared.

Mary sighed. "Yes, on the basis of what we know now."

"Nonsense," said Boyne, indignation making him brave Robertson's wrath. "Free fall -- complete absence of gravity -- it would have been cruel -- "

"The animals did it," Robertson snapped.

"Animals are often cruel," Bentley observed. "Anyway, they didn't know that their offspring reared in weightlessness would have to learn painfully and possibly unsuccessfully to cope with gravity later. We did."

Robertson repeated: "We should have had children."

"/I/ wasn't going to have any children for whom there might have been no future," Jessie remarked. "Quiet, everybody. We're going round in circles on an old, dead question. Mary's right. On the basis of what we know now, we'd have had children and the Gap would only have been half what it is. But we didn't know. We waited until we saw Mundis and knew we could live on it and then said, 'Right, we'll have children.' That was reasonable and humane and many years ago, so let's hear no more about it."

Jessie was motherly and kindly, but when she spoke like that she was quite forceful and people were liable to pay attention to what she said.

"The fact is," she went on more quietly, "that when the first child was born here on Mundis his parents were thirty-three, and everyone else was thirty-three.

"There was always a certain amount of friction between youth and age, and they were never as sharply divided as this before. But that's old stuff. Let's -- "

"Excuse me, Jessie," said Mary firmly. "It may be old stuff, but it's as relevant now as at any time since the landing. More. This friction, as you call it, was hardly noticeable five years ago, when the children were still children. It's grown every week since then. What's the situation going to be in five years?"

Brad Hulton was slow and even-tempered and steady, like many big men. "I can't see that this is a vital problem," he said. "Suppose we don't always agree with our kids? Suppose it's due to that thirty-three year Gap of understanding? Soon we'll all be dead and the kids will have their own way anyway and there won't be any Gap any more."

What he said was undoubtedly true, but no one else was inclined to be so philosophical about it.

"I want to take up what Mary's been saying," said Jim Bentley. "Truth is, friends, we made mistakes. Maybe they weren't our fault -- maybe they were the fault of people who sent out youngsters with hardly any experience of life to build a new world. But anyway, we made them. What's our general line about them going to be? Are we going to say to the young folk now 'All right, we were wrong, let's do it your way,' or are we going to insist to the death that black is white and we were never wrong and we couldn't possibly be wrong if we tried?"

This was plain speaking, too plain for Robertson and Boyne. Robertson went white with rage. He was angry at everything, but angriest at any suggestion or hint that he could possibly have been wrong, ever. Boyne took Bentley's observations quite differently. Against such stupidity, such failure to see the obvious, what could one do? Clearly all that was wrong in the community was the absence of Faith. Sooner or later everyone would turn to God and there would be a new heaven on Mundis,

"Well, you know," said Brad easily, "granting you're right, Jim, I don't see how we can take everything back and start all over again."

"No," Mary agreed. "In theory it sounds very nice to admit one is wrong . . . "

"But in practice," Jessie took it up, "One finds that the opposition, which is cocky anyway, gets even cockier, thinks it knows everything, takes control, and proceeds to make far worse mistakes."

"That's all beside the point," Robertson said furiously. "If the youngsters don't realize how little they know, we'll have to show them. We haven't lived all these years longer for nothing. One of us is still worth any two of them. They need a lesson -- "

"The first Mundan war?" inquired Brad gently.

"Oh, no war," said Boyne hastily. "Don't even speak of it. Nothing like that can ever happen again. Everything will come out for the best, so long as we have trust and faith and follow . . . "

"That's just the trouble," complained Bentley. "We expect our kids to share our horror of things we won't tell them about. We ask for blind trust, and insist it must be blind. The other day Dick Smith was talking about atomic energy . . . "

He had to wait for Jessie to shush Robertson and Boyne. Robertson wanted Dick Smith haled before the Council right away and put on trial for offense against the Constitution. Boyne was saying something about anti-Christ.

Bentley caught Jessie's eye. They would get on much better without Robertson and Boyne; but the trouble was, Robertsen and Boyne were just as representative as Bentley himself or Brad. They reacted as a large group of their contemporaries in the Council would react.

"And why shouldn't Dick talk about atomic energy?" Bentley went on, when he could. "Because he'd been told not to. Reasons? Because we'd seen cities destroyed, first in war and then in peace, by atomic power. What's that to Dick? What is a city? What is destruction? What is power? What is war?"

"So what do we do?" asked Brad. "Have a small-scale atomic war here so that they'll know what it's like?"

"We must at least /tell/ them," said Bentley. "I'm asking permission of the Inner Council to tell Dick what I think I ought to tell him."

"In open defiance of the Constitution!" exclaimed Robertson.

"Not defiance. Not when I ask for permission."

Jessie frowned. "You're not going to give him a lot of clues he can use to work out the fundamentals of nuclear fission, are you?" she asked.

"It's a pity," said Bentley patiently, "that we weren't all nuclear physicists. Then we might know what we were talking about. I told Dick, truthfully, that if we all changed our minds and went all out for atomic energy, pooling all our knowledge instead of suppressing it, nobody alive today would be alive when it was accomplished. Clues don't matter -- they're there already, and Dick has the brains to have seen them. The curious reticence in the microfilm about some substances and processes and lines of research, for example. I hate atomic energy, and everything connected with it. You can trust me to say nothing to Dick that will make the rediscovery of atomics any easier, and quite a lot that may make him less inclined to rediscover it."

"That shouldn't be necessary," rapped Robertson. "They should have the sense to see that anything we forbid is forbidden for their own good."

Bentley sighed. He was only a little less equable than Brad. But he had come as near as he ever did to losing his temper. "If it ever comes to open dissension between the young people and us," he said, "they'll win. Because, as a group, they have more sense than we have."

Robertson was on his feet, raging. "Is that a personal insult to me?" he demanded.

"Well, if when stupidity is mentioned, you take it as a personal insult," observed Bentley, "it probably is."

That was the end of that meeting.

2

Rog had two rooms tacked on to the end of his father's house. There was no way from one part of the building to the other -- old Bob Foley had walled it up.

June was in one of the rooms, sewing. Rog gently prodded the door shut before he turned to Toni.

"Do you want the whole story, Toni?" he asked. "Or will you have it in a nutshell?"

Toni leaned back and tensed sundry muscles. She wasn't making any conscious effort to be seductive; she couldn't help it. "Something between the two," she suggested. "I want to know what's behind this, whatever it is. You said it was something wild enough for me, that I might do but no one else."

"That's it. You like John Pertwee, don't you?"

She grinned. "What girl doesn't? A few men have that -- something. Other men make dirty cracks about it because they're jealous. They pretend it's all physical, that the man who has it is just sort of prize bull. But they don't know . . . Yes, I like John. I always did. So?"

"So why not marry him?"

Toni wasn't a genius, but her intelligence was quick. "You're crazy," she said instantly, but kept her eyes on Rog, waiting for him to prove he wasn't.

"No. I think Pertwee's the man you've been looking for all your life. Only you wouldn't took there because of a silly law."

"Maybe -- but how do you get round the fact that I can't possibly marry him? Do you search for all the impossible things, Rog, and try to make people do them?"

"Yes, if there's any purpose in it. There is in this. Toni, you know we're fighting the Constitution. It's wrong, and we want to change it. By 'we' I mean, broadly, all our generation, and particularly those who occasionally think. That includes you."

"Thanks. I'm with you, moderately. But why not just wait a few years till we can vote the changes?"

"Three quarters majority? That's the Constitution, you know."

"Well, a few more years."

"Why not wait until we're all dead and then we don't have to bother doing anything at all? No, Toni, I don't undervalue patience. Sometimes it's essential. But if a thing is wrong, /now/ is always the time to change it. Like the three quarters majority. That was all right for the founders, all the same age, with the same experience, with the same goals. Now it has to go. As things are, it just stops all change, all progress . . . "

June tooked in. "Can I come in?" she asked, looking uncertainly at Toni.

"Sure thing," said Toni, with her friendly grin. June had Rog, whom Toni had wanted, but Toni had never acquired the habit of bearing malice.

However, June was looking at Rog. He considered the matter carefully. "No, June," he said at last. "Better not."

The door closed quietly.

"I grant the point about the three quarters majority," said Toni. "What else?"

"The mating prohibitions. They were for the early days, or if for some reason breeding was slow or insecure. But the original two hundred are eight hundred plus now. Groups don't matter a damn. Anyone should be able to marry anyone, barring blood relations."

Toni nodded. "Fred and Alice," she said.

"And you and Pertwee."

"Oh, but that's fantastic. I mean -- "

"List the things that are fantastic about it, one at a time."

"He's fifty-four and I'm twenty-one."

"How long have any of your marriages so far lasted? A year or so. Pertwee won't be noticeably decayed a year from now."

Toni grinned. "I don't agree you've answered that, but we'll pass it meantime. Because I'm inclined to pass it, I suppose. Point two -- it's illegal. It can't be marriage."

"I hope to arrange that, by having you bring up the matter. Like the three quarters majority and the other class of prohibition."

"Item three -- suppose Pertwee has a point of view on this?"

"I'd trust you to change it, if it needs to be changed."

"Point four -- would we have to leave Lemon?"

"For a month. Give me a month at least and I'll guarantee that when you come back there will be no action taken against you."

"Point five -- do you think I'd make up my mind on this just on the spur of the moment?"

"You might. But anyway, you can think about it, now I've told you."

"Oh, I'll think about it -- you cunning devil. You know I've always been half in love with John, and this is the sort of thing I'm just crazy enough to do. Not because you want it -- I don't give a damn about your plans, really, Rog. But just because . . . "

"Because," said Rog agreeably.

When Toni had gone he pondered for a while and then remembered June. He went in to her at once.

"I hope you don't mind, honey," he said. "It was just something it's better for you not to know."

"Oh, no," said June expressionlessly, "I didn't mind at all."

Rog was balancing the points. He couldn't topple the Constitution on the atomic-energy negation -- for one thing, no one in his party knew whether atomic energy would be desirable or not, given all the data. But he could use the flat, unreasonable "no" to loosen up the founder colonists for a defeat on the majority-vote question and a rout on the marriage prohibitions. Then . . .

Briefly he considered doing something about June. He decided, however, to continue the interesting balancing of possibilities instead. June was always around; destiny wasn't always as malleable as it was now.

3

John Pertwee sat in the garden as the shadows grew deeper, waiting and reviewing his responsibilities. Kate and Frank were married; there was no need to consider them. Ruby was sixteen and competent. She could, if necessary, look after Jack and Norman. They were in the house at his back, presumably asleep.

No, he need consider no one but himself.

For all the early years, the hard years, Pertwee had been the President of the Council. He had presided at the very meeting at which it had been agreed that thirty-three years was too great a Gap to be crossed by man and woman -- that for strongest breeding, to ensure that no healthy young person should be tied to a man or woman becoming sterile, and for various other reasons, no marriage be allowed between founder colonist and native Mundan.

Then, Marjory had been alive. Marjory was cool and clever and beautiful, and he loved her. Besides, when that was agreed, he was surrounded by scores of attractive young women, and it was hard to visualize the possibility of mating eventually with what was then a female child just out of the womb.

It wasn't a thing that mattered. The men and women who agreed to that provision didn't really consider it as applying to themselves. It would apply only to people of over fifty, and they couldn't see themselves being over fifty. It was a good thing to have in the Constitution, so that there would be no misunderstanding when the time came.

As it happened, the law was directed personally against John Pertwee, and applied to no one else. For by the time the first children had grown up, the only woman they were at all likely to be interested in from the point of view of marriage was Mary Bentley, and the only man, John Pertwee. Mary didn't come into the reckoning. That left Pertwee. No doubt there were other men among the founder colonists who might have trespassed had the opportunity to trespass been offered them. But Pertwee was the only one who at fifty-four was still tall and straight and strong and handsome enough.

Marjory died early -- as most women died, in childbirth. Pertwee married Jean. In the tenth year of the colony, she died. There was no one else for Pertwee to marry. There weren't many deaths on friendly Mundis, but more women were dying than men.

He became Pertwee the lover, the terror of every jealous husband. Nobody turned him off the Council for that; it was inevitable that if the handsomest man in the community was single, something of the sort must happen.

But the case of Helen Hulton was different. She was fifteen. It was against the Constitution. Pertwee had taken advantage of her youth. He was entirely to blame, a libertine, almost a pervert. He was deposed from the presidency, though not turned off the Council.

Frances Bendall was next. That was the end, He was banished from the Council, never to hold office of any kind, removed from the fine house he had built himself and given a small hut on the outskirts of the village and told grimly that the next time the only possible punishment was death for himself and for the girl concerned.

Curiously, it was only the founder colonists who objected. The young people didn't care, The women could understand why a girl should want a man of maturity and experience, particulary such a man as Pertwee; and the men shrugged their shoulders and said if a girl wanted an old guy of fifty-four she was welcome to him.

Pertwee believed the Council meant what they said about the death penalty -- for him, at any rate. On the other hand, there was no question, surely, of executing a girl of twenty who could produce six or seven children. That was only meant to scare girls away from him.

Apparently it had failed to scare Toni. She was not only prepared to fall in love with him, she came to him prepared to run away with him. It was a wild scheme at first sight, but Pertwee usually looked into things a little more closely than that.

If they went away, no one would look for them, There might be a token search close to Lemon, but the people who made it wouldn't expect to find them. Any part of the planet was as safe as any other, as far as the colonists knew. They hadn't explored much of it, because there was very little to explore -- no seas to chart, no animals, the same kind of vegetation everywhere. The only thing that varied was temperature. One could find places where it was hotter, but few places where it was cooler.

It would only be necessary to stay well out of sight for a month or two, and then come back alone -- without Toni. It would be quite a strong bargaining position. . . .

Pertwee started to his feet. Toni was there beside him in the dusk.

She came up silently, effortlessly. She was the right partner to have in an elopement like this. She knew what she could do. She had a sack on her back, and he could trust her to have packed what was necessary.

They melted into the darkness without a word. It was not until they were clear of the bounds of Lemon that Toni remarked: "I still think we should have taken horses."

"Apart from the fact that they would have left a track that could be followed," said Pertwee, "it would have made it more important for us to be discovered. They would have cared more about the horses than about us."

Toni laughed. She laughed easily. She was a happy girl, and Pertwee felt his blood coursing through his veins in a more powerful surge at the thought that she was his. There was no doubt she was the most attractive girl in Lemon -- very little doubt, therefore, that she was the most attractive girl alive.

There was a slight hiatus in his thoughts as he realized that there was something he didn't fully understand about the affair. Toni had had the thing worked out in a way that didn't seem at all typical of her. And she had made up her mind quickly after they had flirted briefly, innocently . . . It occurred to him fleetingly that instead of taking the leading part in the affair he was almost being pushed into it.

But he refused to follow out that thought. John Pertwee was a strong man with a weakness, and his Achilles' heel was women. When the Council cut women out of his life, they struck deeper than would have been the case with most men of his years. With a wise woman he loved beside him, Pertwee could still be a leader, a big man in any community. Without her he was uncertain, weak, lacking purpose in life.

He didn't /want/ to survey Toni's reasons too closely. It was enough that he had Toni.

4

The disappearance of Pertwee and Toni was probably the most disturbing single event in the history of Mundis. They were the first two who ran away from the community, and they were Pertwee and Toni. Only the disappearance of Rog Foley with Mary Bentley would have produced the same stir.

It was suddenly rediscovered that Pertwee was a great man. This didn't mean people took his side and said they would welcome him with open arms when and if he came back. It meant, however, that the incident was important.

Jim Bentley collected a dozen stories in the first morning. They included:

Pertwee and Toni were setting out to start a new race on the other side of the planet. He would bring up his children indoctrinated to attack and destroy Lemon one day.

Pertwee had gone to search for other human beings on Mundis in a sort of Hidden City somewhere. Deposed in Lemon, he was looking for another race he could rule.

Pertwee and Toni had been kidnapped by intelligent non-human Mundans who lived underground and had hidden when the Terrans arrived in their great ship twenty years since.

Pertwee and Toni were already dead. They had had a suicide pact -- one night of love, and then death together.

An unknown lover had killed Toni. Then, wondering how to cover up, he hit on the plan of murdering Pertwee, too, and making it look as if they had gone away together.

Bentley reported these to his wife and Alice and young Jim. Alice was diverted by the first theory.

"Pertwee and Toni have to go away because our rules for strong breeding won't permit a union like that," she observed sarcastically. "Yet now it's suggested that the two of them can found a race that will overcome all of us here in Lemon. Do I smell an inconsistency?"

The Bentleys got on better than most families. Perhaps that was because there were only four of them. Most families were much bigger, and there was a lot of quarreling just on general principles. The Bentleys never quarreled. They just silently disagreed. They seemed to get on even better than they did, for they avoided the subjects on which they knew they would disagree.

"Do you know anything about this, Alice?" Bentley asked, with a shrewd glance at her.

"No," she said honestly. "But I know what you mean. There's more in it than meets the eye. And I'll tell you this -- just before Rog Foley married June Smith, Toni was chasing him hard."

"Oh. Foley," said Bentley thoughtfully. "Frankly, Alice, I hoped you'd marry Rog."

"It was duly considered," Alice observed briefly.

Bentley and Mary looked at her with interest at that, but her expression told them not to pursue the matter.

In the afternoon a large search party was organized. The older people were grim and angry; the young people thought the whole thing was a great joke. There was jocular calculation of how long Pertwee would last living with Toni.

Hardly anyone could think of Toni's second name offhand. They had to go back in memory and remember her being born. She was the daughter of Albert Cursiter and Nancy Brown, they remembered, and she took after her mother. Nancy had been the Toni of her generation. She had died in the only disaster of Mundan history -- the bush fire that had killed five people, back when the country round about Lemon was still being explored and no one had much experience of Mundan bush fires. Like Toni, she hadn't been pretty -- only enormously attractive. She was called Nancy Brown because that was easier to remember than the name of the husband of the time. Actually she had been Nancy Mayor, Brown, Simpson, Smith, Cursiter, Jackson, and Morgan, in short order.

Mundis was flatter than Earth. There had never been a survey from the air, so it was quite possible that some parts of the world would prove surprising. But certainly all that had ever been explored had proved very much the same.

Over almost all of the surface of the planet a coarse grass grew. Its roots were so long and powerful that it seemed to be capable of leveling the ground itself. Once, no doubt, Mundis had been mountainous, but the grass had conquered all but the barest, rockiest ground. Even there it was working slowly and patienly, first gaining a precarious footing and then gradually eating away the mountain. Possibly the hill on which New Paris had been built was all that was left of a whole mountain range. The valley of Lemon was not so much a flat area among hills as a depression in flat ground.

Here and there forests grew. Mundan trees were small and thick. Their wood was harder and tougher than the wood of Earth. It didn't burn as the wood the colonists were used to burned: only under pressure, reluctantly, but finally with enormous release of energy. Fires occasionally started in the grass or bush, and they would sweep rapidly along until they reached a wood. That stopped them. The woods were the natural fire depots of Mundis. Bush fires didn't often get round them; the trees were such powerful water pumps that the vegetation all round a wood smoldered damply instead of blazing.

The search for Pertwee and Toni, in country like this, was admittedly a formality. If they had been careful not to leave tracks, they had left none.

Dogs were useless for tracking. The grass had a harsh, musky odor that covered human scent very rapidly.

Alice sought out Rog during the search. "Did you put Toni up to this?" she asked bluntly.

Rog nodded, and dumfounded Alice once again. Rog was unpredictable. He would admit nothing or everything. It was no surprise to her that he should be behind the disappearance of Toni and Pertwee, but she hadn't expected him to admit it as casually as that.

"Why?" she demanded.

Rog nodded forward at June, a little further ahead. "June was jealous," he said. "I had to get rid of Toni."

Alice snorted. "If you expect me to believe that, you must think I'm dumb."

"I don't think you're dumb, Alice."

That was all he would say on the subject.

The search, having accomplished all that anyone expected it to accomplish -- nothing -- was given up in the early evening. Pertwee and Toni were gone, lost, safe until they cared to come back, if they ever did.

And good luck to them, said Rog and his friends with the cheerful unconcern they had often shown over the prohibitions of the Constitution.

5

Another meeting was held at Jessie Bendall's house, but the constitution of this one was different. Jessie and the Bentleys knew what Robertson would say -- "Death to both of them. They must be shown that the law means precisely what it says." They knew what Boyne would say, shaking his head -- " This thing is against the laws of God and man."

But they didn't know what the attitude of the silent minority would be, the quiet, solitary people like Toni's improbable father, Albert Cursiter, and Bob Foley, and Kim Jackson. So they invited them instead of Robertson and Boyne.

"There's something going on," Jessie Bendall said, her kindly face puzzled and worried. "Something's rocking the boat."

"Somebody," corrected Bob Foley, who even now could almost he mistaken for his son. He had the same long nose, the same wiry strength, the same way of speaking. But Bob wasn't important; Rog was. "And I think the somebody is Rog Foley," Bob went on.

"I believe everyone overestimates Rog," Mary Bentley remarked. "He's always seemed a placid, straightforward sort of boy to me."

He's a devil," said Bob morosely. "You never know what he's up to."

"Let's stick to the main issues," said Jessie. "Pertwee is one of our big men. We always knew that. The trouble is, our life here isn't a struggle. There aren't emergencies. We don't need Pertwee."

"We haven't needed Pertwee for the last ten years or so, anyway," said Bentley. "We may need him again."

"Then," said Jessie, "do you say, Jim, that we must accept his marriage to Toni? Are we to break down Article Six? Do we admit we were wrong and -- "

"What the hell," said Kim Jackson abruptly. "We /were/ wrong. It was nonsense. I always said so."

Jessie and Mary and Bentley exchanged startled glances. Was this, then, going to be one of the attitudes to be reckoned with? Jackson, of course, had not always said so. In public, at any rate, he seldom said anything. Certainly nothing so forthright.

"It's not really so much a question of whether we were wrong or not," said Jessie carefully, "as whether we admit it. Whether we're being edged into admitting that some of the Constitution is wrong, and therefore possibly more of it -- "

"For chrissake," said Jackson loudly and unhelpfully. "If you try to cut stone with wood and it won't cut, do you go on trying and insisting it's got to cut?" He looked round challengingly, obviously certain he had put his finger right on the core of the matter.

"Toni isn't had," said Albert Cursiter eagerly, unaware that his contribution was hardly relevant. "She wouldn't do anything she thought was wrong."

Jessie caught Mary's eye and shook her head helplessly. She frowned at Brad, who was taking no part in the discussion. Brad merely grinned back.

"Rog /is/ bad," said Bob Foley gloomily. "Always been bad. I'm sure I don't blame his mother, but -- "

"What are we going to do," Jessie interrupted rather impatiently, "when Pertwee comes beck? Sooner or later he will. He's no hermit. Suppose he walks into Lemon tomorrow. What do we do? What do we say to him?"

"How about 'Hallo---see you're back'?" suggested Brad. "Why don't all you earnest people just let things work themselves out quietly?"

"Because they won't," snapped Jessie. "Sorry, Brad. Didn't mean to shout at you. But you seem to forget everyone isn't like you. If they were, we wouldn't have a government of any kind, and we wouldn't need it. Frankly, I don't think we'd get much done, either."

"Just a minute," said Mary. They listened, not only because she generally had something to say when she spoke, but because they liked her. It was said that even Tom Robertson liked Mary. "Hasn't Brad got a point there, Jessie? Let's stop going round in circles for a moment.

"What is the trouble, anyway? Tension, uneasiness. Old people and young people not pulling well together. Disagreement about our laws. The children growing up and wanting to change things. Didn't Jessie put her finger on the trouble when she said life here was easy? All of us here came from a world that was destroying itself. We're going on the basis that it /has/ destroyed itself by now. So we're afraid, frightened, worried. We feel we have a heavy responsibility.

"Aren't we just taking thins too seriously?"

She looked at each of them in turn. "Jessie was asking for a plan," she went on. "Here's one. Let us all, each of us independently, try to understand the young people better and win their confidence. Just that."

Jessie frowned, unsatisfied. Jim Bentley pursed his lips, apparently not entirely satisfied either. Albert Cursiter looked from one face to another, wondering if they really thought Toni was all bad. Bob Foley stared at the floor, meditating on the ingratitude of children. Jackson took no further interest in the proceedings. He had told them what he thought; a man could do no more.

Only Brad nodded. "Ever considered this, folks?" he inquired. "Who talks of danger and death and dissension and destruction in this community? Who's worried? Who's unhappy? Not the youngsters. We wanted them to multiply, and that's what they're doing. We wanted them to grow crops, and settle down, and make Mundis their home, and so they have. What are we concerned about? Why don't we realize we've done our job, and die, and let them get on with it?"

Two days later the complete Inner Council, young and old, decided on a policy of closer co-operation between all groups.

The next day the whole Council decided that the Gap didn't matter anyway, and voted it out of existence, Pertwee and Toni could come back any time they liked and live where they liked. Robertson was shouted down, not by Rog Foley's party but by the founders.

Everyone was to live happily ever after, by order.

But Alice remarked shrewdly to Rog as they came out of the meeting together: "That wasn't what you wanted, was it?"

"No," Rog admitted.

"You wanted this to build up so that when it broke there would be a real snap, didn't you?"

"Yes," said Rog.

"So what are you going to do now?"

"Retire from politics," sighed Rog, "and raise a family."

6

Eight million miles away, on Secundis, Phyllis Barton was just reaching a basis for action on what Worsley had said to her when she lost the chance quite finally.

On one of the days when the full operational crew of the Clades was on board, a call to attention sounded from all the loudspeakers on the ship. There was only one thing that could mean, and Phyllis guessed at once it was Worsley who was going to play the central part. He had spoken to someone else, been reported and convicted, and she had lost an opportunity.

She fell in step with the others. Every steel corridor resounded to marching feet, until a loudspeaker order told all sections to break step. Girders don't take too kindly to a rhythmic, unified assault on them.

At first Phyllis seethed with self-reproach. Someone was certainly going to profit by Worsley's fall, and it wouldn't be her. But a few minutes thought restored her usual calm. Whoever had cut the ground from under the captain's feet had had more strings to pull than she had -- she'd have done it if she could.

Clades poured from the four locks and formed, with the symmetry and neatness of crystallization, a square six deep. Into the center marched Commodore Corey and -- yes, Worsley, in a uniform stripped of all indication of the rank he had held. With them was Mathers, wearing his ceremonial sword.

Phyllis was at once interested. Something might come of this after all. She had something that might possibly he used against Mathers.

Corey spoke into the microphone, and his voice thundered back from the ship. There was little or nothing to be learned from what he said -- Worsley was a traitor, Mathers had unmasked him, justice would be done. Phyllis knew all that. How had Mathers got real evidence? Naturally, Corey didn't say. The same methods could be used again and again, so long as they weren't freely discussed every time they were successful. Presumably, Mathers had somehow been able to record without Worsley knowing he was recording.

In the middie of the commodore's speech Worsley tried to grab his gun. It was futile; Mathers spun him back before he was near Corey.

And at the end Corey pointed dramatically to Mathers, who flicked out his sword. Muttering stopped. If one closed one's eyes one might, for all the sound there was, have been alone on the bare, pitted field.

The point of the sword made neat, rapid passes in the air. Worsley was held now, but it wasn't necessary. The ignominy of cowardice would have held him steady and straight. A neat square of skin was bared, unbroken by the point. Phyllis saw with disgust that though Worsley was standing steadily enough, he couldn't prevent the flesh of his stomach from shivering convulsively.

Mathers made a quick thrust, and it was over. Or rather, it was begun. Writhing on the ground Worsley was still some hours from death, but short of medical attention which he wouldn't get, death was certain. Bets had been made on how long he would last, at odds which took into consideration Worsley's constitution and Mathers' probable skill with the sword.

Still no one moved. Phyllis didn't like this part much, yet it was undeniably exciting.

They were waiting now for Worsley to scream. If he died without a sound, even the worst of traitors was accorded a decent burial. It seldom happened, however. For seconds, minutes, a man might writhe silently, determined not to make a sound. But sooner or later, knowing there were hundreds of eyes on him, hundreds of Clades waiting for him to voice his agony, he would make the slightest of sounds and then, the dam burst, scream until his lungs were raw. Then he would be left alone.

One could feel Worsley's resistance being drawn tighter and tighter. Still there was no sound. Murmuring wouldn't start again until he broke, or until it was obviously near the end and he sank visibly. Many Clades were sorry for a man beaten by unconsciousness, a man who made no sound until he didn't really know what was going on; and then moaned.

Seven and a half minutes after the stroke Worsley screamed once, sharply. There were five seconds filled with the murmured satisfaction of men who had won bets and grunts of men who had lost. Then Worsley was moaning steadily, horribly.

The Clades streamed back into the ship.

Fear struck Phyllis's heart at the realization of the step up Mathers would take. Suppose he did really want her, as she had sometimes suspected. He had only to break her as an officer, and her day of privilege would be over -- she would return to the child-bearing cattle from among whom she had emerged before she was old enough to have children. Then, of course, she would be his, as, when, and how he liked.

It was supposed not to happen, but it did. Marge Henley had been senior to Phyllis six years since. Sloan had caught her out in minor faults once, twice, three times, and she became just a creature again, and Sloan's whenever he wished.

None of that was admitted, but that didn't prevent the threat to Phyllis from being real. It was tooth-and-claw survival. She had to break Mathers before he broke her.

If only, she thought, if only Corey would decide that it was time to go to Mundis. There would be action then, and as long as anything was happening something might be made of it. It was in inaction that Phyllis was helpless, hated and distrusted by her colleagues because she was a fellow officer and therefore a rival, young and successfu] and therefore dangerous, and perhaps worst of all, a woman who could not be treated like a woman, like a superior sort of animal.

III

1

Dick, said Bentley, "go and see if you can find Rog Foley."

Dick looked puzzled. "You want him here?"

"Yes."

"How about June?"

"Not unless Foley wants her. Or -- wait."

He hadn't considered June. Nevertheless, she was a factor. It was said that Rog was acting as if she really mattered in his life. Bob Foley growled about it and said Rog must have some scheme in which she figured -- Rog couldn't love anybody but himself.

"Yes," said Bentley. "Get her too."

He waited outside the laboratory. He sat on a wooden seat placed in the sun, but he didn't get chairs for the others, knowing they would prefer to sit on the grass.

Dick was back in a few minutes with the Foleys. Bentley looked keenly at them. Rog was unhurried, casual; June rather excited. She knew something was happening, and she was included because she was Rog's wife. She was very neat and clean, and looked happy.

Rog nodded respectfully to Bentley before he sat down. That was one of the odd things about Rog. He observed all the little niceties which one would have expected to mean nothing to him. Perhaps that was why he observed them, Bentley thought. He liked the way Rog held June's arm as she settled herself on the ground beside Bentley's chair.

"You know why I asked you here?" Bentley asked. He didn't address anyone in particular.

"I knew you were going to talk to Dick," said Foley, "because you asked the Inner Council's permission, and got it. "But you said nothing about including us."

"Dick would tell you anyway, wouldn't he?"

Rog nodded.

"You're working for power," said Bentley, looking directly at Rog, who stared back unblinkingly. "Some people seem to object to that. I don't. Ambition is natural and inevitable. Back on Earth you would have worked for power and success and security, because back on Earth they often came together. Here you've got security -- everyone has. Success doesn't matter much; you've only got power to work for. Well, why not? You're on the Council, of course. Now you're on the Inner Council. One day you'll be President -- you could hardly help that if you tried. I hope you don't try to be President too soon, that's all."

"It's a pity," Rog observed, "that more of the founders aren't as reasonable as you."

"Because I agree with you?"

"Because you agree with me when I'm right."

"You don't think your father, is reasonable, for example?"

"How could I?"

Bentley didn't pursue that. "You know what I'm going to say. At least you know the purpose. I don't want you to work towards atomic power. So I'm going to tell you why not.

"Can you imagine what Earth was like? Not the superficial picture, but what went on underneath? Millions of people. By our standards, very little space. Fifty houses built on top of each other, a million people living in a space we would call a fair-sized field. Everybody having to fight to stay alive, Having to be better than the next man."

His eyes moved to June. "Women too. Setting a dozen goals against each other. Better jobs, more money, more clothes, a better apartment, marriage, more leisure. It was a life you couldn't do anything to change, June. If you didn't want that life, you could die, that was all. If you didn't have a good job you couldn't live in a nice apartment and wear nylon stockings and new dresses, hats, and shoes, and Rog would never notice you."

"I don't see what you're getting at," said Rog.

"Neither do I. I'm not trying to prove anything. I don't understand that life any more than you do, Nobody could. It was too complicated. You didn't try to understand it. You just lived it.

"It was all built on machines. In the morning you were wakened up by a machine that was made two thousand miles away in a factory employing a thousand people. You got out of bed -- it would take half an hour to tell you how the bed came to be made by a dozen different industries. You took off your pajamas. They came from a factory too. Hardly anybody made a single thing any more. They made things by the thousand, all exactly the same. You had a shower in water piped from a reservoir miles away, under the streets, up to the top of the building you were living in, down to your cistern, and out of the sprinkler when you turned a tap. You used soap made in another factory from the action of caustic soda on animal or vegetable oils or fats, and you didn't even know what it was, except soap. You didn't know it assisted solution in water and reduced surface tension, because you hadn't time to know things like that.

"You dressed in shorts, vest, pants, shirt, tie, socks, shoes, various pins, cuff links, pull-over, coat, hat, and all the other things I've forgotten. You ate breakfast, the component parts of which had traveled more thousands of miles in trains and vans and trucks and had then been processed and canned and wrapped.

"You did everything in a hurry became if you weren't at the office at nine you might be fired and then you'd have to look for another job. You wouldn't get any money while you were looking for another job, and when you got it you'd still have to be there to do it at nine o'clock in the morning. So June would be helping you to be at the office at nine. She hadn't taken time to dress, but had put on a wrap over her pajamas. She would have leisure to dress after she got you off to work.

"You went down the elevator, right down into the basement where your car was garaged. I don't know how many thousand parts there were in a car -- quite a few. You drove it up the ramp and into the street. You were surrounded immediately by cars, trucks, streetcars, vans, motor bikes, water wagons, buses -- "

"Take it we've got the picture," suggested Rog.

"All right. It needed some form of power to keep this vast machine moving. Once it was steam, like our water pumps and generator, but then it wasn't such a big machine. Later it was steam, gasoline, heavy oil, electricity. But the machine got too big for any of these, or even all of them.

"It needed atomic power to run it."

June gave a little gasp. She had never thought much about atomic power, one way or the other, but she knew people didn't talk about it. Bentley put his hand on her shoulder reassuringly.

"If you've got power of any kind," he went on, "and you're ingenious enough, you can make it up into packages of exactly the size you want. If machines can't use your power raw, you put it into something they can use. At first all men could do with the atom was make a big bang with it, a bang that would destroy a city. But later it could be used for everything. To run your clock, bring the water to your shower, make your clothes, move the elevator, power your car, anything at all."

Bentley paused, because his thoughts ran into channels where Dick, June, and Rog couldn't possibly follow him.

People who still thought of the atom as a little black dot surrounded by little white dots drawing concentric circles round it, like the illustrations in the pocket magazines, were generally the victims of double conditioning. The atom bomb was horror, grief, misery, death; the peaceful, industrial use of radioactivity was the white hope of the future, peaches and cream for everybody, cake instead of bread, and by some quirk of rationalization -- an insurance against the atom bomb. They thought, using a curious mechanism of self-delusion, that the use of atomic power for heating, lighting, transport, and industry precluded the unleashing of atomic power for terrible destruction.

Therefore, use more and more atomic power. Convert everything to atomic power. Put all the old equipment on the junkheap. Placate the god of the atom by sacrificing everything to it.

"In a system like that," said Bentley soberly, "the scientists, who knew better, were ruled by the businessmen and clerks and milkmen who didn't. That's why I tried to give you the picture. It was no use some technician saying 'There's something wrong here -- let's hold everything while we find out what, and put it right.' The scientists learned, they advanced, but always they were a little behind, a little late. The crowd was behind them, pushing."

"Exactly what was the danger?" asked Rog bluntly.

"I can't tell you exactly what. The Inner Council still won't let me. Probably they're right -- you heard the discussion. But it was a thing called radiation. Radioactivity. You can guard against it, dispose of it harmlessly, if you're careful enough. And at first, when there was very little of it, this was done. But soon it was leaking all over the place. It did less harm than people expected. The warnings given by the early overflows of radiation, instead of slowing the rush, speeded it up. For each time the disaster was limited by brave men, who limited it with their lives. The danger became accepted. It was a part of everyday life."

"Let's stop there," said Rog. "I don't understand that bit."

"No one ever will."

"Surely . . . " Rog stopped, thinking, trying to picture it.

"The people in charge said 'Keep things running,' and told everybody there was nothing to worry about, and they themselves refused to believe there was anything to worry about. Perhaps in that world you, Rog, guessed the truth. Well, were you going to run down a hundred flights of stairs every morning? Were you going ts break up your car, and not use the shower, and stop eating food prepared by atomic power?"

"A whole world," said Dick, /couldn't/ be built on just one thing -- "

"Couldn't it? I tell you Earth was."

"But if once there was /no/ atomic power," said Dick, "surely they could have gone back -- "

"Oh, sure. But people are optimists, Dick, and like to leave things to someone else. 'Everything will come out all right.' Besides, sometimes it isn't easy to go back. You know how it is with machines. The very devil to start, sometimes, and then once they're hot and roaring you can't stop them at all unless you can cut off their power somehow. Well, nobody can stop the power of the atom."

He had a lot more to say, but they seemed to have enough to think about for the moment. He was pleased with their reaction. He had always agreed that atomic power should do its last job in taking the ship to Mundis; but he hadn't been quite so certain that the way to kill atomic power was to forbid it to the extent of stopping people talking about it. Kill it, yes; but mere legislation never killed anything.

"Anyone like some lemonade?" he asked pleasantly.

2

Mundis sneered at compasses, but that wasn't serious. The sun was seldom obscured by clouds, and never completely obscured. There was little seasonal variation. The sun rose due east and set due west, since the planet's axis was perpendicular to the plane of its orbit. And even an imbecile could travel by the stars as they were visible on Mundis.

Pertwee and Toni traveled northeast. They hadn't intended to go far, but soon they found they liked traveling. They decided they might as well go on. There was always the possibility that they would discover something of importance. Considering the Mundan colony was twenty-two years old, there had been amazingly little exploration.

"I never thought I'd be a vegetarian," Toni observed. Her eyes gleamed mischievously. "Don't you need good red meat to stay virile, Jack?"

Pertwee grinned. "Don't worry about that."

They got on amazingly well. Pertwee had had misgivings; he wasn't reckless enough to break wantonly any law of the society he lived in, except one. The rule that cut him off from women had to be broken. He was incapable of giving up women. When Toni came to him with her proposal, there had been no question of refusal. He had to go with Toni. It was automatic.

They were both a little surprised about how it worked out. Toni had wondered if Pertwee could satisfy her for long; soon, she had feared, he would begin to seem an old, tired man to her. She found, however, that Pertwee's experience really counted for something after all. He was like a veteran tennis player who made his opponent do all the running. He did things the easy way, but did them well, so that she was never conscious that she was traveling with an old man. If either helped the other, it was liable to be him helping her.

He never wasted effort. He would calculate exactly what every job needed, and put just that amount of effort into it. And he was placid, like her. Toni realized she had never before met a man whose temperament chimed with hers. They all mistook her passion for violence, They couldn't believe she was naturally contented, serene.

Neither of them talked much. They liked to walk together by day and lie together by night, silent for the most part but occasionally chuckling together at some incident -- a situation usually. The same kind of situation amused them both, so if a humorous idea occurred to either, they shared it.

There wasn't much to see. The stony parts of Mundis stood out, bleak and bare, amid the dusky green of grass and bush and forest. Mundis wasn't ugly, but it couldn't be said to have much real beauty either. Beauty needed variety of shape, color, texture; the Mundan landscape never offered more than a few variations at one time.

They found occasional streams. The first time Toni stared for hours, fascinated by the sight of so much water in motion. Sometimes the rain swept about hard ground like a flood, but when the rain stopped, the rivulets were gone. Pertwee tried to explain to her what a river was like. That gave her another purpose in making the journey. She wanted to see a river. Surely if there were streams, there must be rivers somewhere?

But though they found other streams, they were usually mere trickles of water, less impressive than the rain floods.

There was plenty of variety in the vegetation, but not in its color. Mundan plants had come to a certain tacit agreement. Where one thing grew, another could not grow. The roots were different, their needs from the soil were different, except for the water and sunlight that they all needed. When the soil no longer comfortably supported the coarse grass, a space would clear itself. In this space, within a short time, a bean plant or a bread tree or a berry bush would grow, unmolested.

Being a vegetarian on Mundis was no hardship. The Mundan blueberry was largely protein, the bread tree supplied digestible carbohydrates, and the yellow berry -- unfortunately rather rare -- was the milk of the Mundis. It had a rather stringent taste which had put the founder colonists off it but which the young Mundans relished. It contained all the essential constituents of food, and was easily digested. The founders had tended to ignore it, but the young Mundans were experimenting with it as a major crop.

Traveling as they did, Pertwee and Toni had no food problem. They never stayed long enough in one place to exhaust the supply of what was readily available. Pertwee wouldn't have liked to live for ever on the vegetable products of Mundis; but Toni didn't seem to find it a hardship at all.

Indeed, when Pertwee once mentioned going back to Lemon, not as an immediate goal but as something they would have to do eventually, Toni nodded disinterestedly. She was in no hurry.

On the twenty-seventh day -- by which time they must have covered over five hundred miles -- Toni had her wish and more.

They had been climbing slightly most of the day. The rise was so even and gradual that only when looking back could they see how high they had risen.

"It would be about fifteen hundred feet above sea level," Pertwee remarked, "if there was a sea to have a level."

Just as gradually the rise leveled out, and again they only noticed it by looking all aboxt them. The effect was that the the world had shrunk. The horizon was only about five miles away. They had a curious feeling of being at the top of the world and very much alone. They were almost afraid to go forward in case they found themselves looking over a precipice a mile high into a sea of sulfur. It was borne in on them for the first time that no human being had ever been this way before them.

But when at last they came to a drop which was very abrupt, for Mundis, and saw into the valley beyond, Toni gave a cry of delight, began to run forward, and then checked herself and waited for Pertwee, a little frightened. The entire floor of the valley was a lake. Pertwee wondered at sight of it if there were not in fact a sort of sea level on Mundis, a level far below the average land level.

The valley was vast -- it would take thousands of years yet for the vegetation to come within reasonable distance of leveling it out, if it ever did. Surrounded by ground fifteen hundred feet above the level of the plain, it dropped at least two thousand feet to the lake.

Pertwee took Toni's arm. "This settles one thing," he said contentedly. "We can go back to Lemon on our own terms, when we like. Finding a lake like this puts us in a good bargaining position."

"Is it dangerous?" asked Toni, awed, looking at the gleaming water below.

"Only if you fall in it. Come, let's go down."

They moved slowly down the hill. Pertwee would never waste energy doing a thing in five minutes less time. Toni would; several times she scampered on ahead and then changed her mind, waiting for Pertwee again. Pertwee tried to picture the reaction to this lake of fifty of the young Mundans together. He failed; it would be completely new in their experience, and they might be wildly excited or find it only mildly interesting.

They reached the waterside. Pertwee saw the bed of the lake was shingle, shelving gradually.

"Let's stop here a day or two," he said, "and I'll teach you to swim."

"SWim? What's that?"

Pertwee only had to throw off his knapsack and kick off his shoes. "This," he said.

3

Never having had any opportunity to acquire fear of water, Toni swam after a fashion almost at once. Pertwee found it impossible to keep her in shallow water. She could see that swimming in deep water was no more difficult than in the shallo -- in fact, it was better in that it cut out the risk of stubbed toes and scraped knees. Every time he headed her back she would laugh and strike out with a crude dog paddle for the deep water again.

He almost had to drag her from the water in the end, for she showed no sign of ever leaving. It was cool, but not cold enough to drive anyone of Toni's vitality from it. She protested when he made her take off her wet ket and wrapped her in a blanket.

"This is Mundis, not your old frozen Earth," she told him, laughing.

Pertwee had wrapped himself in a blanket too. They didn't have to worry about drying them afterwards; cloth was never damp for long in a climate like that.

"If you could only see yourself . . . " Tony gurgled.

"Well, I can't," said Pertwee phlegmatically. "I can only see you, and you look much better than in that cut-to-ribbons outfit of yours."

"Do I?" asked Toni, surprised. "How's that?"

The blanket was draped over one shoulder and fastened at the waist by a belt. It fell gracefully in soft folds, giving Toni a look of cool grace and repose she had never had in her life before.

"Back on Earth," said Pertwee, "that was standard dress for women, all through the centuries. There were variations, certainly. But at almost anytime in history women wore something like that."

"This?" asked Toni, holding up the skirt in distaste. It didn't seem right to her to have her legs wrapped up, as if to keep her from moving easily and quickly.

"Yes. The space flight killed it. When we started, Mary and Jessie and Marjory were younger than you. They'd always worn skirts, except for running, swimming, and playing games. But skirts weren't exactly made for free fall."

Toni grinned. "I guess not."

"It was treated as a joke at first. We whistled whenever a girl's skirt went floating up to her shoulders. But it can be a nuisance when the hem of your skirt gets in your mouth or in front of your eyes. So the skirts became slacks or trunks or shorts."

"Quite right, too," said Toni, who still didn't see anything attractive in the lines of a skirt. "I notice no one ever brought them back, once there was gravity again."

"No, the habit of sixteen years was too strong. 0h, one or two of the women wore them again for a while in the early days of New Paris. But never enough of them -- the girls who did felt conspicuous. Personally, I'm rather sorry. I still think a pretty girl is prettier in a plain frock or a neat blouse and skirt than in any of these space-designs."

"They're not space-designs. They're right for Mundis."

Pertwee laughed. "Never argue on questions of history with a man who helped to make it, Toni," he said. "For this is history, after all. Do you really think blinkers are reasonable garments to wear in a planet's gravitational field? Curved flaps held up by starch and what must be will power, I suppose. No, but they're reasonable enough in a spaceship, where things tend to stay put given the slightest help. And do you know why nothing anybody wears hampers the waist? Because in space you swim from the waist. Up, down, forward, back, side -- all directions are the same, and if you want to get anywhere you push off from something, keep your legs together like a tail and curve smoothly from the waist when you want to turn."

"All that's very interesting," T~n/observed. "Why did I never hear it before?"

"Because you didn't ask. You youngsters never do ask. I only know one of your generation who has a really omnivorous curiosity -- Rog Foley."

Mention of Rog made Toni uneasy. She didn't like secrets or barriers of any kind between people. Particularly she didn't like having even a little secret from Pertwee, as if she were in some sort of ailiance with someone else against him. So she told him frankly that if Rog hadn't put the idea in her head it would never have occurred to her to run away with him. She told him that Rog had admitted it was one of his schemes to undermine the Constitution. When she had told Pertwee all she could remember of what Rog said, she sat back and looked at him anxiously. Though she hated secrets she knew that sometimes it was risky to admit certain things. People just wouldn't understand.

But Pertwee merely pondered calmly. "Interesting," he said. "You know, Toni, I've never considered myself on one side of the Gap and you youngsters on the other -- you know that. I like Rog, and in a dispute I'd be just as likely to be on his side as the other. And yet . . . "

It was getting dark more abruptly than usual, for all round them hills made walls that cut off the sunlight.

"I could still take command in an emergency," Pertwee observed. "I've been voted into a lot of positions of responsibility since the Mundis took off. But if there's no emergency, I'm happy in a back seat. Rog isn't. He has to make an emergency, find something to do, something to build up, something to knock down . . . Sometimes I think what we really ought to do, on this world which will never have a real emergency, is hang Rog -- "

"Hang him!" exclaimed Toni, sitting up abruptly.

"Or shoot him or poison him," said Pertwee equably.

"Oh." Toni lay back on the grass again. "You were just joking."

"I was not. He's a born leader in a community that doesn't need a leader. So what does he do? Leads. But since he had only Lemon to control, he cuts it into two, at twenty-one, and leads one side of it against the other."

Though Toni had once taxed Rog with the same thing, she felt a curious urge to defend him. "And yet you say you're for him! That doesn't sound like it."

"I don't know. Half and half. But Rog isn't our concern at the moment," he said briskly, dismissing the, subject. "We should be feeling a sense of accomplishment."

"Why?"

"Because the colony has existed on Mundis for twenty-two years, and it's been left to us to find the first lake."

Toni agreed and accepted the change of subject contentedly. Water had never been a real difficulty. There was no need to make reservoirs to trap the rainwater -- there were natural reservoirs not far underground. The steam pumps at Lemon brought up enough water for the whole colony, and the supply was practically unlimited.

Still, it was good to know that in at least one place on the planet there was water in abundance, out in the open. It had been beyond Toni's imagination, until she saw it, to picture a body of water so vast and deep that Lemon could be sunk beneath it and lost forever.

She lay in Pertwee's arms and watched the stars twinkling in the dark surface of the water. She noticed one in particular, a bright, fat star, an especially cheerful star. She turned her head and looked at it direct.

"Jack," she murmured. "I've never noticed that one before, have you?"

Pertwee turned his head lazily. She felt the arm that held her suddenly go stiff. He jumped to his feet, looking round to get his bearings -- over the rim of the valley where the sun had set, along it to get the line of north and south.

"Yes, it's a new one," he said in a hard voice. "At least, it's an old one with its power stepped up. That's the sun, Toni. /The/ sun. The sun that used to waken me in the mornings when I was only a year or two younger than you are now."

"But what. "

"I don't know what's happened. We knew Earth was going to be destroyed, but not that the sun, too, was going to blow up. It doesn't really matter what caused it -- something did, and we can see with the naked eye that Earth's gone. Maybe that's the history of all novas -- a so-called intelligent race develops atomic physics."

He dropped to the ground.again. "Oh, well," he said philosophically, "it only proves what we were taking for granted anyway."

He saw that Toni was not really very much interested. Her sole concern was the effect of the affair on him.

That was another thing in which the founders and their children had always differed, he realized. The older people had said openly that Earth was destroyed and Mundis was the last hope, the last stand of the human race.

But they never quite believed it~ They had continued to hope that by some accident, some freak, radioactivity would suddenly decide not to be dangerous and Earth would he there, green and lovely and safe, if ever they went back from Mundis.

The young people, on the other hand, with no fixation on Earth, no particular feelings about it, believed what they were told, and counted Earth out of their calculations. Earth was not, as it would always be to the founder colonists, /home/. Home was Mundis. The young people called themselves Mundans. They were human too; they had no idea, as the founders had, that the only real place for humans was Earth.

No, this would mean nothing to the youngsters, Pertwee realized. But it meant a lot to the people who had been born on Earth.

4

Bentley sat in his chair as before. He had even arranged that Dick and Rog and June would come along and hear more of the story of Earth that had led up to the story of Mundis. They would have been there now -- if last night a new star had not suddenly blazed in the sky.

The Council fell into a panic -- at least, the founder colonist part of it did. This was final proof of the utter deadliness of atomic power. Not only had it destroyed Earth, but Earth's very sun. Probably the region where Earth had been was now filled with gases at a billion degrees centigrade. Bentley didn't think it worth while to deliver a lecture as a physicist. In any case, obviously Earth no longer existed in any recognizable form.

Mary came out and joined him. "You think they should have let you go on as you planned, don't you?" she said.

Bentley shrugged. "This makes no difference," he said. "It was fourteen years ago, anyway."

Mary was silent. Bentley realized with a slightly hurt feeling that for the first time they were not in agreement.

"You think they were right to forbid me to tell the young people any more?" he asked.

"Yes," she said quietly.

"In heaven's name, why? I only meant to tell them a little more of the truth. So that they would see for themselves that it was unwise to meddle with atomic power."

"Won't they see that for themselves, now?"

"Not without some explanation."

Mary sighed. "I never believed explanation was so very important," she admitted.

"But tell me," asked Bentley doggedly. "What difference does this make?"

"That we know it's up to us now."

"Well, weren't we working on that basis anyway?"

"Of course, but . . . " She tried to put into words what she felt in her heart. The words wouldn't come. She shook her head and left him.

Bentley's hurt grew. So even Mary was going to go around moaning, apathetic, because what they had expected for so many years had happened,

He tried to work out what had happened, and when. They had left Earth thirty-eight years before. The sun had blazed with furious new energy only last night -- that was, fourteen years ago. Earth itself must have been quite dead for most of the intervening twenty-four years. Had someone deliberately blasted the sun, or could Earth have disintegrated, finally, with such violence that it triggered the sun in doing so?

There might have been some way of finding out if someone had been on duty at the observatory the night before. But the first notice they had had of the nova was when Jessie Bendall saw it when she went out for a breath of fresh air, and everyone dashed out to see it too. They didn't have enough people to spare, trying to fill in time, to have someone constantly in the observatory. Its telescope, in any case, was only the one they had taken from the ship. It showed a large area of the sky in no great detail.

Bentley ran over in his mind what he would have told Dick and the Foleys, given the chance.

He had meant to explain how it became too late on Earth to do anything but allow a few people the opportunity to escape. Atomic energy had made interplanetary travel easy -- too easy, from one point of view, for when it came to the point of evacuating Earth it was impossible to evacuate people to any habitable planet in the solar system. Venus and Mars were soon going to be dangerously radio-active, as Earth already was. There was no time to use the enormous power of the atom to make any of the other planets habitable.

Besides, somehow, that didn't seem to be the solution. A lot of time was wasted, early on, because the scientists recognized the danger of atomic power and tried to find a way of survival without using it.

There was none. The only means of escape was by using the very thing they were escaping from.

So a ship was built. Tae power of the atom would drive a ship out of the solar system, out to the stars at a speed not much less than the speed of light. A ship had to be made that would get somewhere habitable.

There, fortunately, astronomy was able to help. It had recently been practically proved that the first planet of Brinsen's Star, only seventeen million miles from it, was another Earth. No one had seen the planet. From direct evidence, no one could say with certainty that there was a planet there. But from indirect evidence not merely the existence of the planet but almost everything else about it could be confidently postulated.

The Mundis was made and sent out. No one who went on it knew anyone else. None of those who went knew the methods of selection. In fact, the last few weeks before take-off were somehow blurred. That wasn't surprising. It was a time of the greatest possible emotional stress. Everyone must have left someone dear to him.

All the eggs were put in one basket. Everything the colonists needed to make a new world was put on board the Mundis.

The journey. Bentley hadn't worked out what he would have said about the journey through fourteen light-years, if anything. He would probably have passed over it lightly. It was nothing to the young people, that time of suspense, hope, fear, and regret. They knew how it had ended. They would never understand what those sixteen years had been to the founder colonists. And why should they? It was an old, dead story.

Bentley looked up as a shadow appeared beside him. He saw Rog Foley. Alone.

He brougt his mind back from the past. "Didn't they tell you?" he asked a little blankly. He still wasn't entirely in the present. He had left a part of him being shot through space at very little less than the speed of light.

"Tell me what?" asked Rog, dropping on the ground beside Bentley as before.

"That it was off. That I couldn't tell you any more."

"Oh. That." Rog looked up into Bentley's eyes. He didn't seem to find it any disadvantage being in the inferior position. "I heard that, yes. But only you know what you're going to tell me."

Bentley became fully alert. "You didn't bring the others," he observed shrewdly.

"No," said Rog, giving nothing away.

"Do you expect me to go against the Council's ruling?"

Rog answered with another question. "Did you agree with it?"

"No, I didn't. But disobeying it is another matter. I'd tell you if I trusted you, Foley."

"Well, that's plain enough, anyway," said Rog agreeably. "I like you, Mr. Bentley. I think you and I could get on, if we really had a chance. Anyway, I'll tell you what I'm going to do. But first I'll tell you why."

He gazed thoughtfully at the grass in front of him.

"It's been said that I'm power mad," he observed. "It's been said by people on both sides of the Gap. The last person who told me that was your daughter. But I don't think she really meant it, for she's backing me.

"I don't believe I'm power mad. I don't want to have such power that I merely have to say a thing and it's done. But there's one thing I won't stand for. I'm not going to leave power in the hands of people who are jittery. Who won't make up their own minds. Who can't keep the community together. Who have failed and are going to go on failing."

He looked eamestly up at Bentley. "Don't you see? Since John Pertwee was stripped of office, stupidly, we haven't had a government. We've had a Council that could be swayed by fear, or a fiery appeal, or a little push by someone like me. Well, I may be young, Mr. Bentley, but I can see when things are wrong, I'm going to do something about it."

"War?" asked Bentley bluntly.

"That's the trouble with you old folk," said Rog a little impatiently. "You've got war on the brain. War and atomic power. Who gives a damn about atomic power? Not us -- you. And war -- what do I know about war? What good would a war do?

"No. I'm getting out. And taking about half Lemon with me. Including Alice. She's going to marry Fred Mitchell."

He rose easily. Bentley started up too. "Wait a minute. Let me get this. Alice is going to marry Fred Mitchell? But she can't. They're both -- "

"She can," said Rog, "in my town."

He was calculating coolly. Perhaps very soon he was going to look very silly. He had planned to start a community in New Paris, some time in the future, of young Mundans who were prepared to follow him. But he had mentioned it to no one, not even Alice. He had talked to Bentley as he did merely because he trusted his own talent for knowing the right moment -- it had seemed right to talk as he did, when he did.

Which was all very well, but suppose Dick, Alice, Fred, Ruby, Jim, Abner, Frances, and all the rest said. "You can go and live in New Paris if you like -- we're staying here"?

He shook off Bentley's hand. "What more is there to say?" he asked. "You're not the Council. You're not even the President. I wish you were."

"Have you thought about this?" Bentley insisted. "Do you know what you're doing?"

"I've thought about it for months. That was why I sent Pertwee away with Toni."

"You . . . " Bentley gasped.

"He would have cqmplicated the issue. He understands action. He's the only one among you who does."

He moved away, then turned for one last word. "Can't you see," he asked, ringing confidence and sincerity in his voice. "how necessary it is for someone, something, to put a little life into this community? Things don't stand still -- if you're not going forward, you shouldn't be surprised if you find yourself slipping back. We've become vegetables. We've taken root in Lemon. 'No change!' is the cry. The Inner Council say 'No change' to everything and calls that government. Government! Any settlement is only as good as its government. And ours is dead!"

He left Bentley staring.

IV

1

Rog called a mass meeting and spoke to it, for the most part, quietly and rationally. There was a certain amount of purely emotional appeal, of course; Rog couldn't have been entirely undramatic if he tried. But on the whole he invited rational agreement, not fanatical devotion to himself or to a cause. He didn't really stampede his supporters into anything. He made sure that if they followed him it was because in general they agreed with him, and could be relied on to continue to agree with him.

He stood on the dais at the sports ground, and talked quietly so that his audience had to be quiet too to hear him. Not many people could have got silence. Jessie Bendall, John Pertwee might; Alice, possibly, if she had something to say. Rog got the attention he wanted. He always did. He had the kind of soft voice that could cut through the shouts of others.

"Let's get this straight," he said. "We're not starting a fight. Anybody here who wants a fight can have one now, with the rest of us. You, Abner?"

Abner Carliss was small and bright and quick in his movements, like a bird. No one ever knew quite what he would do. He could be a small whirlwind, quick to take offense and as quick to apologize; and he could also be placid and good-humored, like a miniature Brad Hulton. When Rog marred June, Abner might have looked for him in fury, incoherence, and mad jealousy. Quite a few people had thought he would. But Abner hadn't said or done anything. He hadn't congratulated Rog or June, didn't seek them out, didn't avoid them, accepted their marriage as casually as he would have accepted anyone else's.

"Hell, no," said Abner. "I couldn't fight more than half of you."

"You, Fred?"

"Oh, whatever you say, Rog," said Fred equably.

"Just what," asked Ruby Pertwee, "are we doing? /If/ we do anything, which I don't regard as settled yet."

Of all Pertwee's children, only Ruby showed any independence of thought. Rog turned all his attention on her. Ruby was always a good weathercock. If she regarded a thing as sound, a lot of people would think it was sound too -- probably it /was/ sound.

"We are showing all Lemon," said Rog carefully, "including ourselves, precisely what value a Constitution has which none of us ever had a chance to make or break. Laws are handed down, yes, but laws can be changed. The Constitution is handed. down too, but when is it going to be changed? Never, so long as it needs a three-quarter majority. We're not changing it now -- only showing what value it has, how applicable it is to present circumstances, if half the people in Lemon decide not to fight it but sidestep it . . . "

He had to state that more simply, several times; but he didn't really have to argue. The attitude of most of the young Mundans there -- nearly two hundred of them, with more streaming in every moment, and asking those on the outskirts what had been going on -- was that they might as well go along too, if Rog had all the support he appeared to have.

Rog glossed over the question of how long the demonstration would last. Several people asked "How long?" taking it for granted that it was a temporary move, as a gesture. Rog admitted that. They would come back to Lemon some time, almost certainly, but he couldn't prophesy at present when the psychological moment would be.

He didn't admit that.

After the talking was over, Rog practically led the meeting straight out to New Paris. There was no organized opposition from the other party, for there was no other party. It was organization -- impromptu, perhaps, and extremely loose -- against no organization. All that anyone could produce, at that time, in disagreement, was a suggestion that they should wait and talk things over quietly and not do anything in a hurry. To this Rog replied with a certain limited amount of justice that this was what had been going on for twenty years.

The people who were most doubtful were those who counted as his closest allies, He had known Alice wouldn't be entirely enthusiastic, but would come along. She was slightly more enthusiastic than he had expected, perhaps because she had feared when he did anything it would be more drastic. Dick didn't like it, of course, but came along, also of course. Fred was glad to support anything which would give him Alice: Abner Carliss said nothing; he merely nodded and came along.

For June there was no question. Rog must be right. Nothing else was possible.

"You won't always think that," he told her, as they packed a few things.

She looked at him inquiringiy.

"Sooner or later," he told her, "you're going to start thinking for yourself."

She blushed, "That's not fair," she said. She tried to hide it, but she was hurt.

Rog looked at her thoughtfully. When something proved afresh how much he meant to her, he was always a little surprised. He looked for reasons for things, and he could see few reasons for this. If he could once have explained it to himself, it would cease to be a constant puzzle, something he didn't include in his more general calculations because he didn't know what to include.

He held out his arms, and she threw herself into them, passionately. He felt her heart race against his. He always touched her gently, tentatively, as if unsure of his right to touch her at all. She lifted her feet from the floor, her arms still about his neck, and he scarcely had to brace himself to support her weight.

Abruptly he dropped her on the bed and stood gazing at her.

"What's the matter?" she asked anxiously.

He dropped beside her. "I want to do what's right for you, June," he murmured. He found his head in her lap without any clear idea of how it got there. Her hands smoothed his hair.

He wanted to love her, and was afraid to love her. It was giving a hostage to fate, letting a woman mean so much to him. Rog Foley gave no hostages.

He heard the door open and tensed to jump up. Then a certain peace came over him. Let them see. Hostage to fate? Every promise, every plan, every hope was a hostage to fate.

"We're ready," said Alice's voice. It was strangely subdued. He raised his head reluctantly. There was something in Alice's eyes that he had never seen before.

With Rog and June and Alice at the head, the column moved through Lemon, growing.

Jessie Bendall wanted to speak to Rog. He dropped out, waving the others on.

"Tell me," she said. "Is this a demonstration -- or a revolt?"

"Neither, really," he said. "But call it a demonstration if you like. Relax, Mrs. Bendall. There isn't going to be any trouble."

She had been angry, grim. But she was losing her confidence in the face of his unconcern.

"What do you want us to do?" she asked, a harassed woman of fifty-four rather than the President of probably all that was left of the human race.

"Nothing -- do you feel you ought to do something?"

In ten seconds they had reached agreement on the true situation. Rog was in command. The destiny of Lemon was in his hands.

"It was inevitable, I suppose," she murmured. "Is this a final split?"

"No. We'll be back for Council meetings -- for everything. Is that all?"

He moved on. He had been polite, as ever, his manner more pleasant and cordial than his words.

It wasn't a demonstration or a revolt -- it was a coup. The kind of thing which, back on Earth, had come when a group or a party or a nation had gone as far along a track as it could go, and if there couldn't be a change for the better it had to be a change for the worse. The man to stage the coup, had always been there -- comes the hour, comes the man.

Alice gave him a wry smile as Rog caught up with her and June.

"June thinks you're right, anyway," she said.

"It isn't a question of being right," Rog told her. "Perhaps it's a question of being less wrong. I'm not sure."

He began to whistle softly.

"You can afford to whisfie," muttered Alice, rather nastily for her.

Suddenly Rog realized what had been in her eyes when she had burst in on him and June. She had seen what she hadn't previously believed -- that in addition to everything else, Rog had won love, too.

What had been in her eyes was envy.

2

Things worked out well at New Paris. There was plenty to be done, yet not so much urgency about shy of it that work need become toil. Rog kept his followers on the right road without giving any impression of driving them, and delivered justice, where necessary, with wisdom and good humor.

"In fact," Alice remarked at the end of the fourth day, "I think a lot more of you than I did a week ago, Rog. I'm just waiting for you to show the cloven hoof."

"I wonder why everyone's determined I've got one?" Rog inquired.

"Not everyone," said June.

Rog put his arm round her shoulders. "No, honey," he said. "You're not. But everyone else."

"I think I know why it is," said Alice. "Because you are ruthless, Rog. One can feel that. You're cold. You don't emote. You're not sympathetic. You -- "

"Alice." said June warmly, "you're talking utter rubbish. Rog's not like that at all. You don't know what you're talking about."

"Maybe I don't," Alice admitted, but without conviction.

On the fifth day they saw the ship.

It was natural enough that they should see without being seen, though there was a close watch aboard the ship and none in New Paris. For Lemon was hidden in the valley, the ship was never closer than ten miles and New Paris, long deserted, overgrown, was entirely green and brown, like the surrounding territory. On the other hand the great silver ship showed up in the sky like the finger of destiny it was.

Dick saw it first, when he was washing at the well. The most self-conscious individual of either sex on Mundis, Dick dashed into the square, naked, shouting and pointing. Everyone in New Paris saw it. Even at that distance they could see, those of them who were old enough to remember, that it was another Mundis.

They were excited and pleased. No one was overjoyed; everyone there had been born on Mundis and regarded the planet as his own. They wanted to develop it themselves, and to that extent the arrival of another ship was not entirely welcome. From the first, there were mixed feelings about it.

But it was certainly an event, the arrival of another ship.

The more imaginative among them realized at once some of the things it would mean. . . .

Competition. The Mundans might be two groups, might have had their disagreements and split, but whenever this ship appeared it was obvious that it was one for all on Mundis. Whenever contact was made with the second ship it would be Mundan against Terran, in friendly rivalry perhaps, but rivalry.

New people. Lemon was still so small that there was no question of anyone ever meeting anyone he didn't know, and know well. No young Mundan had ever met anyone, young or old, he had not known since childhood -- the childhood of one or both of them. The nearest one could come to meeting someone new had been Rog's recognition of June, after knowing her all her life.

New experience. Different things must have happened to the people on the second ship, whoever they were and wherever they had come from. They would act differently, and the knowledge and experience and reality of everyone on Mundis would be different, enlarged and complicated, for their presence.

The ship moved towards the north, and had clearly seen nothing of Lemon or New Paris. Someone -- Fred Mitchell -- dashed towards the vacant huts at the other end of the village, with the obvious intention of firing one and attracting the attention of someone on the ship.

"Stop, Fred!" Rog shouted. "Come back here!"

"I'm just going to -- "

"I know what you're just going to. Don't do it. Come here."

Fred came back reluctantly, looking over his shoulder at the receding ship.

"Look, Rog," he said protestingly, "even if they're combing Mundis looking for us they may never come in sight of us again. They may think we never got here, or died off or something."

"Perhaps," said Rog. He looked around, saw a mound that would give him an extra two feet of height and jumped on it. Everyone gathered about him.

"Maybe it was a mistake not to let that ship know we're here," he said. "But I think we all ought to think about it a bit first. Take everyone's views before we answer for everybody. The people in Lemon count too, you know. Now, Fred, do you still want to show them we're here?"

"Some people are too damn cautious," said Fred, but he didn't answer the question. Alice spoke to him rapidly, quietly. His eyes opened wide.

Rog wasn't surprised that Alice had seen some of the implications that Fred had missed, but he wanted the others to see them too.

"Dick!" he called.

Dick, started guiltily. He had just realized he was naked, and was tiptoeing away. He turned, blushing.

"Dick, if you knew you could have atomic power for the taking, would you take it?"

Dick forgot his nakedness again in the consideration of the problem. "I'd think twice about it," he admitted. "Yes, I believe. I'd take it. But it would depend. I wouldn't like to burn my boats . . . "

"You know that ship is powered by atomic engines, don't you?"

"Of course." Dick had, but the others only now saw what Rog was driving at. Suppose, after all, the old folk were right, and they were much better off without atomic power. Everyone was quite prepared to believe that was, at least, possible. Well, close contact with the people on ship might knock a hole in that idea. Besides -- "

"Suppose there were disagreement," said Rog, "and there often is between different groups -- remember? /They/ have the power; we haven't. They could blow us all to atoms before their tempers had a chance to cool."

He let that sink in, then said quietly: "Am I being too damn cautious when I say we should let this ship go and be glad it didn't see us?"

There was sudden uproar, everyone telling everyone else that was exactly what he'd been going to say, if Rog hadn't said it first. Rog let them argue about it and work things out for themselves. He saw Fred looking a little green about the gills as Alice pointed out to him how little a community like Lemon stood to gain from a very different community, and how much it had to lose.

Then he held up his hand for silence again. "Come on," he said. "We're going back to Lemon."

There was a gasp of surprise at that. He was ahead of them again. There were some shouts of protest.

"I brought you here, I know," Rog went on. "That was right, then. But the situation has changed. I think we all belong together -- don't you?"

Before they left New Paris they climbed on the roof of some of the cottages and made sure that nothing that could be seen from the air showed that there was a village there. They rubbed dirt on one house that had been whitewashed, and knocked down a wall that cast a long, straight shadow.

Then, as they had come, they trekked down the hill, Rog and Alice and June in the lead.

3

After spending a few days by the side of the lake they had discovered, which they christened Antonia after Toni, Pertwee and Toni moved on. They had ceased to talk about their purpose in traveling; the life suited them, and nothing else mattered as far as they could see.

Besides, they had found one important thing. Toni's imagination was fired by the idea that they might return with scores of such things to relate. She was impatient to get on and find the next. Pertwee, more phlegmatic, thought they would be certain to be accepted again in Lemon on their own terms as it was, having found the lake, and that it was unlikely that an unspectacular world like Mundis would have much more to offer.

They were about seven hundred miles from Lemon when they heard a noise. A noise of any kind on Mundis was unusual. Apart from the gentle whispering and crackling of foliage in the constant sough of the atmosphere, and the various sounds of the rains, there was hardly any sound natural to the planet. But this was a kind of buzz, perhaps a roar far away -- steady, yet with a certain beat about it.

Toni, never having known any but domestic animals or anything but individual men one could possibly fear, was puzzled, curious, but not afraid. Pertwee, however, found excitement and fear warring within him the instant they heard the sound, long before they had any idea of what might be producing it.

They could see nothing. They were in the middle of the usual Mundan scene -- almost all grassland, with small forests dotted here and there, a few bare patches, and one rocky ridge about five miles to their left. They were still traveling northeast. The sound seemed to come from the direction they had come. Pertwee wondered fleetingly whether aviation had been developed at Lemon since they left, and then recognized the sound.

It was the noise made by the engines of a spaceship. His heart nearly stopped beating at the thought. It could not possibly be the Mundis -- it had not been demolished with any idea of being rebuilt. Every part of it had been incorporated in something else or destroyed in an effort to ensure that there would never again be such a thing as an atomic engine.

Yet these were atomic engines. And there was the ship powered by them -- far, away, moving very slowly, but still such a sight that Toni became as awed and impressed by the significance of the occasion as Pertwee.

So there had been another ship. They had been told, half a lifetime ago, that the Mundis would be the only interstellar ship there was time to build. Well, that had been a guess, and it had been wrong. There had been time, it seemed, for at least one more.

Had it been at Lemon already, Pertwee wondered. He also wondered for a moment whether they really wanted to contact it or not.

But he didn't consider that seriously. The second ship represented a complication the Mundan colony might have been better without. There was no real question, however, of pretending now that it didn't exist. A whole lot of questions had to be answered.

The ship was low, and obviously someone was scanning the ground very carefully. Pertwee looked about him quickly. There was nothing but grass and brown soil for quite a distance round them, and against neither would they stand out.

"Your white ket, Toni," he said urgently. "Get it out."

Toni pulled open her knapsack and produced the white ket. Pertwee almost tore it from her. The ship was coming close. He stood erect and waved the white garment above his head. The next most conspicuous thing Toni could find was the red scarf she sometimes used as a sash. She stood some yards from Pertwee and waved it, pulling it through long loops in the air.

The lookout must have been good, for almost at once they were seen. The ship changed its course slightly and dipped to get a better look. Then it dropped still further. It landed only a hundred yards or so from Pertwee and Toni. They blinked in its vast shadow.

It was very like the Mundis, Pertwee saw, but bigger, considerably bigger. He turned to look at the blunt nose to see the name. Clades, it read. He frowned. Clades -- wasn't that the Latin for destruction, or disaster, or something like that? It was reasonable enough to call it that, perhaps, since it had left an Earth that was about to blow itself up. All the same, he couldn't regard it as a good omen.

The lock opened, and six men came bounding out. They ran to Pertwee and Toni like a team of guards retaking an escaped prisoner. When they reached them they formed up neatly in line.

"You're from the Mundis?" said the first man in line.

Pertwee offered his hand a little hesitantly.

"Yes, that's so," he said. "Glad to see you. You must have left Earth after us?"

The man took his hand in a firm grip. But he didn't offer any information. "Better talk to the commodore," he said.

The six men formed about them as an escort. Pertwee caught a bewildered glance from Toni. She had never seen a disciplined force before. She couldn't understand why these men, who looked otherwise like the men she knew, should stare straight in front of them without expression and make every move together and walk in a stiff, precise way she had never seen before. Pertwee wanted to tell her that people could be soldiers and still human, but there were two men between him and Toni.

The men wore a uniform that was not unlike the U.S. Air Force uniform, as Pertwee remembered it. Only it was green, of all colors -- green for Earth, perhaps. The most interesting thing about the uniforms, however, was that they appeared new. That meant . . .

At the lock, which was five feet above the ground as the ship had landed, the sergeant glanced at Toni and barked an order. One of the men put his hands on her waist, a little self-consciously, for she was wearing her blue ket and his hands were on bare skin. She smiled up at him; a lot of men had held her in one way or another. But he whirled her round, caught her again by the hips, and heaved. She sailed up easily and landed lightly in the lock.

They seemed to be waiting for Pertwee to jump up, without assistance, but he knew he couldn't do it. He pulled himself up with his hands instead. The men left behind retired about three steps, formed in line, and jumped up three at a time. Toni was waiting, still more puzzled. Pertwee would have had a chance for a word or two with her then, but he was as puzzled as she was.

There were small alterations in the layout of the ship, Pertwee saw -- inevitable modifications, the result of the experience gained in building the Mundis. Sometimes the workmanship seemed inferior, however, barer and rougher -- the Clades must have been built in more of a hurry than the Mundis. Some things were missing altogether.

He remembered, for the first time for years, now that he was on his way to see the commander of this ship, that he had been the captain of the Mundis. That was history, though; when they had stripped him of office years ago he had given up all idea of rule, of being a leader. He had done so with a certain relief. Unlike young Foley, he had never wanted power. But like Foley, he had always found it difficult to avoid being given positions of responsibility.

They reached the commodore's room. It was a big room. There were three men there already, the commodore and two of his officers.

The commodore came forward, smiling affably. "I'm Commodore Corey," he said. "These are Captain Sloan and Lieutenant Mathers. You're? . . . "

"John Pertwee. This is my wife Toni."

The commodore undoubtedly noticed how much younger than Pertwee Toni was, but he made no comment. Instead he turned to the escort, who had formed themselves into a squad by the door.

"Take your men away, sergeant," he said.

"Yes, sir." The sergeant had one last glance at Pertwee's shorts and Toni's ket to make sure that neither of them was concealing weapons, and marched his men out. Toni was relieved to see them go. The men in the cabin were in uniform, but not rigid and expressionless and machine-like. They were more like the men she was used to. Mathers, who was only about twenty-five, was looking at her in almost the frankly admiring way that might have been expected. But as she looked he seemed suddenly to realize that and became machine-like. She frowned. There was something odd about the way all these men looked at her.

Twenty-five! -- it struck Pertwee suddenly that this was the end of the Gap. The commodore was about the same age as he was, and some of the men had been forty, some thirty, some twenty.

He picked up the recording in his mind of what Corey had said, when it became obvious they were waiting for an answer.

Corey had asked where they had come from, where the main colony was. It was a perfectly natural question.

Pertwee moved slightly so that he caught Toni's eye, warning her. "From the north," he said casually, as if it didn't matter. It would be easy enough later to turn the lie into truth, but not so easy to turn the truth into a lie.

"Have you come far?" asked the commodore politely, then added quickly, "Oh, Mrs. Pertwee, you must be wondering if there are no women among us. Just a moment. He pressed a button on his desk. He had stumbled slightly over the designation "Mrs."

A woman appeared and saluted. Her tunic admitted reluctantly that she had a bosom, her trousers didn't absolutely deny hips; otherwise she was dressed exactly as Mathers was, in lieutenant's uniform.

"Lieutenant Fenham," said the commodore. "Show Mrs. Pertwee around, will you?"he said. He said the Mrs. quite confidently this time.

Toni was used to a community that spoke its mind. "But I want to stay here with Jack," she said. She glanced at Lieutenant Fenham with distaste she didn't manage to hide altogether. The women Toni knew didn't ape their menfolk. Uniform, worn by men, merely aroused her curiosity; worn by women it produced dislike. Besides, Fenham wasn't attractive. Her figure might be all right, quite possibly was, but she hid it as if it were hideous. And her face was hard and plain and altogether uninteresting. She was about forty.

"I would rather you went with Lieutenant Fenham," said the commodore gently.

"And I'd rather she stayed here," said Pertwee, just as quietly. "Are we under restraint, Commodore?"

"I wish you wouldn't put it like that," said the commodore. "Lieutenant Fenham!"

The woman took Toni's arm. From the look of surprise on Toni's face, she had found herself, for probably the first time in her life, in the grasp of a woman much stronger than herself.

"Don't say anything, Toni," said Pertwee rapidly. "Don't believe anything they tell you about me. Don't tell them -- "

"Never mind, Lieutenant," said the commodore regretfully. "No useful purpose would now be served. We might as well keep them together."

Beginning to understand a little about the Clades and her crew, Pertwee wished suddenly, passionately, that the Mundis had been the only interstellar ship built.

4

"Try to understand," said Commodore Corey patiently. "We're not going to destroy your people, or torture them, or make them slaves. That isn't our purpose at all. We want to unify the human race again -- can't you understand that?"

In other circumstances, Pertwee thought, he and Corey might have got on quite well. It wasn't a question of good and evil; but there were two strong groups with very different ideas on what was good.

He had begun to guess what sort of ideas the Clades party was operating. Towards the end, on Earth, obviously if there were to be any sort of order a militarist attitude had to be taken up. Pertwee didn't follow it any further than that. He merely pictured, fleetingly, the grimness and determination of the work of building the Clades -- definitely the last performance this time -- and saw how grim, firm, determined, strong the crew picked for it would be.

"In fact," said Corey, "we must unite. You know and we know that we're not the only living things in the galaxy. If there are plants here, somewhere else there is an intelligent species. Earth destroyed itself. If we are not to he destroyed, we must be strong, united -- "

"I understand perfectly," said P. ertwee. "I disagree, that's all."

"If you understood," replied Corey patiently, "you could not disagree."

"That is precisely the attitude we're against. The idea that there is only one reality. You say you're right and we're wrong. We don't say we're right, you're wrong. We'd say we think we're right and though you may be too, we don't think so -- "

"Exactly," retorted Corey, losing patience a little. "Not 'I'll do this,' but 'I think perhaps possibly I might do this sometime, eventually, if nothing better occurs to me' -- inaction, indecision, procrastination, laissez-faire, indolence. It was your kind that brought Earth to destruction. You didn't believe it could happen. Now you've been given a second chance -- and you want to do the same thing again."

Toni was still there, standing, looking from Pertwee to Corey and back to Pertwee. No one had offered her a chair. The officers were waiting to be called into the discussion, or for the commodore to come to some decision. At any rate, only the two of them were doing any talking.

"I don't quite see that," said Pertwee mildly.

"Suppose we encountered another intelligent race now. We'd be split, disunited, unable to work together."

"I don't think that's a good argument. If we're separate, so much the better chance of one of the groups escaping or surviving. In any case, how much trouble does one usually take over a billion-to-one chance? Granted that a brick might fall on your head in a street back on Earth -- did you always go around wearing a steel helmet?"

"I was trying to make you understand so that you would cooperate peaceably," said Commodore Corey. "I see it was a vain hope. Pertwee, I want to know where your people are."

"We don't know,~' said Pertwee. "We're lost." He didn't expect Corey to believe his answers, but if the commodore was stupid enough to allow it, Pertwee could use his answers to instruct Toni.

"What have you done with the ship?"

"Hidden it."

"Where?"

"I don't know. Only some of us know. Not either of us."

"How many of you are there?"

Pertwee had no time to think. The situation, naturally, had found him completely unprepared. Perhaps he should have pretended that he and Toni were the only Mundans left, but now it was too late. Nor had he a chance to consider carefully whether it would be better for the commodore to think the Mundans were strong and numerous or to say they were few and weak, not worth bothering about.

Without hesitation he said: "There are very few of us. We were almost wiped out seventeen years ago by a plague native to this planet. And two years ago it broke out again. We've never been able to find any cure or even an adequate prevention. It seems to be a virus disease -- "

The officers moved uneasily, but the commodore's voice lashed out at them. "Fools! Can't you see these are just stupid, inconsistent lies designed to frighten us and mislead us? There is no sense in it. How could you hide a ship nearly as big as this and not know where to find it? Why hide it, anyway? Only a few of them, he says -- yet instead of being glad to see us, as a few lonely people would be, these two lie to us and argue with us . . . The others died seventeen years ago, he says -- yet see, their clothes are new, manufactured, and the garment the woman wears is obviously a fashion developed over a period in a large group on a safe, healthy planet . . . "

It was a good enough resum�Corey was clearly no fool. "And yet," Corey was musing, "some of it may be true. They might hide the ship, at that. For the first colonists were conditioned -- "

A light dawned on him: "That's why you won't co-operate," he said. "It's not us you're afraid of, it's atomic power. Pertwee, you early colonists were all conditioned against atomic power, so that you wouldn't use it, wouldn't teach your children anything about it. If you did hide your ship, that's why -- because you were rigidly conditioned never to use atomic power unless in a life-and-death emergency. You don't know it, but you were made not quite sane on that point. It was drummed into you night and day -- can you understand what I'm talking about?"

Pertwee could, up to a point. It needed thinking over, later.

"It's not that," he said. "It's -- "

"Hell!" exclaimed the commodore. "I'm wasting no more time. Pertwee, /where are your people?/"

"To the north," said Pertwee.

"I don't believe you," Corey retorted, "but we'll go where you say. It will only take a few minutes to prove or disprove."

That was the trouble. Stalling for time would do absolutely no good, since the people at Lemon probably didn't know of the existence of the ship. But it was the sort of thing one did, hopefully.

Pertwee turned toward Toni, but one of the lieutenants prodded him round again. They weren't going to be allowed to communicate with each other at all, apparently.

Corey spoke quietly to Mathers, who left the cabin. A few minutes later they felt the steel under them pulse and the sensation of movement.

"How far north?" asked Corey conversationally.

5

The young Mundans found when they spoke to the first people they met in Lemon that no one there had heard or seen anything of the ship. That was a pity. It meant explaining again and again what had been seen, because it was too big for people to believe easily. Some people sought confirmation from everyone who would give it; and though there were nearly two hundred young Mundans telling the same story, some people continued to refuse to believe it.

Rog went straight to the Bentleys. "The sister ship to the Mundis just passed on the way north," he said. Alice, beside him, nodded in confirmation.

That was all the Bentleys needed, in contrast to the people out in the streets who believed that this was some plot of Rog Foley's, part of a second coup, perhaps.

"Did they see us?" asked Bentley.

"No. Unless they decided to pretend they hadn't. But they're looking for us, all right."

"Did you signal?"

"I stopped someone who wanted to."

"Why?" asked Bentley.

Rog frowned. "I hoped you, of all people, wouldn't have to ask that."

"I don't. I agree with your action. But I still want to know what /your/ reasons were."

Rog gave them. "Are yours different?" he asked.

"A little. We know a little more than you could, of course. Which is why I'm particularly glad that, knowing as littie as you did, you still had the sense not to communicate with them before we'd considered the matter. But shall we leave discussion to the Council meeting? You want one now, I suppose?"

"No," said Rog. "Not the Council. This is important."

"So?"

"Leave out the people who won't have anything to contribute, among your people and mine. Robertson, Boyne, Hamburger, and -- sorry, Alice -- Fred Mitchell."

"They're duly elected representatives," murmured Bentley.

"If we want common sense, we'll hear more of it if they're not there. This is an emergency. I'm going to call a meeting, Mr. Bentley. I'm asking you and Mary and Jessie Bendall and Brad Hulton, but I'm not asking Robertson and Boyne. What are you going to do about it?"

"I'm going to come," said Bentley agreeably.

The meeting lasted a long time. Scores of points of view were expressed; but the sole decision could have been prophesied by Rog or Bentley or half a dozen others.

Communication would not be sought with the second ship. The ship was too powerful, Lemon too defenseless. If the ship returned, Lemon would not call attention to itself; neither would any particular attempt at concealment be made.

The Mundans hadn't realized until that meeting how defenseless they were. Until that meeting they hadn't cared. The young people couldn't know -- they hadn't much experience of weapons, none at all of warfare. The founders had been glad to forget what they knew. Now they had to dig bits of recollection from reluctant memories.

There were people like Mary Bentley who didn't care that Lemon was defenseless. "I don't say we should seek contact with them," she said, "but if it comes, what can we have to fear from our own kind, with Earth gone? Surely our peaceful setup will be exactly what they want, what they must hope we have achieved?"

There were others like Mary's own daughter, who said that some of the weapons that could be made should be, just so that Lemon would be able to stand up for itself if necessary. But the third member of the family at the conference pointed out that it was like making candle snuffers to put out a moor fire. A crew with an atom-powered ship had control of such immense forces that it was hardly necessary to carry weapons. Anything loaded with some of that power was a deadly weapon.

Some, like Jessie Bendall, thought it was worth considering hiding from the second ship altogether. They said it might be worth while sacrificing the crops and breaking up the regular lines of the fields and hiding the cattle and camouflaging the houses. Everyone agreed that it was well worth considering hiding if it didn't entail much. But putting the colony back ten years was too drastic for most people.

And the only person to mention Pertwee and the possibility that the ship might contact him did him a severe injustice. It was Brad, who murmured that they were probably wasting their time. If the ship was searching the planet it would probably find Pertwee and Toni, who would not merely be glad to join the crew but would tell them where Lemon was whenever they were asked.

5

"I think," said Commodore Corey, we've wasted quite enough time."

They had visited several locations suggested by Pertwee. He had pretended to be sure and said he wasn't at all sure. He had insisted that he was telling the truth and he had admitted he was lying. But the ship was limited only by the acceleration the people inside it could stand, and by the destructive effect of friction against the atmosphere at high speeds. Even allowing for these, it was only a matter of an hour or two from one side of the planet to the other.

Pertwee had taken the ship very close to Lemon on one of the trips. From an unguarded remark one of the lieutenants had dropped he found that the ship had already been this way. There was a possibility that the people in Lemon had seen it; only a possibility, however.

As they passed within twenty miles of Lemon, the, impatience of the people about him communicated itself to Pertwee and he was satisfied. If on the second visit to this region they were impatient because they had already examined it and found nothing, they would be most unlikely to work out for themselves, from his itinerary, where Lemon must be. That was why he had taken them so close. The place where one is least likely to look for anything is where one has looked already.

But now they were a thousand miles from Lemon again, and the commodore was losing patience.

"Back on Earth," he observed, "we had truth drugs and lie detectors and other useful methods of getting information quickly from people who were reluctant to give it. We have none of these methods here, unfortunatdy. Do you know, Pertwee, I think we will just have to resort to crude old-fashioned torture."

Pertwee had expected they would. It wasn't really possible, he decided, for Toni and him to keep the secret of Lemon's location from Corey. Not if Corey was really determined. If he had been alone, perhaps, though he doubted even that. One man can decide to die before giving information. But two of them, and one of them Toni . . .

It was too much to expect that she could withstand torture, not really knowing why she should. Her experience didn't contain enough for her to know even the shape of what would probably happen if the Clades discovered the Mundan colony.

Besides, technically they were both under sentence of death in Lemon. Should they give so much for a settlement which had rejected them?

The commodore caught Lieutenant Fenham's eye. "Will you work on her yourself," he asked, "or do you want someone else?"

The woman thought. "This is really a job for Lieutenant Barton, sir," she said. Corey nodded, and she left the room.

Pertwee saw Toni was puzzled, cautious, but not in the least afraid. In her experience, people who hurt each other were angry. They didn't speak coldly and calmly as the commodore was doing.

Lieutenant Fenham returned, and at sight of the girl who accompanied her Pertwee started. She wore the usual neat, impersonal uniform, but she was lovely. One felt drawn to her, determined to like her, to think the best of her. Her hair under her cap was silvery-blond. Though she wore no make-up her lips stood out vividly against her creamy skin and her brilliant teeth.

Very likely in her and Toni, Pertwee thought, the most attractive girls of each party met.

"Hallo," said Toni, with a friendly grin. "What's your name?"

"Phyllis Barton," said the girl coldly. Still Toni grinned. Toni's way of dealing with competition had always been to try and get on with it. There seemed no reason why this shouldn't apply to Phyllis Barton.

What might have been a reason soon appeared. Barton and Fenham fastened Toni in a chair. Lieutenant Barton took off her tunic. She was surveying Toni thoughtfully, running through the various possibilities.

"I don't want them mutilated or hurt too much," said the commodore. "I only want information."

"'Them,' sir?" queried the girl.

"We may have to work on the man too, if you have difficulty with the woman."

Phyllis nodded. She put her hands lightly on Toni's shoulders, probing carefully with her thumbs. Then, having found her spot, she leaned on her arms and pressed her thumbs into Toni's flesh with all her strength.

Toni screamed. It was a revelation to her that one could be hurt so much, so easily, with so little warning. No one had ever hurt her scientifically before. Any blows which had ever fallen on Toni had been struck in anger, carelessly. There was nothing careless about Phyllis Barton.

She left Toni a moment to recover, to tell herself it had never happened, and couldn't possibly happen ever again. Then she felt for the nerve again and gripped hard. Pertwee watched her hands go white.

Toni didn't scream this time. She gasped, but made no other sound. Again Phyllis stood back and waited. When she stepped forward again and placed her hands on Toni's shoulders, Pertwee saw that already Toni was conditioned to fear and pain at her touch. She shrank in terror before she was hurt.

"She knows nothing," he said. "She couldn't take you to the settlement if she wanted to."

"Carry on, Lieutenant," said the commodore. "May I work on one of her teeth?" asked the beautiful inquisitor.

"No," said the commodore regretfully. "The idea is good, but it would be better if you confine yourself to things which will heal quickly and entirely. We may have to claim later that their report of what was done to them here is a lie."

Pertwee had forgotten that that kind of planning existed.

Phyllis released one of Toni's arms and went behind her. Carefully, unimpressed by anything Toni could do, she bent it until Toni went white and sagged with agony, afraid to struggle in case the pain became worse. Toni's shoulder was held just short of dislocation. Moved one way it would be back in place. Moved the other it would be out.

No, there was nothing that could be done against this, Pertwee thought hopelessly. Like millions of human beings in not dissimilar circumstances in the past, they were really only taking as much as they could for their own pride. They didn't want to carry with them afterwards the knowledge that they had caved in easily. As a matter of fact they didn't want to carry with them the knowledge that they had caved in at all, but Pertwee couldn't see how they could help it.

Carefully Phyllis replaced the shoulder and massaged it gently with long, slender fingers. She tied that arm up again, though it must still be hurting enough to make Toni reluctant to move it if she could. Phyllis unfastened the other arm.

Toni fainted for the first time in her life at the top point in that demonstration.

"Water," said the commodore. "But not on this carpet. Move her into the bathroom."

A door was opened. The two women lieutenants lifted Toni's chair and bore it into a bare white bathroom. The men made no effort to assist them. They had Pertwee by the arms, but Pertwee was uneasily conscious of the fact that one of these powerful strangers could handle him with one arm.

Toni was still out. Phyllis filled a pail with water and threw it over her. She spluttered into consciousness.

Since they were there, Phyllis filled the bath. She untied Toni and bore her like a baby to the bath, put her in it and held her face down by the back of the neck and one shoulder. Regularly she began to dip Toni's face under the water, waiting what seemed an interminable time, letting her up for no more than a couple of breaths and then submerging her head again.

Pertwee noticed how she got the intervals. She was doing the exercise along with Toni, holding her breath and letting Toni up when she had to breathe herself . . .

They worked hard at their job, these people. Thoroughness might have been their watchword, as it had been of other autocracies in the past.

It went on and on and on. Phyllis grimly continued, until her green shirt was wet with sweat and sticking to her back, and she staggered as she bent over the bath. Then she let Toni up for a moment, leaving her hanging half out of the bath. Toni had taken about as much as she could take. She was gulping air and retching and she had a dead-white pallor that frightened Pertwee.

He really wouldn't have believed this could happen. This was cold, not even cruel. There was no grandeur in this. Pushing a girl's head under water in a tiny bathroom wasn't like burning her at the stake or stretching her on the rack. The bathos of it prevented her from feeling a heroine. It was merely an undramatic way of doing a job. Like suffocating an empress, not romantically with a silken pillow amid the trappings of satin and subdued lighting and fragrant perfume, but by sitting on her face.

Toni wasn't permitted to be brave and beautiful and unruffled and stoic. She was left sprawled in a bath, her hair bedraggled, her ket plastered against her unattractively, retching nauseatingly.

Phyllis wasn't heavily muscled as Pertwee had suspected from the strength she had showed -- though her height was the same as Toni's, every other measurement appeared to be less. Toni, if not plump, was certainly sleek and well-fed; Phyllis Barton was lean and firm.

She stepped to the bath again, grasped Toni, and the performance was repeated. Toni was so much dead weight, and soon Phyllis was in difficulties again. But she carried on grimly, and no one moved to help her. When she stopped again it wasn't because she couldn't go on, but as she told the commodore:

"She's got to the stage, sir, when she doesn't really know what's going on. I suggest you work on the man, or give the woman a few hours to recover."

She lifted Toni back into the chair. Toni slumped in the seat, conscious but only just. She hadn't the strength to vomit now; her stomach did little audible somersaults every few seconds, but she only jerked slightly.

"There's plenty of time, really," said the commodore reflectively. "It doesn't matter much whether they tell us today, next week or next year."

That drew a convulsive shudder from Toni -- the prospect of a year of this.

"Put them in a room together," the commodore ordered. "We won't work on the man -- only the girl."

That was the cleverset thing he had said, Pertwee thought. What must the effect be on Toni if they never harmed him and always, after each respite, went back to work on her? Wasn't anyone in such circumstances bound to feel hatred, sooner or later, for the companion who was never hurt, the partner who was never called on to bear anything -- and blurt out the truth to put an end to the pain, the injustice, the terror that one's fortunate companion never had to face?

2

Rog was aware of June's unhappiness, but, he paid no attention just yet. He would attend to that in a minute. Meantime, he had a thought which might be solved now but lost for ever if he left it.

He didn't believe in coincidence. The older people, used to a complex world, were more prepared to take coincidence for granted. Once, long ago, they had gone to a city of a million inhabitants and met on the street an old friend. Or got back in change a nicked, lucky penny spent by mistake.

When still a child Rog had found that in a small community there was no such thing as coincidence. He had picked up the word, liked the sound of it, and investigated. It didn't really mean anything. Something happened that seemed queer, something the old people called coincidence. But when you traced it back, and found out what happened before this, before that, you found there was nothing strange about it at all.

Bertha Doran had been much impressed when, back in New Paris after ten years, she happened to put her hand down the side of an old chair and when she drew it out, there on her finger was a long-lost ring. But when you considered a few things you wondered why she was so surprised. One, Bertha had gone back to her old home, where she was likely to find a lot of things that had been lost for years. Two, it was a habit of Bertha's to put her hands in odd crannies like that -- all her friends could testify to it. Three, there was only one place a hand could go down the side of the chair, and it wasn't incredible that a ring which stuck strongly enough there to be pulled off a finger should be dislodged by a finger being pushed back into it.

If there was anyone who wasn't satisfied by that, he could try digging around for a few more facts.

What was on Rog's mind at the moment was this. A ship left Earth and traveled quite a few light-years, was broken up and passed out of people's thoughts. Twenty years passed, and people talked less and less of Earth and more and more of Mundis. Then one day the people on Mundis could see with the naked eye that Earth was no more. Within five minutes, so to speak, there was a second ship flying overhead, a ship no one had known or guessed about.

Rog wasn't prepared to buy the coincidence. That two unconnected events of such magnitude should happen to come together was, of course, possible; but he preferred not to believe it. He searched patiently, doggedly, for some connection.

But he found he wasn't getting anywhere. And June still wasn't happy. He could feel her unhappiness.

"Come here, honey," he said.

They were back at their house in Lemon; It was late -- after midnight. June was curled in the darkest corner, watching him. She often did that, and he hardly noticed her.

She uncurled herself. He took her in his arms, but there was something wrong. Patiently he started on the business of finding out what it was.

"What's the trouble, June?" he asked. "Did I do something? Or was it something I didn't do?"

She gulped down a lump in her throat which had probably been there a long time. "It's nothing -- nothing at all," she said unsteadily.

He kissed her lips very lightly and grinned wryly down at her. "Nothing?" he said gently.

The dam burst. "You shut me out," said June, and burst into tears. She couldn't control the sobs -- he could hear her try and fail. He didn't tell her to stop crying. He pulled her head on his breast and caressed her shoulders, knowing that would make her cry more. "Toni," she said between sobs. "You wouldn't let me stay. And now -- you won't tell me. Always."

He sorted out the incoherence. "I should have told you," he said. "I should always tell you. It's just habit, June. I never told anyone anything I didn't have to. But it isn't lack of trust."

"Oh, I'm a fool, Rog," said June unsteadily. "I'm always misunderstanding you, and thinking you don't care about me when I really know you do. You see, you were Dick's friend, and you know what Dick thinks of you. Dick talking about you is one of the first things I remember. And even when you don't notice what you're doing you're kind. You were always nice to me, even when you weren't really noticing me. So I fell in love with you a long time ago. But for years I kept telling myself that I must keep that to myself, because you'd never notice me. And then when you asked me to marry you I wanted to say no, for I was sure it would only mean misery sooner or later."

She laughed uncomfortably. "I'm still expecting the misery, you see," she whispered.

"That's not very sensible, is it?" asked Rog gently.

"No," she murmured, like a repentant child.

"Became if you wait for misery, it always comes. Something comes along, and if you didn't expect to be unhappy you wouldn't let it get you down. But if you're all set to say 'this is it' and let it break you, it will be it and it'll surely break you."

He stroked her hair soothingly. "Know what, June?" he went on. "You never really did grow up. You still care what people think of you the way adolescents do. You're still afraid to say what you think in case people will laugh at you or say it's silly. Well, take it easy, baby. Don't hurry about growing up. I won't be sorry when you do, but you're very sweet as you are now."

Suddenly June laughed. "What a mistake it is to say all men are equal. If they could start people off from scratch over and over again you'd always come out on top, Rog."

But when people began to talk about himself Rog lost interest. He knew about himself -- all he needed to know, anyway.

He wanted to say that as far as he was concerned it wasn't an interim marriage any more. But that was committing himself for the future, and Rog never committed himself when it wasn't really necessary. June was happy enough now and she was still young -- all the reasons there had been for making it an interim marriage still existed.

He became alert and businesslike again. "Listen, June," he said. "I won't shut you out any more. This is what I was trying to work out. Maybe you have some ideas."

"You mean," she said when he had explained what was bothering him, "you wonder why the second ship should come here the instant we saw that the solar system was destroyed?"

"Well, if not quite the instant we saw it, in a day or two."

"As if the flare-up was a signal," June mused.

"It must be a signal. At any rate it clearly acted as one. Then the ship was waiting -- off Mundis, in space perhaps?"

"Not for years, surely."

"Then on Secundis -- yes, /that's it/. They were waiting on Secundis, or they have a base there. Perhaps they weren't thinking about us at all, But whenever they saw that there was no Earth any more, they came looking for us."

"But the flare-up wasn't a signal," objected June. "People back on Earth weren't going to blow up the sun just to show that it was time to do something."

"No, it wouldn't be that sort of signal," Rog agreed. "But it could be a sign that it was safe to come here now. That would mean that it wasn't what they were meant to do. I don't quite know . . . "

He jumped up. "Let's go and see Bentley," he said.

"What -- now?" asked June.

Rog remembered abruptly it was the middle of the night. He laughed. He could turn off his impatience instantly when it was clear it wasn't going to do any good being impatient.

No," he said. "'Come on, June, let's get some sleep."

3

Pertwee shook his head as Toni was about to speak.

"They may be listening to us," he warned her. He could have put it a lot stronger than that; there was no doubt at all that the Clades were listening. But making it clear that he appreciated that would only show the Clades that there was no purpose in leaving them together.

Toni was gradually, and with rather unexpected courage, returning to her normal self. They had been put in a cell which contained nothing but a two-tiered bunk and a chair. There was a lavatory two feet square off one wall. The light was bare, bright and hard.

Their knapsacks had been thrown into the cell with them, after having been examined. Pertwee checked over the items and considered what the Clades could have worked out from what was there.

Not very much, fortunately. The clothes would show that weaving was done on Mundis, but that would hardly be a surprise.

The people on the ship had taken their name from it. They called themselves Clades, to rhyme with blades.

Toni's arms were too sore to move. Pertwee stripped the wet ket from her and eased on a shirt and slacks which had been packed in case they struck a colder climate. The temperature was lower in the Clades than they were used to.

"Yes," Pertwee agreed, dropping his voice. "If we could only get word to Lemon . . . I wonder if there's anything we could do that would give us a chance to escape?"

He closed one eye slowly at Toni, hoping she would understand. He took it that the Clades would be able to amplify the sounds in the cell and hear what he was saying.

"If either of us gets a chance, Toni," he whispered, "we'll make stra/ght for Lemon. and tell them there what these people are like. Agreed?"

"Of course," said Toni quietly. "These Clades are fools. They could have got what they liked from me if they had gone another way about it. Now, no. I'd die before I let them beat me."

Pertwee wanted to tell her she had done splendidly, but didn't dare. Any suggestion to the Clades that he was surprised at how Toni had withstood their efforts would merely encourage them to start again right away. So he was silent, and hoped Toni would understand.

The end of this was all too obvious. So obvious that he refused to think of it. If he decided now the whole thing was hopeless, what else could he expect but that everyone along the line would decide the same thing? But if he stuck to the idea of somehow getting word back to Lemon of what the Clades were like, he might do that and be able to turn the next part over to someone else.

"Surely humans on Earth weren't all like this?" Toni wondered, gently exercising her arms and trying to ignore the pain.

"No," said Pertwee. "This sort of thing only happened occasionally. We might have guessed -- you see, Toni, after the Mudis left Earth long ago, no one would know how much time there was left, but it was far too late to do anything for Earth then. So if any sort of order was to be kept on Earth and Mars and Venus, the military would have to take over. The army, the soldiers -- no, we've never had anything like that here, so I can't explain it to you. Anyway, apparently the military did take over, to the extent we see here."

"People have acted like this before? A lot of them at once?"

"Often, I'm afraid. And always in the same general pattern. Toughness, uniformity, everyone having to think and act and talk alike, having the same aims and pleasures and hates. Women subordinated, because women aren't so good as soldiers."

"But they're not subordinated. Lieutenant Fenham and that devil Barton are officers -- "

"Yes, but they have to submerge femininity. Dress like men, act like men -- like soldiers, rather. Never show a sign of weakness. Be tougher than men, in fact, in case they're not tough enough. I think you'll find the rest of the women are subordinated. That's the usual pattern -- child-bearing cattle -- "

"You could call us that in Lemon, couldn't you?"

"Not exactly. If sex is all sex and no reproduction, it's bad -- one kind of decadence. If it's all childbearing and no sex, it's bad too -- another kind of decadence. Well, if the Clades follow the pattern, sex among them will be duty. No frills, no sublety. Just conception after conception, no nonsense."

As he spoke, Pertwee was carefully reviewing all they had said. They were handing out information, of course; very little, as far as he could see, that would do the Clades much good, however. And he thought the idea of letting one of them escape was neatly planted.

Very likely, of course, they would refuse to bite. But if he and Toni continued to be stubborn, the Clades might well decide to try something else. After all, they probably didn't want to ill-treat the two Mundans too much. For all they knew, the Mundans might be very powerful, ready and willing to take offense and capable of exacting retribution. Expediency was an important part of Clade politics.

If they tried something else, Pertwee's suggestion was as good as any.

Toni and Pertwee didn't talk any more. Toni was taking her cue from Pertwee, and he was thinking, not talking. He was wondering about the Clades. How deeply-rooted was their militarism? How strong was it, how fanatic?

Autocracies, dictatorships, militarist empires of all kinds, no matter how small, were built on inhumanity. Administered by human beings, they were at least partly inhuman. Humanity, the softer, tenderer feelings, would try to break through.

How difficult was it for them, among the Clades, to break through? It could be anything from mildly undesirable to impossible. The Clades might turn out to be eternal, implacable enemies of the Mundans. Or they might be indistinguishable from the people of Lemon after a few years of freedom.

But Pertwee had to give up trying to guess. That was all it could be at the moment -- a guess.

VI

1

For the first time since they had entered the ship, Toni and Pertwee had a chance to talk to each other freely.

The ship had landed and all around it Clades were exercising. Up by the bows, a squad of men in full uniform was being drilled, moving quickly, jerkily, neatly, as one man, Toni watched fascinated. At the stern men in shorts were swinging on a bar which had been run out from the ship. They turned somersaults, pulled themselves up to sit on the bar, lay along it, hung underneath it, dropped to the ground and leaped back again -- all with the same precision and uniformity of the other squad at drill.

Over to the left a score or so of women were bending, stretching, jumping, swinging their arms. Toni didn't pay them much attention after one puzzled glance. They wore the plainest black trunks and white shirts, and they were indefinably ugly. Their bodies were slim and firm, they were clean, their skin glowed -- but nevertheless few of them could be called attractive.

"They're inferior beings," Pertwee murmured. "How could they be attractive?"

"I hate Phyllis Barton," said Toni, "but she isn't ugly."

"She's not inferior."

Toni shook her head impatiently. She didn't understand. If it was true that these women were carried only as machines to produce children, why not make a good job of it? Why not be beautiful, so that men would want them? Why not enjoy sex?

"Tenderness and gentleness have been cut out," said Pertwee. "Soldiers can't be tender. Hence love disappears too. Hence -- "

"But you can't legislate love out of existence!" exclaimed Toni.

"You can stop everybody showing any sign of it. Soon some at least will stop feeling it. That's what happens with pretense. It becomes reality."

There were more women further over, but these were the women who mattered -- the women in uniform. Toni looked at them a little more closely. There was no doubt of it, these were the girls who had anything -- intelligence, talent, courage, drive. And fortultously, perhaps, they turned out to be the girls who had any beauty too. Apparently when a girl was useful she was allowed to have a certain amount of pride in herself; if she couldn't make herself sexually attractive, at least she could make herself smart as a female soldier.

This group, which included Phyllis, was exercising under Fenham. The girls wore the slacks and shirts of their uniform, presumably to show at all times that they weren't animals like the other women.

There were other groups. But Toni and Pertwee, apart from a guard of two impassive Clades, were free to do as they wished. The guard went with them, silent but not interfering in any way.

"I think," said Pertwee in a low voice, "you're meant to escape now."

His hand tightened on her wrist as she jerked involuntarily. "Don't alarm the guard," he warned her.

"But -- "

"It's the obvious move. They were prepared to drag the whereabouts of 'Lemon from us by torture and still are. But they don't want to treat us so badly that Lemon would have to take reprisals -- "

"I don't understand that either. If they're going to subject our people, what does it matter what they do to us?"

"They don't know what Lemon is like, Toni. If they knew, we wouldn't matter. They'd torture us to death if necessary, then throw us out of the nearest lock. But Lemon may be big and powerful, for all they how."

He began to walk with Toni, ignoring the guard. They followed, but not too closely.

"Since there's no real hurry, as good a way as any of finding our settlement would be to let one of us go. We'd go to Lemon to warn them about the Clades, of course . . . "

He explained patiently. Toni wasn't very quick on the uptake when things like that were concerned. They were outside her experience, and imagination wasn't her strong point.

"But why me?" she demanded. "Why would they let me escape, and not you?"

"Oh, several reasons. One, you're a girl. Inferior, easier to follow, less likely to realize you're being followed -- you know how they regard women. Two, you know nothing from experience about them and their methods. I know a little."

The guards came closer, and he stopped.

None of the groups at exercise paid the least attention to them. Pertwee wandered further and further from the ship, wondering if the two Clades would protest, becoming more and more certain that Toni would be allowed to escape if the circumstances made it at all possible.

The trouble was that though they and the Clades were more than willing to co-operate in this, neither party would allow the other to suspect the pretense.

"Shake them off first," said Pertwee quietly, "and then make straight for Lemon. Tell them everything that has happened."

"But what about you?"

"I have to take my chance. You see, there won't be any question of letting us both go. They're going to permit one of us to go, but not both in any circumstances. So -- "

There was a cry. One of the guards had tripped in the tough bracken, and the other had turned to help him.

It was less subtle than Pertwee had expected, but it wasn't up to him to quarrel with the Clades' methods of letting one of them escape. He seized Toni's wrist and they ran.

"Stop!" the guard shouted, but not until they were well away. "Stop, or I fire!"

"Separate!" gasped Pertwee.

They had to co-operate with the Clades all the way in this. If they wanted to the Clades could recapture them both in the next five minutes. The thing to do was to allow them to recapture the one they wanted, spectacularly, and let the other somehow slip through their fingers.

Pertwee went left, Toni right. To the left was a ridge of rock, and Pertwee made for the corner. The bracken was often waist-high; it seldom afforded a real obstruction, but it did a lot to hide an escape such as this. Pertwee bent double and ran.

There was shouting behind him, shouting and something he hadn't heard for years -- the cracking of shots. He heard the sound of a motor, and wondered if the Clades had a plane or helicopter. But it could only have been a ground vehicle.

He reached the rock, wheeled and ran behind it so that he could make a mile or two upright, without being visible from the Clades. He was impatient. Why didn't they take him? Toni could run like a deer. She must be far enough away by this time for them to be able to pretend they had lost her.

On and on he went. The shouts faded; so did the sound of the motor. He got his second wind and went on doggedly. The first shadows of dusk spread around him. There came a time when he could stand erect and see the horizon all round, but not the great bulk of the Clades.

At last he realized they had retaken Toni and let him go free. He staggered as the thought struck him. He had been so sure that there was nothing he could do, that it all depended on Toni. But the responsibility was his after all.

And Toni, beyond any doubt, was back on board the Clades, perhaps being punished, as part of the pretense, for his escape.

1

Pertwee crawled cautiously through the bracken, estimating the wind.

There was hardly ever a strong wind on Mundis, by Terran standards. The air was in constant but not organized, united motion. Only occasionally, as at the moment, did conditions combine to produce a light breeze. The rain, when it came in two hours or so, would for once come down at an angle.

The Clades tracking him knew exactly where he was, of course. He couldn't see them, but he was perfectly prepared to believe that they were better trackers than he. They couldn't very well be worse. On Mundis he had never tracked anyone or anything.

He tried to keep his thoughts away from Toni. His escape had been so easy: it was difficult to remember that Toni's would have been absolutely impossible.

The breeze was moving. It was turning slowly and evenly. On the realization he took out a box of matches and struck one. The breeze wasn't enough to blow it out, though it guttered and flickered wildly.

Pertwee dropped it and crawled away from it as fast as he could. Presently he stopped. The match had gone out. He lit another philosophically. Range fires would start spontaneously, and twice on their journey he and Toni had started fires despite their care to avoid it. But when one tried to do it, it wasn't nearly so easy.

His heart was pounding, and he broko a match clumsily in his nervousness. His memory produced vivid pictures of fire warning posters from his childhood, and he remembered his older brother Harry talking ironically about how to start a fire: Fill the furnace with old damp newspaper and wet sticks and ashes, and throw a stubbed-out cigarette end on top. The fire would immediately blaze up and if precautions weren't taken at once it would be a job for the firemen . . .

Harry was dead long ago.

Pertwee dropped the third match and watched it carefully, anxiously. The tendrils round it blackened. Of course, since he was watching over it, it caught and blazed rapidly, and he had to scuttle through the bracken at top speed to get ahead of the bIaze.

In case they could still see him he didn't head for the wood yet. He moved along parallel to it, into the wind.

A shout told him the fire had been seen, and had put an end for the moment at least to the pretense that he was alone on the Mundan moor. He halted for a moment to look back cautiously. The Clades were erect, six of them -- there were probably more at other points of the compass, though -- shouting and running towards him. But as he watched the flame cut them off.

The grass burned with very little smoke, but what there was was heavy, acrid and blinding. Cautiously Pertwee turned and began to work his way toward the wood.

The only chance, it had seemed to him, of escaping from the Clades on his trail had been to use some piece of knowledge of Mundis that the Clades could not be expected to have. He had thought of various things, but the best was clearly this.

A moor fire was the only thing that could cut off pursuit. The Clades, presumably, would have the sense to guard against the possibility; there would always be at least two groups tracking him, one between him and any line of escape from fire -- in this case, between him and the rocks two miles to the south. The fire hadn't spread that way yet; Pertwee thought he could see where the second party of Clades must be, waiting for him, not betraying themselves to him like the other group. They didn't really want to recapture him, of course. They would do that only if there was some risk of his complete escape. What they wanted was to remain on his trail without his knowing they were there.

But the fire was moving in that direction now, and there were flashes of lighter green as Clades in uniform moved.

The Clades, surely, would not expect him to trap himself in a forest. In their experience, a wood must be the last place they would expect him to make for.

On Mundis, it was the only safe place.

The smoke was spreading, and Pertwee was coughing, eyes streaming, as he reached the wood. It seemed most unlikely that anyone could see him now. He closed his eyes for several minutes and let the tears well out from under his eyelids. Then cautiously he opened them again.

Even when he climbed a tree he could see nothing but fire and smoke. The fire would rage for miles in every direction, probably covering thousands of square miles of territory. Unless the ship was fairly close, the trackers would die, except, possibly, those who could reach the rocks. They might find some protection there, though Pertwee doubted it.

To Mundis the fire was nothing. The grass above the ground burned, blackened and became ash. But before the fire had died out completely, green shoots would be appearing again where it had first broken out. The new plants thrived on the ashes of the old. In a week it would be difficult to be sure there had been a fire there, and in a month, impossible.

Where Mundan plants differed from Terran was that the Terran variety tended to exist and have their being principally above the surface. Many Terran plants came out of the soil, roots and all, at a light pull. There wasn't a plant on Mundis that would do that. In a sense, the part of them that was above the ground was the root, sent out to drink sunlight. The real plant was in the ground, reaching down for water. And if one tried to pull out a Mundan plant, usually the above-ground part broke off easily. That didn't matter much to the plant. It could soon grow again.

But dig out a plant of any kind complete and lay it on the ground, even moist ground, and it was dead. It couldn't shoot down roots again. It couldn't germinate on the surface -- only far down underground, in warm, moist earth.

There was a strong probability that the Clades tracking him would be in radio communication with the ship, which wouldn't be far away. Probably already it was in the air, heading for the fire. So he couldn't afford to stay where he was.

When the ship arrived it would be all too clear that woods were the only safe place in a brush fire -- the wood would stand out fresh and 'green in the middle of the black devastation.

So while the smoke still hung over the burnt moor, Pertwee cut back the way he had come. The fire, he knew, would already have burnt itself out in that direction, while it still blazed everywhere rise except round the wood. Haste was more important now than staying low. He stumbled on, blindly, forcing his painful eyes open every so often to make sure his path was comparatively straight.

He stumbled and found the body of a Clade at his feet, charred and ahnost unrecognizable. He was about to hurry on when he saw the gun at the dead man's belt, still gleaming. He picked it up and dropped it again. It seemed to be undamaged, but it was still too hot to touch. He wrapped it in a piece of charred cloth left of the Clade's uniform, and hurried on.

If he got free and reached Lemon, the gun would settle one thing at least. If any of the Mundans were disposed to regard his story, as invention, that gun would be proof that the Clades existed. It was entirely different from the guns they still preserved at Lemon, explosive guns. The Clades had guns like that too, but this looked quite another kind of weapon -- probably atomic.

He felt a surge of fear at the thought, but didn't drop the gun. There might be people at Lemon who would say he should never have brought back such a weapon; but they were the very people who would say, if he didn't, that he should have brought it back, and certainly would have done if his whole tale hadn't been a lie to explain the absence of Toni.

Presently he found himself on moor which had not been burnt. He cut back into the black patch for a half mile or so, then struck out towards Lemon, avoiding any landmarks such as rocks, forests, or bare patches. The Clades would certainly investigate possible hiding places first.

Abruptly the rain started. That would put out what was left of the fire, but it also made him much more difficult to find.

The rains of Mundis were the daily overflow of the atmosphere. There were next to no open bodies of water from which water vapor could rise, and but for the high temperature of the world there would have been no rain at all. The water rained down, drained underground, and then the rain stopped. Then the process was reversed -- the plants dried and sucked moisture back to the surface, where the warm air lifted it into the atmosphere once more.

At Lemon the Mundans took cover when it rained, but since the start of their journey Pertwee and Toni had had to stay out in it every day. That was a small hardship. The rain was never cold. It washed them and their clothes; when it came to drying afterwards, the temperature was too high for there to be any risk of chills.

The sun was visible through the rain -- just. So while it rained Pertwee was able to put a few more miles between him and the scene of his escape, plodding doggedly through the heavy, drenched ground. While it rained, he could be practically certain that the Clades couldn't detect him.

But, the rain lasted no longer than usual. It stopped abruptly, and soon after that Pertwee saw the Clades.

He had been traveling in the general direction of Lemon since he escaped, knowing the Clades were reasonably satisfied it didn't lie in that direction. If he failed to throw off his pursuers he would have led them off the track eventually; but it seemed to him that the Clades, knowing he had known he was pursued and had had a plan all along to escape them, would be most unlikely to reach the conclusion that he had been leading them straight to Lemon.

When he saw the ship he dropped and lay still. The ship's radar could probably be adjusted to detect a moving body which was not a plant, but it was hardly likely that it would be interested in a flat object which might easily be a stone. After a time the ship's systematic search took it to the north again, and he put five miles more between him and the scene of the outbreak.

He went on through the night and most of the next day. He knew that all the way to Lemon the risk of recapture would remain. The Clades had hundreds of men it could land to beat the bracken for him, and the ship itself could search the whole surface of Mundis. It would be ironic and heartbreaking if the Clades found Lemon in the course of the search for him.

But on the third day he knew that the immediate risk of recapture was over.

3

Phyllis took her suggestion to Sloan, not Corey, because he would favor it more. He would try to sell it to Corey as his own idea, which suited Phyllis.

As she expected, Sloan liked it. She saw it in his face. She saw also the regret as he realized that if he was to bring up the idea, he could hardly be the man to play the main part in it. It would hardly be safe.

"As you say, Lieutenant," he remarked formally, "the first priority at the moment is getting the location of this Lemon from the Mundan woman." He added unpleasantly: "You feel doubtful of your ability to get it from her by the present means?"

Since it was known that Pertwee had escaped and was on his way to Lemon, Phyllis had had three sessions a day with Toni. Still Corey insisted that she should not be seriously harmed. Time was less important, he said, than the ability to produce Toni whole might be.

Phyllis doubted that very much, but she had her orders and couldn't be held responsible if the interrogation of Toni took a long time.

"Not at all, sir," she said. "But I have believed all along that the present methods could hardly have quick results. The Mundan woman is weak, but obviously no coward. And you can imagine how long it would take to break a Clade by the present comparatively mild treatment."

She reflected fleetingly that it was a pity Toni couldn't hear her torture so far described as comparatively mild. If anything would make her collapse, spirit broken, that would.

Sloan nodded reluctantly. "Long enough," he admitted. "But not a woman!"

Phyllis was expressively silent. Sloan grunted. "I didn't mean someone llke you, Lieutenant," he said -- admitting that hidden somewhere within him there was a certain appreciation of the qualities of others. "If we try this idea of yours, I wonder who . . . ?"

"Why not Lieutenant Mathers, sir?" asked Phyllis casually.

Sloan started. "Mathers?" he repeated.

"I think," said Phyllis extremely carefully, "that he might relish the task."

She waited anxiously for Sloan's answer.

"Oh?" he said quietly. "Well, you should know, Lieutenant."

She breathed again. He had gone pretty far in his answer. It was an admission that practically made them allies for the moment.

Mathers was below Sloan, of course, but a rival. It could reasonably be assumed that Sloan would help her in any scheme against Mathers, since she was at the moment much less dangerous to him than Mathers was.

That evening Phyllis was a few minutes late and Toni was trying not to pretend that she wasn't coming. When she did, the disappointment would only be greater.

Toni had been told nothing, but when they stopped questioning her and almost began to treat her like a human being for a while, she knew Pertwee had escaped and that the Clades were tracking him, certain they were going to be led to Lemon. Then the interrogation began again, and she knew that the Clades had failed with Pertwee. But she didn't know whether to be glad or sorry, for while he might have escaped them completely, there was also the possibility that he had been killed.

The door rattled and Toni's heart jumped.

However, there was a difference this time. Phyllis was there, but so were Corey and Sloan and Mathers. Evidently there was going to be a special appeal.

The commodore adopted the tone which she had learned meant condescension. He had realized from the first that women among the Mundans were on a different plane, and that it was no use treating them as the Clade women were treated. It was awkward and uncomfortable, but he kept up the pretense, a sort of civility, guessing that showing Toni that the Clades would always treat all women as they treated their own would only increase her resistance and determination not to betray Lemon.

"You're a sensible girl, Toni," he said. "You must know what the outcome of this is going to be. If you were merely trying to keep something from us for a few hours, or a few days, or for that matter for any limited period, I could appreciate your conviction that it was possible. But there's no limit. We keep on patiently until you tell us. That's all."

He stopped, waiting. Toni said nothing; She eyed Phyllis and Mathers. They were the two youngest Clades she had seen, the kind of material Lemon, in any struggle, would have to deal with. She marveled; in appearance they were still nice kids, the kind everyone would be gIad to welcome to Lemon.

But Phyllis Barton was a cold and quite efficient torturer. How about Mathers?

"You evidently don't appreciate /why/ we're in no hurry," the commodore went on. "You're trying to delay us, apparently under the delusion that time will help your people. It won't. This ship is considenbly bigger and stronger than the Mundis was, and we have a bigger, more efficient, better trained fighting force. Giving your people more time to prepare will make no difference to the result -- if it comes to fighting, which we don't want, of course."

He waited again. Toni saw his point. Even if the Mundis still existed, as strong as when it left Earth, it would be no match for the Clades. Corey was confident, unhurried, though the Mundis might still exist. How much more confident would he be if he knew the ship had been dismantled and the Mundans lived out in the open, exposed, defenseless, weaponless? But she said nothing.

Corey sighed. "Very well. I believe you love Pertwee, Toni. We Clades do things differently from you, but that doesn't mean we have no imagination, when it's necessary. I think perhaps you would like to be faithful to your husband, Toni."

Internally Toni relaxed. So that was it. It was true that she would like to be faithful to Pertwee; she wanted that in a way she had never believed possible. She had discovered, when she knew that he might be dead, what it would mean to her if she were suddenly restored to Lemon, but without Pertwee. Rog was right, damn him. Pertwee had awakened in her something that no man before him had ever awakened.

She would be faithful to Pertwee if she could, but apparently these Clades didn't realize how a little thing like that mattered. They had misunderstood the ideals of Lemon completely, and her love for Pertwee. If they gave her to Sloan or Mathers, which appeared to be the intention, it would make little or no difference to her life with Pertwee in the future, if they ever had a chance to take it up again.

She decided to make even less of it than it deserved. She laughed. "You're twisted on sex, all of you," she said. "Naturally you'd think of it as a punishment. I suppose it's treason among you to suggest it's a pleasure?"

It was, but Phyllis's eyes widened involuntarily at that. That men enjoyed sex was an open secret, but that women could was a new idea entirely, to her.

"This is a transparent bluff, sir" said Sloan confidently, forced to support the plan for which he had taken responsibility.

"We'll see," said Corey. "Mathers!'

"I had at least expected the rest of you to go," said Toni. "But it doesn't matter."

4

Phyllis was delighted. It had never occurred to her that Toni would help. Mathers was now definitely suspected of non-Clade emotions and inclinations. She had seen that in the faces Of Sloan and Corey. Mathers was too young, perhaps, too imperfectly trained. He couldn't help himself.

But soberly as she lay in her bunk that night she realized, not for the first time, that she could never be safe -- only safer. She wished there was trust among Clades, as there seemed to be among Mundans. But how could there be? Today she almost trusted Sloan; tomorrow Sloan might be her worst enemy -- quite possibly would be, after the failure of the scheme she had made him suggest. Fenham she clearly could never trust, for she was in Fenham's footsteps, her successor if one was needed. Mathers -- well, Mathers at the moment would be unwise to make himself conspicuous. But in a week's time she might be forced to bargain with Mathers to ensure her own survival.

She wished openly, unreservedly in her own mind, that the Clade system was more like that of the Mundans. Toni and Pertwee had hardly known fear. Among the Mundans a woman could afford to be nobody, it seemed, and still be happy and free of this constant striving to be ahead of one's neighbor, in case the neighbor slipped a knife in one's ribs.

She wrenched her mind back from such thoughts with self-derision. What did she know of Mundis and the Mundans? They were weak, and the Clades were strong. The Mundans would die, and the Clades survive, ever more strongly.

Now that they knew positively that Earth was gone, with the whole solar system, and that no stronger force yet would ever come out -- as if there had ever been any doubt of that -- humanity must be welded into one strong, virile, conquering unit. The galaxy was man's.

And high in this hierarchy would be Phyllis Barton, always clawing her way up, until someone clawed her down. When she ceased to strive and fight and climb, she would be dead.

VII

1

Pertwee came across the fields to Lemon, and thus was seen nearly an hour before he actually reached the town. He hadn't planned his approach so as announce himself like that. As the town was in the south end of the valley, it was the natural way for him to come. But he had considered the implications. He wanted to know as soon as possible what he had to face, and this was as good a way as any. Lemon had time to prepare and give him precisely the kind of reception it wanted to give him. He didn't hurry. He had done over thirty miles that day, and it was still full daylight.

When he was still a long way from the town, he saw two people come out to meet him. Ruby and Jack? He could see, long before he recognized them, that they were not founders. But the man was taller than the woman -- no, it wasn't Jack. He was only fourteen and small for his age.

Only when they were quite close did he recognize Rog Foley and Alice Bentley -- for he wasn't expecting to see either of them. What concern he was of theirs he couldn't see. Unless -- Toni had once been married to Rog, hadn't she? And Alice could be Toni's friend, though from what he knew of them both it didn't seem at all likely.

The three of them met. "You've left Toni behind as a hostage?" Rog inquired bluntly.

"No. The crew of a second ship from Earth has taken her prisoner," replied Pertwee, equally bluntly.

Alice caught her breath, but Rog merely nodded. "Let's sit down and talk about it," he said. "You look tired."

"Here?" said Pertwee. "Why don't we go on to Lemon~"

"Because we wouldn't get any talking done, There'd be crazy people screaming at you and accusing you of murdering Toni and suggesting we lynch you -- just a few, but the ones who make the most noise. They wouldn't mean it, but they'd say it all the same. And even some of the sensible people would want to lock you up instead of hearing the story. Well, let's have it."

He and Alice had squatted comfortably in the field. Pertwee still didn't understand, but he appreciated their confidence and coolness. Something had happened since he left Lemon, apparently. These two counted more than they had when he left.

He told them the main facts, briefly. They didn't even ask questions. Rog didn't say a word until Pertwee stopped speaking.

Then: "You're certain you weren't followed?" he asked.

"I'm certain I was. I've seen the Clades six times since I escaped, the last only two days ago. But then it was well to the north. I think it's been combing the ground in a tight spiral from the place I escaped, looking for me and for Lemon. If you mean, could anyone have followed me on foot, no. Twice when I was in a safe place I lit moor fires in case there was anyone in my tracks."

"Wouldn't that give the ship a clue?"

"No. Further north there are more fires than we're used to here. I expect flying over the moors they'd see two or three every day. Oh . . . "

For the first time, so easily had they accepted his story, he remembered the only proof he had that it had happened. He drew out the Clade gun carefully and laid it gently on the grass.

Rog and Alice looked at it curiously. "Have you fired it?" Rog asked.

"No, I didn't dare. Perhaps it won't work. It was in a fire. Handle it carefully."

"Keep it," said Rog. "It proves your story."

Pertwee frowned, puzzled. Whatever kind of reception he had expected, it wasn't this.

"Tell us everything that happened since you saw this ship," said Alice. "The whole story."

"Hadn't you better tell me something first?" suggested Pertwee. "What's happened since Toni and I went away -- a revolution? Have you killed off the older people?"

"No. I'd like to kill off Boyne and Robertson and Beaton and Watters, but I imagine you felt like that too in your time."

"I did." Pertwee looked at Rog with new interest. "Are you the new President? Was it a bloodless revolution?"

"Not even that," Alice told him, "thank goodness. No, Rog isn't the President officially, because we haven't voted him in. But in practice he is. Now how about my question?"

Prompted by Rog and Alice, Pertwee told everything he knew about the Clades -- all he had seen, every word that had been said, how it had been said, how the Clades moved, how they looked.

"You're right, Rog," Alice observed. "They come from Secundis, all right."

Pertwee started. "You know about them?"

"They passed here," Rog told him, "probably just before they picked you and Toni up. No, they couldn't have seen anything."

"But what's this about Secundis?"

"They must have a base there. Put two and two together. A few days after we see Sol explode, they're here. They haven't been waiting in space --- not if they're as strong physically as you say. Instead of living in free fall, thay've been coping with a greater gravity than that of Mundis -- Secondis, in fact."

Pertwee found his respect for Foley growing. Alice too. They could separate the wheat from the chaff, and they knew what to do with it when they had it. A big part of the impression they had made on him was in their expression, the way they talked, the rapidity with which they accepted things. He realized that he had expected to have to insist that what he was saying was true, to repeat everything, to explain not only how things were, but how they could be so, excuse himself for abandoning Toni before they would listen to the rest . . .

Instead, Alice and Rog had not merely understood what he was saying as quickly as he said it, apparently never thinking of disbelieving it, but had worked out, on less data, something which hadn't occurred to him.

"Yes, Secundis," he said. "Of course. Now that I think of it, everything they said inplied they had a base somewhere else."

"Do they have any Gap?" Rog asked.

"I can't be certain, but I don't think so. I saw no one under eighteen or so, but the children could have been hidden away somewhere . . . "

"Sterility?" Rog suggested.

"No," Pertwee said, "I don't think so. Their cycle is so firmly based on childbearing -- like ours, but in a very different way -- that there must /be/ childbearing."

Rog nodded. He got up easily.

"Let's go and see the others," he said. "You wondered if we'd killed off your contemporaries, Pertwee. On the contrary, we're going straight to talk this over with Alice's father."

"That's wise," said Pertwee.

"I wanted to get the information from you first. Because I can't be sure we'll be able to talk in peace for hours yet."

"There may not be much time."

"I know it. Are you sure you told us everything?"

Bouncing around in Pertwee's mind like a roulette ball was something he hadn't mentioned. He couldn't make it stay still until he identified it.

"A possible weakness in the Clades?" Rog suggested. "Something you noticed but didn't understand about them? Something about Toni?"

"I don't usually have difficulty remembering things," murmured Pertwee in self-annoyance.

"Could it be," said Alice, "that it was something you don't want to remember?"

"It was," said Pertwee without triumph. "It was something Corey said. He told me that all of us -- all the founder colonists who came on the Mudis -- had been strongly conditioned against atomic power. I think it's true, though I don't remember anything like that -- for it gives me an uncomfortable feeling even to think about it."

"Might be useful to the Clades," Rog murmured thoughtfully. Don't see how it's useful to us, though. I'm not surprised. The old folks always seemed psychotic about atomic power. But where does it get us?"

Pertwee saw as they approached the outermost houses of Lemon how and why they had been allowed to have their talk in peace. Fred Mitchell, Dick Smith, June, Abner Carliss and -- yes, Ruby, his daughter, were all drawn up in a sort of guard to prevent anyone going out to them. They kept it up as Rog and Alice escorted Pertwee in, and he was able to see a little of their method and guess the rest.

People who were easily cowed were told peremptorily to keep back, and that worked, for it was used only with people on whom it would. People who liked to have reasons were given a reason they would probably accept -- Rog and Alice were acting friendly and getting all they could out of Pertwee before the party turned rough; or preparations were being made to show John Pertwee what everyone thought of him, but they weren't ready yet; or Pertwee had a gun, and Rog and Alice were trying to get it away from him. And people who would understand the real issues were co-opted into the task force -- Mary Bentley and Brad Hulton joined it as Pertwee watched, reassuring him somewhat. He hadn't been quite sure that Lemon hadn't had a youth-and-age war, or that it was over.

Alice darted ahead and spoke rapidly to Fred while Pertwee and Rog were still approaching. Then she ran back. Pertwee saw Fred speak to Dick, and Dick to Brad and Mary; now presumably the reasonable element was not only together, but had some inkling of the true state of affairs.

As Pertwee came level with the crowd, flanked by Alice and Rog, an angry shout rang out: "Here comes the dirty baby snatcher!"

For a moment it looked as if Rog's plan might fail and Pertwee's arrival would result in violence. There were about a hundred people around, despite the efforts of Rog's party to send people home.

Beside Pertwee, Rog laughed. Dick and Fred and Mary grinned. As the free anger in the air came a little of the way towards good-humor, most people agreed you could hardly blame anyone for snatching a baby like Toni if he could, especially when Brad said so, in the slow, easy tones that carried so far.

Someone else shouted something, but it was drowned by a bellow in what sounded like Abner's voice: "Bet you're going to have a sister, Ruby!" This was greeted by the low chuckle that greets any public mention of procreation or copulation. There was no further demonstration. Rog and his party had turned what might have become blood-lust into mild amusement and realization that there was another side to the story.

2

Phyllis saluted. "Excuse me, sir, but am I free to use any certain method of getting the location of Lemon from the prisoner, provided she isn't permanently harmed?"

"Any /certain/ method, lieutenant?" demanded Corey. "I should like to hear it."

He was rather stiffer with Phyllis than he would have been with a male lieutenant.

Theoretically, women should have remained on their subservient level among the Clades -- there should have been no possible way for them to climb to the anomalous level of Fenham and Phyllis and Dr. Heneker. And certainly for the most part they stayed down.

Women had few rights and would have been unwise to insist too strongly on those they had. The fact of their practically permanent pregnancy alone made competition impossible, and kept them out of any important job; but in addition to that, the disciplinary pattern of the Clades accorded females only the right to live and bear children, the one dependent on the other.

There should not have been high-ranking women officers; they were an excrescence on the system. The pattern was neat and logical and utilitarian, but for the existence of lieutenants Fenham and Barton, Dr. Heneker, Professor Jenny Mueller, and a few others.

The trouble arose because, back on Earth, the totalitarian, militarist regime had been imposed by necessity on a social order in which there was almost complete equality between the sexes. At other times women, agreed to be an inferior form of life anyway, had merely been pushed a little lower, in such circumstwnces. But this time it wasn't possible, at any rate in a short time. Some women were /needed/. Jenny Mueller was a hydroponics expert. On the journey from Earth it was on her, more than anyone else, that the Clades depended for its daily bread, so to speak.

Dr. Sarah Heneker was a better man for the job of M.O. than the men. Phyllis Barton had grown up as an unwanted, unimportant girl child, merely a pair of hands to labor until she was old enough to bear male Clades. But she contrived to be noticed, to be strong, hard, brave, infallible. Alone she couldn't have climbed from the level of beast to human being. Since, however, Mueller and Heneker and Fenham were already recognized as human beings, Phyllis was recognized too -- grudgingly. It was all she needed. She had drive. She was efficient.

She was efficient enough to merit promotion, and didn't get it. She became twice as efficient, and did get it.

So Corey had a certain discomfort talking to Phyllis alone. A complicated situation was superimposed on the fact that Corey was a man and Phyllis an attractive woman, and yet Corey could not be father, brother, lover, or friend.

Phyllis made her suggestion.

"Nonsense," said the commodore immediately. "Are you getting soft, lieutenant?"

"Not at all, sir. I merely think my method would be more certain, more efficient, less liable to produce consequences, and even quicker in the end."

"Nonsense," said the commodore again.

"I should like my suggestion to go on record, sir," said Phyllis evenly.

That gave the commodore pause. There was a long moment of silence while he considered and calculated and reconsidered.

The Clade system looked and was totalitarian, but Commodore Corey wasn't the official dictator. No one was, just at the moment. Corey was answerable, above, to the President of the United Nations, and below, to a council of officers. In theory it was democracy. In practice it was autocracy, and the autocrat was Power.

So long as Corey was strong, hard, successful, and confident, he was Commodore Corey. Immediately he failed or showed weakness or uncertainty, he was out. He had supreme power over individuals, but freedom of choice only in attaining the goals of the society. If those goals were not being attained, his power would be gone, and so would his command.

Corey remembered that twice before, with other officers, Barton's judgment had been correct and her cold evaluation had led to promotion for her and demotion for the other. He reconsidered, but it was too late to withdraw.

"Very well," he said. He reached out, and Phyllis watched him flick the switch "Record."

"Suggestion by Lieutenant Phyllis Barton re interrogation of prisoner Toni Pertwee," said Phyllis coolly. "To Commodore Corey, August 9, Year 28. Confirmed?"

With no change in expression Corey switched the recording off again under the desk. "Confirmed," he said. The timbre of his voice could be measured so exactly that if it had been recorded it would have been useless for him to deny having confirmed Phyllis's suggestion. He wondered whether to switch on again, but decided against it.

Phyllis went on to give her opinion that the information required from Toni could be acquired much more rapidly, more certainly, more efficiently, and with less danger of possibly unfortunate consequences by herself and by others working to her orders gaining Toni's confidence than by torture.

As she made her statement in detail Corey was frowning. She was wrong, obviously she was wrong. It was too late to gain the Mundan girl's confidence /now/; earlier, perhaps. Yes, she was wrong, and he wished he hadn't tampered with the recording. That was a dangerous thing to do. But on the other hand, if she was right, and the record existed, it would be serious; not fatal, but distinctly undesirable. Since it didn't exist, he could countercharge in the event of any reference to it being made that she had attempted to make a false record. If she was wrong, it didn't matter either way. She wouldn't demand the production of a record that proved her error.

He roused himself in time to say "Confirmed" again at the close of the record. Phyllis waited. Puzzled, he stared back. At last she pointed, and, reddenlug, he closed the switch on his desk.

"That's all, lieutenant," he said.

She saluted again and went.

Corey frowned again. It wasn't like Barton to make a dud suggestion and insist on recording it. He wished she had gone to Sloan instead, when he was off duty. Then it would have been Sloan's responsibility.

3

Pertwee stated his point of view quite definitely.

"Destroy Lemon," he said. "Go somewhere else. Where we can hide. Where the Clades could have no reason to expect to find us."

Rog had again called an unofficial meeting to reach some conclusions. This one, however, was so large that they had to use the smaller Council Chamber for it. Present were Mary and Jim Bentley, John and Ruby Pertwee, Dick Smith, Fred and Alice Mitchell, Brad Hulton, Jessie Bendall, Abner Carliss and his sister Felicia, and quite a few others who might have something to say and could be trusted to keep their mouths shut if they hadn't.

Rog opened the proceedings by inviting Jessie Bendall to take the chair. She was going to refuse, since Rog was clearly the real president. But Rog said he wasn't going to preside anyway, and if Jessie refused he would merely suggest Mary or Alice or Brad or leave it to the meeting.

One or two more people who hadn't noticed it before realized that Rog Foley was a diplomat. He never used any power he might have merely for the sake of using it; he kept it in reserve until it was needed.

Jessie accepted the chairmanship, and then Rog made it clear, smoothly but decidedly, that as far as he was concerned Pertwee was accepted back without reservations. Only if and when Toni returned, only if her story disagreed with his, should any charges against Pertwee be considered, he said. Alice agreed. So did Ruby, of course; Fred nodded.

The older people looked at each other, waiting for someone to take the lead and express an opinion. But nobody did. Their only real leader was Pertwee. And Rog was restoring him, not opposing him.

Pertwee stated his attitude. Lemon couldn't stand against the Clades, from what he had seen of them, for as much as ten minutes. In that time the Mundans could be destroyed or taken prisoner, as the Clades wished.

"And the Clades are evil," he went on. "The less we have to do with them the better."

"Are any human beings really evil all through?" asked Mary Bentley quietly.

"Perhaps not. But bad enough. You all know what happened to Toni and me on the ship almost as well as I do. Let's look at the various people. The commodore is honest, sincere; he really believes that the two parties should join together and make a powerful whole. Since his is the stronger, we must fall in with their way of life -- I think he'd accept it as quite natural that we should enforce our way on them if we happened to be stronger.

"Evil? He's no worse than most of us. He'd be a useful man if he were with us. But that's the point -- he's not with us, and can't be with us. As things are he'd be cruel and inhuman and stubborn, crushing Lemon like an insect.

"Or take Phyllis Barton. I've heard the opinions of some of you on her, from what I've told you. None of you has any sympathy for her, and a few think the only thing she could understand is torture, and a little of her own medicine would break her down pretty quickly.

"I don't think you understand her at all. There's no more evil in her than in most girls her age -- it's just been developed more fully, that's all. Most of her life has been the journey on the Clades. There was no other life but the life of the ship, no other point of view, beliefs, customs. People aren't horrified at things which no one in their acquaintance has ever been horrified at. When Corey told her to torture Toni, she did it just as if she'd been told to close the door, or stand to attention. If Corey had said to stab Toni through the heart, she'd have done that too without the least -- "

"And you say there's no more evil in her than in anyone else!" burst out Fred Mitchell. "Is murder such a detail?"

"Yes," retorted Pertwee. "Among the Clades. I'm only guessing, of course -- how they acted leads me to believe that if Phyllis Barton had refused to torture Toni, say, she would have been thrown in a cell like us, right away. And if she refused before a big gathering of Clades, and some demonstration was necessary, as likely as not she'd have been shot out of hand. It's because the Clades are like that that I say let's cut ourselves off from them -- hide from them, keep out of their way -- "

"For how long?" Bentley demanded.

There was the rub, How long could it last?

Points of view emerged; little by little a structure of probabilities built itself up.

The Clades would not give up the search. They would keep scouring the surface of Mundis, knowing there was a settlement, until they found Lemon. And then, they had Toni.

Pertwee pointed out that it wasn't reasonable to expect Toni to stay silent for long on the location of Lemon. Some of those present couldn't see that. They said that with the Clades as Pertwee said they were, it was her duty to die before betraying Lemon.

It wasn't a question of dying, said Pertwee. Mundans didn't understand torture. The Clades did. They would take no risks with Tonl's life. They would make it hell, but they wouldn't end it, Toni would talk, like anyone else.

So if the Mundans did nothing, the Clades would appear over Lemon in a few hours or a few days, and the Mundans would become Clades, under Commodore Corey. Human freedom would be at an end for a generation or two, at least -- probably for a long time.

"And very likely," said Bentley, gloomily for him, "long before freedom returns there'll be yet another final atomic war -- and probably no one will get away this time."

But as Brad Hulton pointed out, the picture wasn't likely to be very much different if they abandoned Lemon and tried to build some sort of secret city.

"Traveling," he observed, "we'd be a little more conspicuous than we are here, a little easier to find. Split up? Then that's the end of our settlement anyway. Travel separately, to meet at some fixed point? The Clades are bound to pick up some party, and work on it as they're doing on Toni, so we gain nothing by the switch."

"Anyway," said Dick, speaking unwillingly, as usual, but having something he felt had to be said, "hiding isn't merely impracticable. In the long run it's impossible. We can't live decently without crops. It's all very well for you, Pertwee, to go on a journey and live off the land, but a whole settlement can't live as you did."

Rog said very little. He was ready to take the lead when there was a lead to be taken, but obviously, so far, there was none. With every word that was spoken it became clearer that Mundis, defenseless and peaceful, could not hope to stand against half a dozen armed Clades, let alone the whole huge ship and its complement, backed by a probable colony on Secundis.

What was wanted, obviously, was a miracle. It didn't seem as if anything less would do any good.

4

Phyllis handed an envelope to Captain Wyness, saluted, and went straight to the gymnasium. Toni was there, held by two men, but she pretended not to see Phyllis.

It was this gymnasium that had made it possible for children born in free fall to develop the muscles they would need for the one-and-three-quarter G pull of Secundis. Dr. Heneker, back on Earth, had worked out the schedule of exercises that strengthened young internal organs and built up tough, wiry muscles to withstand the gravity they had never experienced. And for the most part the exercises, grimly enforced, had been a brilliant success. The only children who died on the arrival at Secundis were some between three months and four years old. Younger, they were still able to adapt; older, their internal organs had been built into the pattern one-and-three-quarter G demanded.

Phyllis glanced at the bender, which she had already decided was going to be the sole instrument for this session, and wished she could tell Toni proudly that she herself had had ten hours a week in a machine like that for eleven years. Toni was going to scream and be sorry for herself. But Toni was making her first acquaintance with the bender at twenty, fully developed, well-fed and healthy, watched over by an operator who would be very careful that she wouldn't be seriously harmed. Phyllis had been put into the bender when she was three, a thin, frightened, hungry child, by someone who didn't care whether she lived or died.

"I could explain this," said' Phyllis briefly, "but it's easier to demonstrate. Oh, by the way, where's Lemon?"

Pertwee hadn't been mentioned since he escaped. The fact that he had really escaped, when he had only been meant to think he had, would have been enough to depose Commodore Corey if he hadn't been able to blame it on the second lieutenants with the three tracking parties. Eleven men had died -- it was the first indication that a Mundan, on Mundis, might in certain circumstances be dangerous.

But though Pertwee was ignored as if he had never existed, and Toni's questions about him were not even acknowledged, she must, Phyllis realized, have been able to work out that he was either dead or had escaped. That unvarying question at every session, for example, was a tacit admission that the Clades had no other possible source of information.

Toni didn't answer. Toni remained a puzzle to Phyllis. She had said and done so little since she came aboard the Clades that Phyllis couldn't begin to understand her. But there were two things she liked about the Mundan girl. One was her courage. It wasn't the stoic, silent variety of the Clades. Toni would scream and plead. But she didn't give in. By this time, Phyllis calculated, a Clade male would have. The other thing was her beauty. Phyllis couldn't talk about that to anyone. To admire beauty was soft, and almost an invitation to be grounded. Nevertheless, Phyllis liked the look of Toni, and had once even wondered, deep in the recesses of her calculating brain, how she looked to Toni.

"Lift her," said Phyllis.

The two men lifted Toni into the bender. One clamp was fastened about her shoulders and neck. The other fitted over her feet and ankles and calves. Toni was puzzled. The clamps were padded, as if the purpose were not to hurt, for a change.

Phyllis operated controls. A motor hummed. Toni, held gently but firmly by the shoulders and back, and by the feet, was slowly bent first into an L, then as if sitting in a chair and then with her knees pushed hard into her chest. To drive the lesson home she was then telescoped brutally once or twice. She couldn't help crying out.

"You see?" said Phyllis, straightening her out again. "You can resist the pressure or not, as you like. It's resistible, and if you resist it isn't so bad." She threw the switch again.

Not since she was five had the machine been able to bend Phyllis more than once each session. It was adjusted to the observed, calculated strength of the person in it. For Toni, though she didn't know it, Phyllis set the controls normally, honestly. It was no worse for Toni than for every Clade, male and female, born in space. But it had occurred to Phyllis that it was quite a reasonable persuader.

Once there had been scores of benders on the ship; now there was only one, retained for routine exercise. Phyllis half closed her eyes and saw herself at six, at ten, being fastened roughly in the machine and left for her hour or two hours. She had never murmured, and already Toni was whimpering. They just didn't understand, these Mundans.

The third time Toni braced the right muscles and found she could hold the machine. A hard wall of muscle split her stomach and diaphragm. She saw it quivering, lost confidence in her own effort, and the bender folded her up painfully again.

The fourth time she held it. For five minutes, ten minutes . . . She gasped and collapsed again.

She had just tensed herself once more in the way the machine was designed to make her hold herself, when there was an interruption. Captain Wyness himself entered and signaled to Phyllis.

She considered briefly. Clades were left in the bender for long periods. Once, as revenge for some real or imagined slight, Phyllis had been left in it for seven hours. But Toni was no Clade, just a prisoner.

So Phyllis switched off the machine and told the guards to take her away.

When she was gone Wyness looked at Phyllis intently. "This is a very serious charge, Lieutenant," he said, nodding at the note in his hand.

"Have you checked it, sir?"

"No. I just want to contirm that you want me to."

Phyllis was silent.

"You realize said Wyness, "that if the recording exists, the consequences will be very serious for you?"

He meant, principally, that Corey would take it out of her hide, as he was entitled to do. It was far beyond the captain's duty to tell her so, and give her a chance to retract. Phyllis made two mental notes on different sides of the slate -- one, Wyness was quite capable of elaborating on his duty and of sentimental weakness and must be carefully watched; two, Wyness was a decent fellow and might perhaps be trusted to a certain extent. The double attitude was necessary.

"I mean it, sir," she said. "After all, if I'm right, you can imagine circumstances, I'm sure, in which this sort of thing would be very dangerous for any officer."

Her reply, too, was ambivalent. If anyone was listening there was nothing to which exception could be taken. But the unusual warmth of her tone showed she understood Wyness's warning, and appreciated it.

The investigation, made in the next few minutes, showed, as she alleged, that she had made a suggestion to Sloan, had it recorded, and been recommended to take it to the commodore; that there was a recording made in the cabin of the commodore beginning "Suggestion by Lieutenant Phyllis Barton re interrogation" and ending on the question "Confirmed?"

When the commodore saw Captain Wyness and Sloan and Phyllis he knew what must have happened. Somehow Phyllis had trapped him over the recording. The calculation took a split second.

"Ah, Lieutenant Barton," he said smoothly. I was just going to send for you. There was a misunderstanding. I don't think the recording you requested was actually made -- "

It didn't save him from the bald, damning statement in the log; it made no difference to the actual verdict in the case and it didn't enable him to take any action, even indirect, against Phyllis in revenge.

But it did, probably, save his position for the moment. It left him dangling by a thread, but it left him Commodore Corey -- until the faintest shadow of discredit or failure should fall on him, and Corey would be less than the youngest spaceman on board.

It also left him with a raging hatred for Phyllis Barton, and the knowledge that if he allowed himself to vent it in any way she would use it to topple him finally.

VII

1

This is the last Council meeting," said Rog.

There were gasps, murmurs; there was even a muffled shriek from the back. No one thought for an instant he was joking. Rog could be forceful, he could be determined. He was all these and more at this meeting.

"/We are just about to surrender to the Clades/," Rog remarked.

"Shut up!" he roared as the storm burst. "I don't want that any more than you do. But no one has produced an alternative."

More calmly, quietly, he explained. It was impossible to hide from the Clades, if they persisted with the search. There were no caves on Mundis; any community was out in the open, more or less visible. One could camouflage dwellings, but not fields of crops, and while the Mundans might live somewhere else for some time without crops, it couldn't last. Now or next month or next year the Clades would find them, whether they were in the open waiting to be found or trying to hide.

Some of the older people looked at Pertwee, hoping he would have something different to say. He merely said: "That's perfectly true, and sat down again. As a politician, Pertwee had always been colorless. He only used rhetoric when he steeled himself deliberately to do so, and he always found it much easier to tell the truth and the whole truth than anything else.

Bentley nodded too; for the people there who followed their leaders there was no sanctuary. No one who mattered was going to give them comfort.

Henry Boyne stood up and said frenetically that God would not permit this, and that the forces of evil, if evil indeed the Clades were, would never be allowed to triumph, and the answer, the whole answer, was prayer.

"Let us return to God," he said. "Let us open up our hearts and admit we have erred and ask forgiveness. Let us . . . "

Jessie Bendall was a Christian. As well as being the President she preached at the service on Sunday, and when she could, tried to spread the Christian faith on the somewhat barren ground of the young Mundans. When Boyne's voice worked up into the whine of the fanatic, Jessie Bendall echoed Rog Foley and said:

"Shut up."

"It's impossible to withstand the Clades when they do find us," said Rog. "The only possibility is some kind of working agreement. Frankly, from what Pertwee has told us I don't think there can be any agreement. I think the Clades might respect us and deal honestly and fairly with us if we were strong. But, being weak, we can only be swept into their train, to become good Clades."

"That," said Pertwee, "is precisely how I see it."

"We've said all this before," Alice pointed out impatiently.

"And we must go on saying it," said Rog, "until everyone understands it."

Alice was puzzled. Then she saw it. All the young people saw it. It was easy enough for them.

Bentley saw it too. "If you think we are going to have atomic power to use in fighting off the Clades," he said bluntly, "you're wrong."

"Let's split that into two parts," said Rog. "You mean it would be impossible even if you worked towards that end?"

"Yes."

"All right, let's consider the other part. Would you do it if it weren't impossible?"

"No."

"Then maybe if we can change the answer to the second you might be able to change the answer to the first."

There was no noise now. Atomic power might have been kept secret in the community, like birth control. The young people might never have heard about it. Instead they had heard about it only in a prohibition. It had always been a dangerous thing to talk about. There was a feeling of danger in the words: /atomic power, radio-active, nucler fission/ . . .

Other words were never used. The list of elements stopped at eighty-eight. Stopping at bismuth, eighty-three, had been considered, but the eventual decision had been to stop at radium, which was the last element in the preliminary survey made with the instruments of the Mundis. It was there; one might as well admit its existence. The other radioactive elements beyond it, now; they were no doubt there, but that first and only survey hadn't revealed them. Therefore, very likely, they would remain undiscovered for centuries.

"We haven't centuries for progress now," said Rog quietly. "We have a few hours or a few days."

"Then it isn't worth considering," said Bentley. "It doesn't matter whether I'd change my mind if it were possible -- "

"I'd do it," said Pertwee. I've seen the Clades."

"Did you hear about Corey's taunt?" said Rog, knowing they had. "You were all conditioned against atomic power."

"So?" said Bentley angrily -- Bentley who was never angry. "Wasn't it right that we were? We agree -- "

"With the compulsion. You say you'd do it anyway. It says somewhere in those microfilm records that if you hypnotize a man and command him to stand on his head, he'll insist he /likes/ standing on his head. He'll tell you he's standing on his head of his own free will."

Rog was no psychologist. He didn't know what to do with compulsions except batter at them. Pertwee was on his feet now, trying to explain something. The founder colonists were whispering, protesting, interrupting, looking angry; the young people only looked bewildered. They hadn't been conditioned. They had only been told: "Don't do it," and as they hadn't wanted to do it, hadn't been able to do it, and hadn't, for the most part, had the fainteat idea of what it was they were not to do, this had hardly registered at all.

But it was clear the old people were fighting with something deep in them. They wanted to live. They wanted to withstand the slavery that the Clades might bring. But they also /knew/ that they must have nothing to do with atomic power.

Rog let them stew for a long time. It was surprising, almost frightening, to see even Mary Bentley frowning, grim, puzzled, angry, and not really knowing why. Then Rog took over again. Conditioning could only work by involving the emotions rather than reason. Therefore one could try to break it down by involving the emotions again.

"Pertwee has changed his mind on this," he said. "Why? Because Toni means something to him, and he's seen the Clades torturing her. When you see someone you love being tortured, are you sure you'll say: 'Yes, better this than atomic warfare again'? Bentley, picture the scene when Commodore Corey decides to hang Mary -- "

"For Christ's sake!" exclaimed Bentley, his face white.

"With twenty others, as a gesture. To show us we'd better behave. To make it clear who's boss. Will you tell yourself: 'Thank God I didn't do anything that might have stopped this' ?"

"You're a devil, Rog!" screamed Alice, as Bentley swayed and put his hands to his head.

"Brad," Rog shouted, "you look as calm as ever. Suppose they took Fanny away and made her work in the fields. Suppose each time you saw her she coughed a little more, and you knew -- "

For the only time in Mundan history they saw Brad Hulton angry. "Flay someone else, you little snipe," he growled. "I never knew anything about atomic power."

"Albert," said Rog. "Albert Cursiter. Toni's your daughter. You -- "

"Yes," said Albert eagerly. "I'm with Pertwee. But as Brad says, we don't know anything. Only Jim Bentley -- "

Rog turned back to Bentley. "Well?" he demanded. "Are you sticking to the compulsion?"

Bentley looked as if he had been beaten up. His face was pale and tired and old -- and Bentley seldom looked old. "I need time," he pleaded. "I must think . . . "

"There's no time," said Rog brutally. "This very meeting may be interrupted by the Clades. And you've had thirty-eight years to think."

He lashed himself to a frenzy of which he was rather ashamed. He hoped, as he began to speak, that June wasn't watching him, but knew she must be. She was just behind him.

"This refusal to have anything to do with atomics is a very old madness," he taunted. "It's the decision not to do anything, so that you can't fail. It's the provision of an excuse in advance, so that you can say you didn't try, you didn't know, it wasn't your fault, it had nothing to do with you, you couldn't help it. Look at your excuses!

"It's too late. There isn't enough time. Better not do anything, because it's impossible, you're bound to fail, it isn't worth starting. Is that what you say when someone comes at you with a knife? Too late to do anything, it'll only stop him making a clean job of it, and it'll hurt more. It isn't fair to ask you to fight a man who has a knife with your bare hands, so you won't fight. You won't have anything to do with such an unfair struggle, you'll just resign yourself and let him cut your throat. You won't start anything in which you'll show up so badly."

He went on and on, repeating himself, ramming the same things home, taking angrily, violently, and making everyone else angry too. Then at the first signs of nervous exhaustion, of inability to take any more, he said more quietly:

"Any attempt to hide things once discovered is an effort to turn the clock back, to pervert the past, to say it never happened.

"But you can't turn the clock back. Why do you try? Because you're afraid. You've been made afraid. Why are you trying now? They could only have conditioned you against atomics, back on Earth, by mixing atomics up with the group instinct, so that for your group, your children, your race to survive there must be no meddling with nuclear fission . . . "

He knew from the reaction to that that he was on the right track. He kept watching Bentley, for he was the one who counted.

Finally Bentley rose in the middle of one of Rog's persuasive sentences. Rog stopped dead. There was sudden, complete silence.

"Well, why not?" asked Bentley, in a normal, quizzical tone. But Rog watched him more closely than ever. Bentley was sane, but his compulsion wasn't, Rog mistrusted it. This was like the early surrender that covered the last stand. "We won't accomplish anything, of course. If we had an atomic engine, just one, we might -- "

Suddenly Dick was on his feet. Rog moved to him, intuitively. Dick needed support when it came to speaking in public.

"There never was enough metal," said Dick very distinctly.

Bentley half turned, but wouldn't quite look at him.

"There was a lot, and I've seen most of it," said Dick quickly. "The engines were never accounted for. There was never anything that might have been part of an atomic engine, if such a thing is as much as three feet long. I've looked. I looked for any clue -- "

"Those things we helped you to bury!" Pertwee shouted. "Come on, Rog, I'll show you where they are!"

"No need," said Bentley. He sighed and yawned suddenly. He seemed relieved; tired but somehow lighter. "I'll show you. They're on the other side of New Paris. We were never supposed to destroy them, you know. It was known we might need them some day."

In an old Terran phrase, Rog, looking for a pin, had found a guinea.

2

Toni knew she was just about to break. It was a question, now, of lasting from session to session. Every morning, every afternoon, every evening they worked on her. All the sessions were handled by Phyllis Barton; it was a full-time job for her, apparently.

It was seldom brutal, the interrogation. It was rather on the principle of the drop of water on the prisoner's forehead, nothing at first, then an irritation, then a ceaseless, tormenting hammering on his skull.

Toni's healthy body stubbornly persisted in recovering from the various outrages on it. She was seldom prostrate for more than an hour after Phyllis had left her.

The only way Toni found it possible to keep the secret was to live from hour to hour. When she opened her eyes in the morning she looked no further than the moment when she would see Phyllis. She could he content till then, because nothing was happening to her. She could even enjoy breakfast and the morning air when she was taken out for exercise and the thought that the whole mighty ship was chained here, with all its crew, because she had managed to stay silent

Then Phyllis would come or she would he tiken to her. Toni bore it by telling herself that in two hours at the most it would be over -- the prospect of mere absence of pain was rosier than anticipation of the pleasantest things had been in the past.

The respite would come, and as quickly go. Time ran at two speeds for Toni these days.

After the second session the day began to look brighter. For there was only one more period of pain and fear, and then fourteen hours of peace.

But the day, so far, was only starting for Toni. She had been wakened, and had had breakfast -- it was time for someone to take her out for the morning's exercise. The door rattled.

It was Phyllis Barton. Toni had to make a terrific effort not to break down. On such things as this her brief contentment lived and died these days. She had expected at least an hour of comparative freedom. And instead, Phyllis came early.

But Phyllis was smiling. "Not today, Toni," she said gently. "You can tell me where Lemon is if you like. But if you don't, nothing will happen to you. Not today."

Toni was silent, guarded. She had met tricks like this before. One session had consisted almost entirely of false stops, heartbreaking in their disappointment.

"In fact," said Phyllis, "I'm taking you out for a walk, where you can reaily know no one is listening."

"Except you."

"Of course. But is the companion who's actually there so terrible? Isn't it the knowledge that someone else is listening, all the time, someone you can't see?"

Toni was even more puzzled. Of course it was. She would talk with anyone, even Phyllis, more freely away from this vast prison of a ship where every whisper might be overheard. She wanted to talk, even with Phyllis.

But she wasn't going to talk about the location of Lemon.

Phyllis threw something on the bed. Toni looked, then stared. She had been wearing out what clothes she had with her, and for the rest Clade trunks and shirts she had been given -- menial women's clothes, but new and clean. The cuffed shorts and half blouse Phyllis threw down, however, were brand new, cut delicately in a beautiful cloth she had never seen -- blue and shiny and soft, except where it was stiffened, and curiously cool to the touch.

It could hardly he more obvious that the Clades, Phyllis in particular, were belatedly trying to please her, win her over. Could they possibly hope to succeed?

"No," said Phyllis, guessing at the question in Toni's mind, "but -- shall we go out?"

Toni put on the new clothes. There were also open-toed sandals; the feel of the whole outfit was wonderful, light, cool and delicate. This she preferred to torture, any day. She was not merely willing, but eager to play along with this sort of treatment. If Phyllis wanted her to talk, she would talk -- about anything but where Lemon was.

They went along the plain steel corridors that Toni now felt she knew almost as well as a Clade. They saw no one. Phyllis operated the lock, and they jumped lightly to the ground. The ship was silent and still. Outside, it was morning, and if it was the silent, prosaic morning of Mundis at least it was open and free and bracing.

"On Secundis," Phyllis remarked, "the morning is much grander than this. In fact, it can be frightening. You'll see."

It was the first admission of this that had been made to Toni. So the Clades came from Secundis, that bright, glorious world . . . Toni felt rather sorry. Secundis was such a beautiful sight in the night sky, she hated to think of the Clades living there.

Phyllis was leading the way, but when Toni veered slightly she said nothing, but followed. Toni had wondered if she was being led to a spot that looked deserted, but where every word she said could be heard, as usual. They were nearly a mile from the Clades now, there was no sign of life anywhere, and Phyllis was letting her go where she liked -- they couldn't have scores of square miles wired, surely?

"Just a minute," said Phyllis. They had come to a large, flat stone. She took off her tunic and folded it neatly. Her slacks, her shirt. Underneath she wore a replica of Toni's clothes, but in canary yellow. Toni stared again. Phyllis stretched herself luxuriously, and to Toni's amazement kicked out one long leg after the other with sheer pleasure.

"It feels wonderful," she said, echoing Toni's own thought. "You might have no clothes on at all and yet, it feels better than having no clothes on."

She caressed the sheer yellow material that covered her hip. Toni had to keep reminding herself that this was Lieutenant Phyllis Barton, Clade, torturer. She looked like a particularly attractive Mundan.

"Let's walk," said Phyllis. She seemed glad to get away from her uniform. "Had to wear that till we were clear. Someone would have thrown a fit."

Without warning she turned a somersault on the grass. This is very clever, Toni told herself coldly, and it's very well done. Just in a moment, or perhaps quite a while from now, after we've talked for a long time about other things, a casual, innocent-looking question will be thrown in, and if I'm not going to answer it, I have to decide one thing now -- I don't know where Lemon is, and I couldn't find it if I tried.

"Before you decide you're mad," said PhyLlis cheerfully, "I'd better tell you what this is all about. But first, I want to be sure no one can hear us."

That put Toni on her guard again, as if that was necessary. "Even the strongest amplifier," said Phyllis, "can hardly hear us over a mile away, with this swirling air breaking up sound and rustling the grass and bushes. I know -- I've tried it, at exercise time. And there can hardly be a mike in every bush -- anyway, we haven't that much wire aboard."

If she could only knock Phyllis unconscious somehow, Toni thought, she would have quite a good chance of getting away. Might as well say if she could fly. She had quite often managed to hit Phyllis, and Phyllis had never admitted noticing it.

"Listen," said Phyllis. "For the first time, I'm fully in charge of what's done with you. I'm not apologizing -- I'm only saying that up to now I've been under orders."

Very likely, thought Toni. Is that supposed to make me love you for what you've been doing?

"I'd better tell you how the change came about," Phyllis went on, and described events having to do with Corey and a recording that were largely incomprehensible to Toni. "The result is," Phyllis concluded gleefully, "that Corey is all but out on his ear, and I can handle you as I like."

"What differance does that make to me?" asked Toni carefully.

Phyllis waved her arm. "Well, this, for a start. I'm not going to lie to you, Toni. I have to get the location of Lemon from you. That's my job, and even if I didn't have to do it, I'd want to do it."

"Why?"

"Because there are Mundans and Clades, and, for me, the Clades have to be top dogs."

"I wish," said Toni, "I could take you, alone, to Lemon and let you see how we live, what it's like, how we get on with each other. Then we could find out whether you'd still want the Clades to be top dogs."

"I still would. I look after myself, Toni. That's why I rank about eighth among all Clades, at twenty-four, though I'm a woman. That and the fact that I can work things out, and . . . "

"I wish you could meet Rog," said Toni.

"Rog?"

"I was married to him once. Before John, He's like you -- Rog, I mean. Confident, calculating, a little cold by the standards of ordinary people like me . . . "

She stopped, suddenly terrified. From the way Phyllis started she thought for a moment she had given something away.

"What did you just say?" Phyllis asked.

"By the standards of ordinary people like me."

"Yes," said Phyllis wonderingiy. "You mean it. I'm just trying to understand what kind of community you have, that's all. We don't dare say we're ordinary. That somebody else is, sure." More briskly, she demanded: "Are you told to say that?"

"What?"

"That you're ordinary."

"But I am ordinary."

"Are you told to say it?" repeated Phyllis, a little impatiently.

"By whom?"

"Your officers, your leaders."

"We haven't any officers. Or leaders, in the way you mean."

"Then you aren't told to say it," mused Phyllis. "Do you really believe you're ordinary?"

Toni flushed slightly. "Well, I'm pretty. More than average."

"And you're proud of that?"

"Of course. Aren't you?"

"You mean I am, too?"

Toni was beginning to enjoy this. For one thing, Phyllis was a human beisg after all. Pretense could only go so far. People acting a part were only acting so much. A naturally silent man could only act a talker for so long. And Phyllis /felt/ right. Toni hadn't forgotten that Phyllis had tortured her. She would never forget it. But she could get on with her -- she was getting on with her. They were in communication at last, sharing ideas, admitting beliefs.

For another thing, Toni was beginning to realize that she understood Phyllis better than Phyllis understood her. She had seen something of the Clades, after all, and one could just see how people might get like that.

Phyllis hadn't seen Lemon, and couldn't understand how people might get like the Mundans. So as they talked, Toni had the confidence of knowing she was really more in control of the situation than Phyllis was.

She had left Phyllis waiting, wondering if she was pretty.

"Among your people," said Toni shrewdly, "that doesn't matter, does it?"

"Matter?" repeated Phyllis, with a rather hard laugh. "We pretend beauty doesn't exist. Because beauty is weakness."

"Rubbish," retorted Toni.

"I know. I know that because you're beautiful -- I don't think there's any real doubt of that, however little we know of beauty. But you're not weak. Not really."

Toni know the compliment really meant something, because it came from a Clade.

"Beauty is . . . " Toni shrugged. "A gift from God, but you Clades won't have anything to do with God, will you?"

Christinity was not entirely dead among the Clades, not completely stamped out. Remnants of it existed among the women. It didn't matter what they believed.

"If you say you know there's a God," said Phyllis slowly, "I'll believe you."

Toni smiled. "Not exactly. But if you said you knew there wasn't, I wouldn't."

There was a long silence. They were still walking, and it was still away from the ship. Presently however, Phyllis jumped on a stone and waved, regularly yet with intervals Toni couldn't have matched without practice.

Phyllis jumped down again. "They're watching us," she admitted. "If I didn't do that they'd come out for us. Toni, I want to take up what we've been saying, but I don't dare stay out here with you too long at one time. Is that frank enough for you?"

"Why not?"

"Nobody is trusted too much among us. Yes, I'm trusted with you -- I could kill you, which would be a death penalty offense, or let you kill yourself, which would come to the same thing, or contrive your escape -- it wouldn't he easy, but I could do it. I'm trusted not to do these things, but if you still hate me you can ask to speak to Corey and tell him all I've said to you and I'll be shot. You believe that?"

Toni decided to answer that frankly. Phyllis was telling her a lot -- undoubtedly, Toni thought, more than she was supposed to tell her. The situation was becoming complicated. Toni had only once before wished she was cleverer than she was. That was when she had been trying to win back Rog.

"Not quite," she said, with a grin. "Most of it, yes. But I don't think you'd leave yourself without a loophole."

Phyllis frowned, then laughed. "Right," she said. "Exactly right. You're cleverer than I thought. Anyway, there will be plenty of time for talk, but not much more just now. And I want to tell you a few things yet."

She paused. "Can I trust you?" she asked bluntly.

On the face of it, that was a stupid question. "What does that mean?" Toni asked guardedly.

"I'm going to say some things that aren't covered by the loophole I've left. My only safeguard is your promise to trust me rather than Corey and the others."

Toni had nothing to lose. She said: "I trust you and I promise."

"Thhey may make promises and tell you lies," Phyllis warned, "Oh well, you have enough sense to know that half an ally is better . . . than no ally at all. I told you I still meant to get your secret out of you. I do. I will. But I'm not going to torture you, since I have the choice now -- not with physical pain, anyway. I'm not going to let you sleep until you tell, that's all."

After what had been Toni's life for weeks now, this seemed like the end of her troubles. Phyllis saw her expression and added:

"I don't want you saying I didn't warn you, or you didn't understand. That's more certain than torture -- if it had been that from the start you'd have told us by now. When I say no sleep, I mean it. You'll be kept awake twenty-four hours of the day. Is that clear?"

It was clear. Toni's face sobered. She had never gone long without sleep. No one did -- there was no reason for anyone to do so on Mundis. But she guessed Phyllis was right, and that it was certain. How long could she last?

"Now we must go back," said Phyllis with real regret. She had been leading the way back to the flat stone where she had left her clothes. She put them on, and Toni's spirits sank as the nymph in play clothes became the grim Clade again. She could not believe that Phyllis had talked as she had.

From her black frown as they made their way back to the Clades, apparently neither could Phyllis.

3

Three of the founder colonists committed suicide that night. One cut his veins, one hanged himself, and the third shot himself with one of the old guns.

However, they were three of the weakest, least valuable people in the community. That was a callous view, but it was the kind of view everyone was taking about everything just at the moment. They were men who couldn't face the idea that a compulsion which still remained in their minds would have to be battered down.

Only guesses could be made new about the purpose of the compulsion. In general it was clear enough -- the crew of the Mundis had been meant to make sure the planet was habitable, get over all the early hurdles, and then dismantle the ship. The atomic engines were not to be used, for radioactivity, which had been the end of Earth, was not to be the end of Mundis too. Yet they were not to be destroyed, for they might easily become necessary again.

Perhaps the compulsion, the conditioning, the post-hypnotic suggestion, whatever it was -- perhaps it had been too strong, or had grown like a cancer in the mind. For even when the founders needed the atomic engines again, they could not admit that the engines were safe, carefully buried in a hillside, and could be dug out in a few hours.

Or perhaps the compulsion had concerned itself entirely with the use of atomic power for offense. The colonists might have been commanded never to resurrect the engines unless it was necessary to leave Mundis and seek another planet.

In any case, now that they had them there was something that might be done, however wild and hopeless.

"I don't think there can be much argument," Rog said. "We evacuate Lemon, of course, and get as far away as we can in a short time. If the Clades find us on the way, it's too bad -- we can't do anything about that. When we're well clear of here we dig in and somehow build defenses."

Some of the Mundans didn't go to bed that night. They were on the hillside, digging. Others took over from them as soon as it was light. Soon after dawn all twenty-four engines were lying out in the open.

Rog had been sticking close to Bentley. Bentley was a very important man now, the only one among them who really understood these engines. Slowly, gradually, Bentley was becoming his usual self again.

He stood with Rog in the early-morning light and surveyed the machines. There was hardly anything to see; they were covered in completely so that they were nothing but big black boxes, seven feet long, five feet breod, four feet high.

"Is this all?" he asked. "Get the digging started again, Rog."

"More engines?"

"No, these are the engines, but as they are they're no use to us. There must be cables and transformers there. The power these things generate is so vast and raw that it's never used direct."

He wasn't going to say more, for Rog didn't pretend to be a technician. But Dick joined them then, and for the first time Bentley began to give information on this subject instead of blocking it.

"If the shielding in that casing had been developed twenty years earlier," he observed, "Earth might have had its cake and eaten it too. That shielding might have made it possible for us to use atomic power as we liked, safely. It's a sort of blotting paper for gamma-rays and neutrons -- about equivalent to ten feet of lead and quite a few fathoms of water. But probably it wouldn't have made any difference. It wasn't that radioactivity couldn't be shielded, but -- "

"Cables and transformers, you said?" Rog interrupted. He stepped forward and spoke to Brad, who was directing operations.

Pertwee had been traveling almost night and day, and he slept for eighteen hours. By the time he got up, Lemon was almost on the point of evacuation. An amazing amount of work had been done.

He marveled. The old people, who had had to leave practically all their possessions behind once before, were going round and pointing out to the young Mundans that they couldn't possibly take /that/. An advance party, he was told, had already gone on. In the square, Bentley and Dick and Brad and Fred and everyone else who had the slightest ability as a craftsman of any kind were working. . . .

Pertwee hurried to Rog, who was watching the work in the square.

"I don't want to see any more," he said. "I'm going away so that I won't."

Rog turned an inquiring gaze on him and waited.

"I'm not coming with you," said Pertwee. "Toni's with the Clades. I had to come back and warn you, but now that I have I'm going to wait for them and let them take me again."

"That probably won't do Toni any good,". said Rog~

"Perhaps not."

"But you're doing it just the same?"

"I can't see anything else I can do, or want to do. Besides, we're working on the basis that the Clades will find this place, and soon. Unless someone stays behind and throws them off the scent, they may find you the next day."

"We're going to . . . " began Rog.

"Don't tell me anything. What I don't know they can't get from me. I don't see what you can hope to do, and I'm not going to ask."

"Bentley!" Rog shouted.

Bentley looked up, said something to Dick, and came across to them. "Well?" he said.

"Pertwee's waiting to let the Clades recapture him," said Rog. "What should he tell them?"

"I thought perhaps you might, John," said Bentley quietly. "It's what I'd do if it were Mary. In fact, I've even thought out what seems to be the best answer to that question. Remember when we were approaching this system, decelerating, twenty-odd years ago. Remember the dead world?"

Pertwee nodded.

"Tell them we've gone there. Explain it how you like. But convince them somehow there's no urgency -- you said they thought that anyway. Get them to go to -- what did we call it?"

"Outpost."

"That's it. Take them out there, delay them as long as you can -- then, when you can't delay them any more, let them come looking for us."

"How long do you want?"

"As long as we can get."

"But what, as a minimum, do you absolutely have to have?"

Bentley considered.

"We might do something in two months."

"Two months! Then there's a chance!"

"Oh, yes. If you can get them to go to Outpost."

"I'll try." Pertwee put out his hand.

He didn't protract his farewells. Mary, Brad, Jessie, Kate, Frank, Ruby -- these were all who mattered. Ruby mattered most, and he had least qualms about leaving her. She didn't say anything -- she was never very communicative -- but he felt that at the parting they had reckoned up and settled everything between them. Ruby was young to be responsible, but she had taken responsibility under Rog Foley. She was going to take her part in building the new Lemon.

He went east; not far, for he was only leaving Lemon so that he wouldn't see what happened there. He waited a day, two days.

When he returned there wasn't a living soul in the valley, and most of the houses had been destroyed.

IX

1

Every morning, now, Phyllis took Toni out in the open, well clear of the ship, and talked with her in complete freedom. Always, to increase the illusion, Phyllis wore Mundan clothes. It worked as it was probably meant to work -- Toni had so thoroughly identified the grim, cold Lieutenant Barton with the uniform she wore that Phyllis in a ket or cuffed shorts was accepted easily as another person.

Every day Toni's eyes smarted more and she was stiffer. Fatigue got into her bones and into her very blood. Time moved jerkily; it would glide along rapidly, imperceptibly, and then draw up with a crash and a jar. Thinking of the last time she was in bed was like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Behind her stretched the morning and the long, silent night with three guards sitting up with her, making certain she didn't doze even for a moment. Behind that the day, always a slightly less tired day than this one, and before that the morning and another long, silent night. And so back to the time when she was being tortured, but could have spent fifteen hours a day sleeping if she wished.

Sometimes it was hard to talk, but for the most part she made the effort. It was more pleasant, if possible, to keep herself interested and awake than to succumb and be jarred into wakefulness.

And she had learned a lot of interesting things about the Clades. There were a lot of things she knew now and wished she could tell the Mundans.

The Mundis had been supposed to he the last interstellar ship that could leave Earth, and it very nearly was. It was made while Earth's dvilization was still functioning, while communications were good, while one only had to order a piece of equipment and get it. As Phyllis spoke about this she echoed a certain bitter jealousy which must have animated all Clades when they thought of the Mundis.

The Class was built in a collapsing culture -- or rather, after all culture had collapsed. It was built amid violence and ruin and murder and famine. When anyone engaged on its construction refused to obey an order, it was routine to shoot him. Life was dirt cheap on a world that had billions, of whom only a paltry three hundred could be taken on the Cladss. Disappointment was routine too. The flat statement that there wouldn't be any curium had to be overturned somehow, or meant wholesale conversion to the use ef americium or plutonium. Heavy hydrogen was a problem at another time; there just was not, and never would be, any more heavy water. The technicians went back to graphite, which had been used at any earlier stage for the same purpose.

And while atomic power made low-voltage electric power look pretty silly, it could be more than merely infuriating when the electric power cut out altogether and the Clades technicians had to waste a valuable six months making the construction base entirely self-contained.

Yes, the men who built the Clades had a right to sneer at the men who built the Mundis. They did, too, and perhaps that was the real start of what was now to be a war between the two ships and their people.

Phyllis reported all this secondhand, more or less indifferently, merely because Toni expressed interest. She hadn't been concerned in it herself. She had been born in space.

Those who had remained behind on Earth had been in no doubt of what the purpose of this last mighty ship would be. Men knew again that survival mattered before all else. Survival of self, group, nation, race, humanity, animal life. The Clades was sent after the Mundis to make sure. Two chances were better than one.

And two chances woald continue to be better than one.

"This isn't what's taught among us now," observed Phyllis. "It's what" I heard when I was a child. We were supposed to contact the Mundane, that was all. We were to see if you'd succeeded -- if you had settled down, if you were safe. The contact was to be very slight, and only to see if you needed help. Then we were to go on colonizing other worlds, making sure that never again would the destruction of one tiny world threaten the whole race of man."

"But you didn't," said Toni. "Why?"

The Clades didn't because that was only the view of those who stayed behind. For those who went, things had a different aspect. There was no doubt of survival any more. If there were, why, certainly they'd rather the Mundane survived than no one at all. But as it was, the Mundans were only the obvious first item in the Clade list of conquests . . .

"Do you agree with this?" Toni demanded.

Phyllis shook her head impatiently. "You don't understand. If someone says a uniform is magenta, and you know you'll be shot if you say it's anything else -- it's magenta. You don't tell yourself you'll call it magenta, but it's really green. If you do that, some time you'll make a mistake and say it's green."

"Yes, but that doesn't /make/ it magenta."

"It does to a Clade. If he wants to live, that is."

"You mean you /must/ agree to conquer Mundis?"

"Not quite. My agreement isn't called for. Asking for agreement is giving a person a chance to disagree."

Toni thought of saying, but didn't, that from the very way she talked it was clear that Phyllis had never done what she said every Clade must do. She didn't believe the uniform was magenta. She might build up an unshakable response, but her calculations on the subject were based on the fact that it was green. . . .

"Go on," said Toni. "If we were your first conquest, why did you wait all these years?"

The President of the United Nations, when the Clades took off, had been a dictator. He had to be, in the world he lived in. There was no authority but supreme authority.

If a totalitarian system is to work properly, and keep on working, there must be no time when there isn't a leader. It is: "The king is dead: long live the king" There must be no instant when there is no supreme leader.

The Clades left Earth, however, with Commodore Corey in command, but answerable to the President. And Corey didn't become supreme commander until twenty-eight years later, when they /knew/ the President no longer existed.

Meantime the Clades had landed on Secundis and found it habitable. They had built a colony, overhauled the ship, spent twelve years growing stronger and training and preparing. They never went to Mundis, for if they did they would lose a possible future advantage of surprise. As it was, the Mundans couldn't know there had been a second ship, and when the Clades were ready --

"I can take it from there," said Toni. "You do what you're told instead of what seems to be the right thing, and your supreme leader had told you not to interfere with us. Not until you had /another/ leader, who wasn't answerable to anyone, could you change that and act in another way."

"That's it," said'Phyllis.

That was the last day when Toni could really think clearly. After that she was fuzzy all the time. She didn't know how many days it had been. It seemed like months.

The curious thing was that it wasn't really unpleasant. The aches and pains and stiffness had stopped. Apparently her body had learned now to use ordinary rest for recuperation, since it couldn't have sleep. Besides, Toni knew she was soon going to tell them where Lemon was. Soon she would mumble it without knowing what she was doing -- she knew, unfortunately, that it was somewhere to the southwest of where the Clades was grounded, and calculated from what Pertwee had told her about distance that it was about a thousand miles away.

After all, she knew she had done more than anyone would have expected. The Clades were surprised that she still held out -- Phyllis admitted that she had given them all a grudging respect for Mundans. And whatever was happening at Lemon, surely they had had time now to get something worthwhile done. If Pertwee hadn't got through, her efforts had been wasted. If he had, the Mundans had had plenty of time to get out of Lemon, wherever good that would do.

There was a day of which she could remember nothing. They wouldn't have let her sleep, of course, but she must have gone around in a coma. Then a day when she found herself about to tell them where Lemon was, and came more awake than she had been for days with a mighty effort.

When at last it happened, she felt cheated. She was suddenly aware of Phyllis's voice through a mist asking her to repeat something. She hadn't the faintest idea what she had said. She was staring at Phyllis, who was exultant and yet faintly, inexplicably regretful as well.

"Oh, well," said Phyllis, "I think I got it. If you tell how far, I can let you sleep now. Otherwise you'll have to come to the control room."

"What did I say?" Toni demanded dazedly.

"Southwest, a little west."

"All right. A thousand miles," said Toni weakly. The resistance was over. It seemed childish to pretend it wasn't. She collapsed completely and never knew that Phyllis, at the risk of being thought soft, carried her to her bunk and covered her up.

But then Phyllis made all the capitol there was to be made out of reporting the location of Lemon, after all this time. She had done all she could to build up the legend of Toni's courage and devotion to duty (that, of course, was how it was phrased among the Clades), so that when she finally succeeded she would have done what was obviously a very difficult job.

The Clades was in the air at once.

2

Pertwee surveyed the valley of Lemon and felt a certain wry satisfaction about the destruction he had wrought.

When he came back to the village after giving the Mundans time to get clear there had still been a broad, plain track stretching away southwards -- the track of animals, many feet and every wheeled vehicle that could be pressed into service or thrown tugether. But Pertwee, having noted the track, was careful not to follow it. And two days later it would have been difficult to see. Two more days, and it was impossible.

Even the direction, however, had been a lie. Pertwee knew that Rog would not have left with him the responsibility of knowing in which direction they had gone. They hadn't gone due south.

Waiting, Pertwee had burned the fields. The last Mundan-Terran crop had been garnered from them; there was no point in letting the Clades see how easily and successfully wheat and corn and barley could be grown in Mundan soil. They might yet be deceived about Mundis. It didn't look an unduly friendly or desirable planet for Earthmen, and if they could be persuaded to keep that idea, so much the better.

Anxiety grew less, tension relaxed, as the days passed. Pertwee didn't think about what Rog would do. But a little time was clearly necessary even before the Clades came to Lemon and Pertwee tried to win more time, If the Clades had come while the track was still visible, of course, the whole effort would have been wasted.

There was quite a lot to do, at first. He burned the houses too, those that would burn. Not many of them would, for fire was such a constant hazard that the basic purpose of a house was rather as a protection against fire than anything else. Pertwee wasn't trying to obliterate Lemon. He merely wanted what remained to give away as little information as possible to the Clades.

As the days went by and there was less to do, the time passed more and more slowly. Pertwee began to fear that the Clades had found the Mundans without coming near Lemon. Perhaps, by supreme had luck, Rog had led his people right into the Clades' hands.

But one day he heard the sound of atomic engines and looked up. The Clades was coming over the hill. It came straight to Lemon, confidently.

Pertwee wore nothing but his shorts and sandals. He was living on a small store of food and water cached in one of the ruined houses. He stood out in the open and waited.

He had thought as little as he could about Toni since he saw her last, but he allowed himself to think about her now. Though he had known it was inevitable that she would break down in the end, he still felt unreasonably disappointed that she had. Just a short while ago, hours or minutes, she had told the Clades where Lemon was, knowing what the Clades were, knowing what they would do to the Mundans . . .

And with this, but quite separate, were fear and anxiety on Toni's account. Perhaps, having got all they wanted of her, the Clades had killed her. Perhaps she had not spoken until she was near to death. Perhaps she was alive but maimed, disfigured, minus an eye or a leg or an arm.

He didn't like it either way. He didn't want Toni to have surrendered easily; he didn't want her to be crazed or mutilated or dead.

The ship landed neatly and quickly. As before, a squad of men jumped to the ground; as before, Pertwee waited. Within ten minutes he was before Commodore Corey. Sloan was there, Mathers and Phyllis, As far as the Clades were concerned the situation hadn't changed, to go by their attitude.

"Your people have gone again, I see," said Corey. He tried to keep his voice cold and emotionless, but Pertwee sensed something in it -- the natural anger and frustration, and something else. "It's stupid. We must find them."

"Certainly," Pertwee admitted. "What have you done with Toni?"

"That can wait."

"No, it can't. I have something to say to you, obviously, or I wouldn't have been waiting for you. But I'm not going to say it until I see Toni."

He didn't feel nearly as confident as he sounded. He could feel the sweat forming on his back, and there was something crawling in his guts. He was afraid of torture and he was afraid of death, but showing his fear would weaken his position.

"You are not dictating to me," rapped Corey, Pertwee became interested. Corey was angry and afraid of something, at a guess. If so, the fear was new; there hadn't been the slightest sign of it before.

Pertwee was silent. Sloan coughed. "Sir -- "he began.

"Did I ask for your opinion, captain?" demanded Corey. And as Sloan shrugged, Pertwee guessed a little more. The commodores position was much more precarious than it had been. One could see that, by the way he dared his officers to speak, and yet had to pretend not to see their significant glances among themselves.

"I'm still waiting," said the commodore, turning back to Pertwee.

"So," Pertwee observed, "am I."

Sloan grinned openly. But suddenly Corey realized it wasn't too late to retreat yet, though it would be soon. "You can't see your wife just at the moment," he said in a milder tone. "She's sleeping."

"Forever?" demanded Pertwee bluntly.

"No, she will be perfectly all right after a few hours' sleep. She has merely been kept awake until she told us where Lemon was. Now, your message?"

Pertwee glanced at Phyllis, assuming that Toni had remained principally her charge. To his amazement she smiled faintly,fleetingy, at him.

"I'd like to see her first," he said.

Corey bit back a sharp refusal. He gestured to Phyllis. "Take him to see her," he said impatiently, "and bring him back here at once."

Pertwee hoped Phyllis would say something on the way, something to explain that fleeting, conspiratorial smile. But he didn't expect it, and it didn't happen. She acted like a robot. He wished he had the quick mind of Rog Foley. Rog, he was certain, would have guessed more than he had and would already be making use of what he had deduced.

Phyllis opened a door and for the first time for weeks Pertwee saw Toni. She was sleeping easily, quite unharmed, as far as he could see; again he was glad and sorry, glad she was safe, sorry she had given in so comparatively easily.

The robot unexpectedly came to life again. Phyllis must have seen his frown. "She took about ten times as much as we expected," she said. "When she spoke, she was asleep on her feet."

Pertwee turned to her quickly, but her expression warned him. They went back to the commodore's cabin without another word.

"Now, say what you have to say," said Corey.

Pertwee had been wondering whether to modify his plans in the light of what was going on, but he could see no advantage in doing so. Dissension among the Clades was all to the Mundans' advantage, of course; it was a pity there was no way in which he could aggravate it at the moment.

"You won't find my people," he said definitely. "You can search if you like -- so much the better. When you're satisfied they're no longer on Mundis, I'll tell you where they've gone, if you like."

The commodore frowned. "What nonsense is this?"

"By the time you reach them," Pertwee said calmly, "they'll be ready for you. So it doesn't matter whether you know where they are or not. It would really be better, though, if there /must/ be a demonstration of power, to have it soon."

"You're lying."

Pertwee shrugged. "You don't seem to understand, Corey, how the whole position has changed. When I was with you before, we had to get Word to Lemon somehow, so that you couldn't make a surprise attack. I was worried and afraid. But now the warning has been given. There can't be any surprise. Lemon, as you see, has been evacuated."

"Your people ran away and hid."

"You can put it like that if you wish."

"Where are they, then?"

"If they ran away and hid," said Pertwee patiently, "I'd hardly be telling you right away where they'd gone, would I?"

"Stop sparring with me!" the commodore flared.

Sloan said: "Excuse me, sir -- "

"Is this perhaps an intelligent suggestion?" Pertwee asked, seizing his chance. "You could do with it, Commodore. You're not doing this very well."

To his delight he saw that the rift was too deep for the Clades to join at once against him. If they would let a prisoner's words split them still further, Corey's command must be very precarious, and Sloan's ambition healthy and well-fed.

"When I want you to speak," the commodore told Sloan coldly, "I shall make the fact very clear. At the moment I don't."

Pertwee had been misled before by the reactions of some of the Clades, particularly Corey. They seldom spoke angrily. They couldn't afford to, in a society where one false step could be so dangerous. They had learned to become outwardly cool as the rage within them mounted, to speak slowly and carefully, weighing every word, to fight back viciously against attack or imagined attack but watching the whole situation closely, intently.

Corey turned back from Sloan and said in the same tone: "Where are the Mundans?"

"By this time," said Pertwee, "they must be on the third planet."

Corey's calculated coldness broke for a moment. "There is no third planet," he snapped.

Pertwee sighed. "Indeed there is. We nearly hit it twenty-two years ago, as we were slanting in to Mundis. We called it Outpost, because it's so far out. We couldn't even be sure it was a planet of this sun."

They couldn't be sure because they wasted no time on it, and their calculations were aberrated by lack of data on the movement of all their check points. However, its orbit was so vast and slow, billions of miles from the sun, that in twenty years it couldn't have moved much. It was a world about the size of Mars, cold and dead. Out there the sun of Mundis and Secundis was just another star.

Pertwee ignored all expressions of disbelief, went on with his story calmly, and presently saw with enormous relief that they were believing him. "We called it Outpost," he said, "because that's what it is. It's guarded, manned -- a fort in space, not only strong but also practically invisible. No one would suspect it if he didn't know it was there."

"Then why tell us?" demanded Corey. "Why give away the secret?"

"I've told you. If there must be some demonstration, let's get it over."

"You didn't want it before."

"I didn't want it before we were ready."

"Did you wait here to tell us this -- to put us off the scent?"

"No, I waited beenuse you have Toni."

"Why, if you kept the ship," said Corey shrewdly, "did you never visit Secundis?"

"Because we weren't ready. We would have, eventually. But we were afraid there might be dangerous bacteria there. Outpost is cold and sterile, perfectly safe. Mundis we had to risk, to have a place to live, But visiting Secundis was a risk we weren't ready to take yet."

Later there would be more questions. But he saw they almost believed his story. Corey asked just one more question:

"How strong are the defehses of this Outpost?"

Pertwee laughed. "You don't think my people would have let me stay behind to fall into your hands if I knew that, do you? I've never been to Outpost."

They believed that, too, because they would never, in such circumstances, have left behind a man who had valuable information.

And Pertwee saw, exultantly, that they were going to go to Outpost and the Mundans were going to be granted the time they needed. Corey did actually order a wide sweep round Lemon, and the ship spent some hours looking for the slightest trace of the Mundans, while Pertwee sweated and pretended to be completely indifferent.

However, the Clades was looking for a needle in a haystack, having already decided it wasn't there. After five or six hours no sign of anything alive but plants and trees had been seen, and Corey gave the order that lifted the ship out of the atmosphere of Mundis.

3

First things first, Rog and Bentley had decided, and the first thing was to get well clear of Lemon quickly. Doing so without leaving traces was secondary; they made vehicles that would move, not vehicles that would move without making clear tracks.

There were a lot of nice problems involved. They had twenty-three heavy engines -- one was defective, and Bentley doubted whether it could be repaired in time to affect the issue -- applying practically infinite power, and hardly any means of using it. There were twenty-seven atom-powered units for different purposes. Only six of them might conceivably supply motive power for wagons, without modification. And there certainly wasn't time to make anything that would fly.

So in the end fifty men threw together a giant land raft running on twenty rollers which had been tree trunks. Ten atom engines as ballast gave the clumsy trolley purchase, even on soft ground. Behind it could be drawn another, unpowered raft with twelve more engines -- the remaining one was the one which was in use, supplying hexum for the motors. It was driven on ahead, on a wagon all to itself.

The trek wouldn't have been possible if Mundis hadn't been so flat. Alice had suggested that the grass be burnt ahead of the cavalcade, but Bentley showed how the grass gave purchase to the lumbering rollers. It was tough, ad tougher still when squeezed dry. The rollers up front left a flat, close-knit surface for what followed; and if it was also slippery for smooth rollers dripping with water and chlorophyll, the weight of the clumsy vehicles made up for that.

If the Clades should come up over the horizon, there wasn't the faintest chance of concealment. But that didn't matter, since if the Clades was going to be around at all in the next few days the track left by the convoy was bound to be seen. The chances were much better than they looked. Mundis was all land surface, and there was only one Clades. The convoy might go on for years, with the ship searching for it all the time and never finding a trace of it.

Bentley and Dick and Rog traveled together for the most part, planning.

"Our best chance lies in having a ground base," Bentley said one day as they were being bounced about at the back of the land raft. "The advantage of a ship is its mobility. The disadvantage is its lack of mass. No ship can possibly mount such weapons as can be built on the ground. What are we going to do, concentrate on such weapons immediately we stop?"

"I don't how," said Rog. "What are we going to have to do -- defend or attack?"

Bentley know he didn't want technicalities, but the essence of the possibilities open to them.

"Defense against such weapons is a long business demanding high technical skill and careful research. I think we shall have to concentrate entirely on attack, in the time we are likely to have. Simplify it, if you like, and say defense against atomic power is impossible. That's near enough the truth."

"What are we likely to be able to achieve against the Clades?"

"Anything up to complete destruction, if we have the advantage of surprise. And, of course, time to prepare."

Rog noted how on the purely theoretical question of the destruction of the Clades, Bentley was quite cold and scientific. But he knew that before that became a real possibility, Bentley would become all too human again. He had to allow for that

"Then we must have the advantage of surprise. We must plan for posts surrounding our city -- what are we going to call it, by the way? -- posts miles apart but always manned and connected with the city by -- "

"Telephone or radio," Bentley supplied for him. "As for what we are going to call the city, I think Mary's suggestion is best. She says we're going to build it for freedom, so why not call it that?"

"Freedom," Rog mused. "We'll vote on that when we can. Does what you've been saying mean that we'll have to shoot first and ask questions afterwards?"

"I don't like it. But if we're to have any chance, I don't see any alternative. There never was a real defense against the atom bomb except the various atom rays. That is, strike first. It's like two people tied together by the ankles, armed with knives. The only way to stop the other fellow stabbing you is to stab him first, and you have to be quick about that. That's the horror and hatefulhess ef atomic warfare."

Discussions like that went on every day, for there was little that could be done while they were actually on the move. Bentley had his fits of depression when he realized that he wasn't going to have something he had taken it for granted he would have, but they didn't last, chiefly because Dick couldn't be depressed by a thing like that. He would be so puzzled by Bentley's despair, puzzled and rather shocked, that Bentley would drag himself out of his depression, if only to explain it.

Rog and Alice spent a lot of time talking to everybody, taking note of things it had never been worth while observing before. Soon jobs would have to be allotted to everybody. Too many cooks would spoil the broth -- therefore, not all the cooks were going to be employed in making it.

When Abner Carllss heard the suggestion that the city which they were going to build should be called Freedom he insisted that nothing else was possible.

"Don't you realize what an opportunity it is?" he asked Rog. "Can't you see it? Towns in the past grew like rubbish dumps. People came along and saw there was muck there already and threw some more down beside the first lot. Only after there were a lot of hideous shacks in a ragged line did anyone think about streets and public buildings. Nobody ever planned for any town getting bigger. I've heard all about it and looked it up. And if that wasn't enough, we've seen it happen twice here. New Paris -- another muckheap. Lemon -- "

"Lemon was a good little city," said Alice warmly.

"By the grace of God, since it was strangled before it had a chance to grow up. A few more years and Lemon would have been like all the cities of Earth they tell us about. Streets wide enough for two fat women to pass, no provision for growth, no room to breathe -- but now we've a chance to build a real city."

He spat disgustediy. "I can tell you what will happen. We'll build another Lemon, and for a thousand people it will be quite nice." He made the last two words into the ultimate insult. "But soon Freedom will have five thousand people, and it won't be Freedom any more. It'll be Prison -- narrow, lightless, tumbledown, filthy, cramped -- "

"After all," Alice interrupted, "we have other things on our minds just now than just building a fine city."

"/Just/ building a fine city?" ejaculated Abner. "What more is there? You're going to build a town anyway, aren't you? What in hell's the use of doing it badly? If I were doing it I'd make it so grand and beautiful that the Clades, instead of dropping bombs on it, would gape at the wonder of it."

Rog and Alice took note of all this, Rog more than Alice, it transpired. But there were other things Alice saw and Rog missed. Like the way Ruby Pertwee kept the children together and out of people's way; how Jimmy Doran handled the little wagon which darted on ahead picking a smooth, clear way for the convoy; the way Brad Hulton went about changing a roller on the big raft when it broke and fouled the next.

It was a time when little could be done, yet in that time the whole labor force was organized. Rog, Mary, Alice, Brad, Dick, or Jim Bentley would talk to someone, and when they left him he would be wondering what it would be like to be a driver, a sentry, a bricklayer, a plumber, whatever it was -- but quite prepared to be one and find out.

June was very quiet when Rog talked about Abner. She had known Abner too well, perhaps. They had kicked on the ground together before either of them could walk; Betty Carliss had taught them, together, to read and write; in any game that needed two people, a team, against other pairs, Abner and June were a team. Rog, for the first time, felt a twinge of jealousy. He had given June all he could -- well, almost all -- and shared everything with her, and she worshiped him, and Alice had envied them. Yet she became silent and withdrawn when Abner was mentioned.

He shared everything with her -- but there was something she wouldn't share with him. Perhaps she couldn't. It was too late, it would always be too late, for June and he to know each other as exhaustively as June and Abher knew each other.

Like this, for example. Rog had known Abner all Abner's life, but he had never heard about this dream of Abner's to build a perfect city. June had not only heard about it -- she had helped Abner to make a model township in clay in the early days of Lemon, and heard him boast that some day he would make a real city.

But Rog hadn't much time to think about June as the cavalcade rolled across the flat green plain that was Mundis. He was learning fast what he could leave to others and what he had to do himself. Alice was right, he had wanted power once. Now it was amazing with what feelings of relief he could split a little piece off his mighty responsibility and give it to someone else. He had almost all the power there was, suddenly, somehow. And instead of wanting more, he found he could get by with quite a lot less.

There were the trucks, the smaller carts, the trolleys, driven by the hexum-powered units or the steam engines, or drawn by horses. There were the hundreds of people walking, clinging to the trucks, riding animals, shifting from one to the other so that the convoy could travel at its fastest, not held up by anyone's fatigue. There were the cattle driven along in small groups, the dogs, now perforce allowed their freedom, helping to herd them.

And on Rog all this depended. If there was any problem, it was brought to Rog. For the moment there was no Council -- he was the Council. The old people forgot he was less than half their age, and asked him what they were to do.

Rog had a job on his hands.

4

"We stop here," said Rog. Nobody argued; someone had to guess how far, at the least, they should go. On Mundis most localities were alike. From this spot the usual half-dozen forests were visible, the usual dark green bracken, the usual spurs of rock.

"There's just one question," he went on, as the land rafts ground to a stop. "Do we dig in or build openly from the start?"

He was even more wiry than he had been at the start of the trek. For the first time, Mundans had had to work hard and go hungry. They couldn't take all their crops with them; they hadn't time to mill them. They couldn't bake on the way. It was too dangerous, in a tinder-bed like Mundis, and with no protection for so many people out in the open. A smaller party could have lived on the land, but this party was huge and in a hurry. Many of the young Mundans knew hunger for the first time in their lives.

About Rog were Brad, Dick, Bentley, and Alice. There was no time for Council meetings any more. For the most part people were glad to have Rog give the orders. They were lost, frightend, puzzled. They were reassured by the fact that someone seemed confident and knew what was going to happen next and could remember things that had to be done. Later they would ask who Rog Foley thought he was.

"We build openly," said Bentley. "It would take us a month just to bury ourselves. So if we don't get a month, that wouldn't do us any good. And if we do -- well, we can do something better with it than just hide."

Rog nodded. "We have to keep gambling on having time," he agreed. He ran up the line, shouting. Men and women started unloading the trucks and carting the stuff towards the rocks. Others rode the horses over, herding the cattle with them. After half the unloading was done, more men on horses rode up. They were the scavengers, the men who had followed the convoy making sure that no avoidable clue was left in their trail.

Dick and Bentley got to work at once on one of the engines. Principally their purpose was to supply hexum, a metal which could discharge its power as slowly as uranium or as an atom blast, depending on what was done with it and what had been done with it in the making. Hexum was the battery, the converter, the conduit between the atom engines, the potential, and the machines which were going to do the job. It could be, in effect, long or short, wide or narrow; it could carry power to be used at once, or store it for months. It could take a trickle or a torrent.

And, of course, unless it was properly handled it could, in an instant of time, make the Mundans completely disinterested in the Clades or anything else.

Right away Rog sent out the three geologists, all founder colonists, to see what they could find. And before the sun was down he knew he had a fair supply of iron and a probability of a good supply of copper. The doctors had had very little to do -- that was common, on Mundis -- so had them, with the chemists, mixing gunpowder charges. There was a certain amount of more powerful explosive, but Rog didn't want powerful explosive. Gunpowder would serve for the blasting he wanted to do.

Two water engineers were sinking a temporary well -- on the trek the Mundans had had to rely on the rains for their drinking water. There was water, plenty of it, under their feet; but it was too far under, below too many feet of earth and rock.

In those first few hours Bentley, during pauses in his own work, realized how Rog had taken complete command and that things which might last for hundreds of years were being decided on, sited, and started on his word alone.

"Are you sure you know what you're doing?" he asked.

"Someone has to be sure."

"What /are/ you doing?"

"What you people should have done whenever you stepped from the Mundis. Twenty-two years late isn't too late. Jim, people can't stay where they are. They have to he advancing or going backwards. And we've been trying to stay where we were. Lemon wasn't developing, only getting bigger. The Constitution that ruled things was an anachronism. That's why I took my party to New Paris. Now we're together again, with another chance."

"Have we? You may turn in five minutes and see the Clades."

In the past few days Rug had stopped politely calling Bentley Mr. Bentley -- Jim was shorter and saved time, and besides, they were working together more closely than they had ever done before.

"Jim," he said, "if we do come out of this Clades affair well, we should thank God for it. We were like a wound-down clock. Already we're ticking merrily again. And there's another thing. From what Pertwee said, I don't think the Clades are bounding with life either. Happy people are people working at high efficiency in a job they want to do. The Clades aren't happy, and I don't think they're really efficient. Frankly, I hope . . . "

He told Bentley what he hoped. Bentley shook his head, unable to share such optimism. But then Bentley, though he had the experience, was no psychologist; Rog, though his experience was limited, knew people and had always known them, naturally, effortlessly.

Bentley went back to his work and Rog to his.

Rog still thought he was right. The Mundans were free, contented, healthy, hopeful. The Clades were fettered, afraid, grim, without imagination or appreciation of beauty, split in half by their subordination of one sex, welded together only by fear.

The Clades couldn't win. Give the Mundans time to regain what they had lost, and they couldn't fail. For the Mundans, always, would be looking forward. The Clades, always, were looking back. Their whole society was built on the conditions of the world they had left. Those conditions were no more applicable to the present than boats on sealess Mundis.

X

1

The Clades sank gently to the surface of Secundis. Pertwee could feel it sinking, though he was in a windowless cabin. Mathers was with him and Toni. They were to be landed at once.

Pertwee looked at Mathers speculatively and wondered whether to risk the spy-eye. He glanced at Toni. They hadn't ever talked freely since he returned, but without saying anything that would help the Clades at all they were developing a system of communication. If every room on the ship was or could be watched, probably one man would have to look at scores of tiny pictures. Though one could never be certain one wasn't being watched, one could be reasonably satisfied that tiny nods, slight changes of expression, minute gestures would never be observed. In a small picture they would cease to exist. Likewise, one was probably safe in whispering a few words under cover of another noise.

But Toni's answering expression said no, quite plainly.

There was a lot Toni must know that Pertwee wanted to know too. Her attitude showed him that she knew a lot more about the Clades now than he did, and that she even had a few tentative plans.

Pertwee had been left with her in comparative freedom since the ship left Mundis. Apparently no one was concerned about them any longer. Several times Pertwee had been prepared to risk casual conversation with a few hints of things that mattered thrown in. But Toni cut off all such attempts.

They talked, certainly. They made love. They spoke of things that had happened on the ship, things which the Clades knew had happened. Pertwee told Toni about people in Lemon, and Toni told him all that had happened on the ship since he escaped. But she said hardly a word about what she had said to Phyllis or Phyllis to her in those hours of comparative freedom. When she mentioned Phyllis, she still spoke about her in the same way. Pertwee was given no hint of any change.

They would have enjoyed those days but for the knowledge of the situation. Toni did, anyway. She was naturally capable of living from hour to hour. The knowledge of something unpleasant to come cast hardly a shadow on her enjoyment of the pleasure of the moment. Pertwee could appear to be as contented as she was, but he wasn't really. Returning among the Clades had restored to him all his worry about them and what they could do to Mundis.

Corey had told them once, as a warning, what had happened to one of the Clades' own officers who had been found guilty or treason recently. The story didn't have the effect on Pertwee it had been intended to have.

This Captain Worsley was nothing to Pertwee, but he had been a man. He had been born on Earth and his mother had probably loved him. For some unknown crime, very likely one which didn't exist among the Mundans, he had had a sword thrust in his stomach and had been left to die in agony. For discipline, for unity, for strength. That was the Clades, If they triumphed, quite a few Mundans would die the same way. Pertwee knew somehow that most of his closest friends would soon be accused and convicted of treason in a Clade community.

Pertwee looked at Mathers again and remembered. Corey had told him that it was Mathers who had executed Worsley. Pertwee shuddered slightly. Cruelty was always ugly. One of the best things he could think of about Lemon was that be had so seldom heard of cruelty in it. Two of the three who had died for offenses against the Constitution had died because of a cruel streak. That wasn't stated, but Pertwee knew there would have been no death penalty if the court hadn't known the men before them were going to go on hurting anyone weak enough to be hurt and stay silent. They knew that to let the men live would only mean so much unnecessary horror and misery in the world.

The Clades meant a lot of horror and misery in two worlds, and they didn't even keep it for their enemies. They shared it among themselves.

There was a very slight jar. Then Toni gave a cry and staggered. There had been one-and-three-quarter gravity for some time, but they had gradually allowed for it as the ship sank. Only now when they expected it to lift did they realize how heavy it was. It was fully double what they were used to; the pull of Mundis was slightly less than that of Earth.

Mathers tried to hurry them along the corridors, but they couldn't be hurried. The gravity didn't cripple them, it merely made them very careful. A stumble which could be righted on Mundis would mean a very heavy fall here. They didn't have to fall to know that.

At the lock Mathers passed them on to Phyllis. Pertwee didn't miss the cold, correct way they treated each other.

Phyllis jumped down, but Pertwee and Toni knew that for them to do that would be asking for broken ankles or strained tendons. They were too intent on watching the ground to see much else, but they did catch a glimpse of a land of mountain and cloud and rock and green foliage. Then they were looking at the gravel under their feet in case they stumbled.

Toni gave an involuntary cry, and Phyllis turned. The Clade disregard for anything the Mundans could do physically was considerable, but, unfortunately, fully justified. Phyllis had been left in charge of both of them, and they could have attacked her together. But the very way she strode along while they had to pick their way carefully showed how useless that would be.

Toni had noticed one thing the gravity had done to her, and didn't like it at all. Her ket gave no support, and her abdominal and pectoral muscles weren't used to treatment like this. They sagged and for the first time Toni had a belly and pendulous breasts. Pertwee looked down and saw that he, too, suddenly had a small paunch. Also, he and Toni were beginning to feel the cold. It was warm enough, but no place for kets and trunks.

"Mathers should have told you," said Phyllis. "Come on, let's hurry. You'll stay warm that way."

It was so unexpected that Pertwee could only stand and gape. But he saw that Toni took it as a matter of course. This, then, was the explanation of Phyllis's fleeting smile and Toni's determined silence. She had an ally, or near-ally, among the Clades. Anyone who admitted to human feelings among the Clades must be an ally.

They hurried on and, as Pertwee began to get used to the heavy gravity he looked about him more. The ship had landed on a pitted field, and most of the Clades had marched off down a hill towards a big, square building that said barracks in every line of it. Phyllis was taking them the other way -- up a slight incline through an avenue of trees which were much more like the trees of Earth than those of Mundis were. They rustled in a slight breeze -- slight, but stronger than anything Mundis ever produced.

Rounding a bend in the avenue, which was very dark by Mundan standards, they saw where they were going. Two hundred yards on, among the trees, was a village, almost a small town. No people were visible, however, except two sentries posted before one of the buildings, and two other men in uniform who were going from door to door with some message or other. All four had been sent on ahead from the ship, apparently. Pertwee recognized two of them.

Pertwee liked the village, save for its dullness. It was built in sandstone, which he had never seen on Mundis. There was no grace about the houses, but he liked their solid simplicity.

"Don't talk when we get inside," Phyllis murmured without turning round. "We'll be able to talk later, but not yet."

The sentries saluted her. Phyllis opened the door and pushed the two Mundans inside in front of her. The building was a meeting place of some sort. They were to be shown off to some of the Clades who hadn't been on the ship, apparently.

"This is Base One," said Phyllis, "You will be asked questions, and we expect sensible answers without delay." Pertwee and Toni didn't have to be told that she was the Clade officer again. "Speak freely," she went on, "and there will be no trouble. Wait in there."

She locked them in a tiny room behind the president's chair. Phyllis's warning presumably applied to this cell too. There was nothing in it; the only break in four bare gray walls was the barred window high up.

"Base One," said Pertwee. "I wonder how many there are?" He was getting used to talking and saying nothing.

About twenty minutes later they were led out again. The Clades who by this time filled the chamber were not in uniform, but wore clothes on the Terran pattern. Generally they were about Pertwee's own age. Of the Clades in uniform, only Phyllis and Sloan were present.

They were asked about the Mundan's numbers, how they lived, the conditions on Mundis -- all the expected questions. Pertwee answered easily and untruthfully. No one expected him to tell the truth, surely. On the other hand, it would lead to unnecessary unpleasantness to declare baldly that every word was a lie, or to refuse to answer at all.

Presently it occurred to him that they /did/ expect him to tell the truth, more or less. The Clades reminded him somehow of the early Quakers. And he began to see that the Clades who stayed at home were very different from the Clades who went on the ship. He remembered how the barracks was placed well away from the village. These Clades were duller, more honest, more like peasant stock.

Apparently the people there were limited to certain fields of inquiry, for there was no mention of any Mundan-Clade dispute or the fact that Pertwee and Toni were prisoners. But if Pertwee saw them as potential allies against their own militarist party, the way they looked at Sloan and Phyllis showed how little value they would be. The civilians were under the heel of the men in uniform. One knew that while only Sloan and Phyllis were there, other eyes were watching, seeing if anyone whispered to his neighbor. The meeting meant nothing, and it didn't matter how Pertwee lied. Its purpose was merely to tell the stay-at-home Clades what Corey thought they should know. Presumably, before Pertwee and Toni had been brought in, they had been told what they were to think.

The base, then, and the people living in it, were nothing. It was still the Clades and its complement that counted. Apparently these people weren't much more than their slaves.

They showed, Pertwee thought bitterly, exactly what was going to happen to the Mundans.

2

"This may be the only time we can talk freely before the fight, if there is one," said Phyllis suddenly and unexpectedly, "so let's use it."

She was leading them to the top of the hill, past the village. They were not alone, precisely; the villagers were straggling up the hill too, but Phyllis had explained briefly what was happening. The Clades, which had returned to Secundis merely to take in supplies for the trip to Outpost and to inform Base One of what was going on, was being tested and its crew exercised before leaving for Outpost. It was a routine test and exercise, but its secondary purpose, Pertwee presumed, though Phyllis didn't say so, was to show both the civilian Clades and the two Mundans how strong and well-trained and invincible the Clades and its crew were. So this was the promised chance to speak freely, unheard by the rest of the Clades. Pertwee hesitated. "I'd like to talk to Toni alone," he said.

"Impossible," Phyllis told him. "No one seems to be paying any attention to us, but I expect we're being watched. No one can hear what we're saying here, but almost certainly everything we do is being observed. Say what you like."

"How far can we trust her?" Pertwee asked Toni bluntly, taking her at her word.

Toni hesitated, working out how to phrase it. "Only so long as it may be to her advantage to keep silent," she said at last. "Not with anything that would mean certain victory for the Clades, for she'd use that against the Mundans. With anything which would mean certain victory for us, yes, I think. She's with us as far as it's to her own advantage."

Pertwee thought it out. Phyllis was running with the foxes and the hounds, and he and Toni had to accept that.

"I can't afford to do anything else," said Phyllis, admitting what Toni had said. "I'm gambling on you Mundans. I'll help you, if I can, in return for recognition."

"As what?"

"The Clade spokesman."

"We can't guarantee that"

"Guarantee as much as you can, and I'll trust you for the rest."

"What can you do? How can you help us?"

Phyllis shrugged. "Who knows? It's a complex situation. I admit frankly I prefer what seems to be the Mundan way to the Clade way. I'm with you, if you have any chance. I may soon be in a position to help your people against mine. I'll do it if I think you have anything to offer."

Gradually Pertwee was understanding her position. She was a traitor, of course. She had been brought up as a Clade, and she was turning callously against her people. She wanted them to be beaten.

However, Pertwee not only thought she was right and justified, but was prepared to trust her -- because she admitted, in effect, that she was not to be trusted. Besides, the Mundans stood to lose nothing and perhaps gain something from her co-operation. "I want any help you can give," said Phyllis, "for myself, Sloan, and Wyness. As little co-operation as possible with Corey and Mathers and Fenham."

Pertwee nodded. "Is there any hope," he asked, "of the moderate elements among you taking over?"

"None whatever. Moderates among us, as you can guess on what you've seen for yourself, are pushed down and out and finally grounded. Base One is full of broken moderates."

"Any chance, then, of help from the women among you?"

"No." Phyllis spoke contemptuously. "They're told they're dirt, and they /are/ dirt. Any improvement in their position they must be given. They won't take it."

"Why is Corey so certain of victory?"

"Because we are bigger and stronger than you can possibly be, and because for him there can't be anything but victory, ever."

"Even a partial failure would depose him?"

"Yes, and Sloan would be commodore. That would be better for you. I should also be higher. Mathers would fall with Corey."

"Has there been any scientific advance among you?"

"Since leaving Earth? I wouldn't know. Yes, I would -- if something made us stronger we would be told. No, I don't think so. Among us, further efficiency in the old methods is sought -- not new methods. Now I want to ask something. You are the only people who know Clades and Mundans. What are the chances?"

"I don't know. I wish I did. I don't think anyone will know until the test comes. It must come, I suppose? Corey won't treat with us?"

"Not if we are clearly stronger. If you'd had an impressive force, perhaps. But now that your people have been on the run a fight is probably inevitable."

There was something unreal about the conversation. Pertwee felt as if he were reading someone else's words. Phyllis was too businesslike. One looked for, and failed to find, some trace of weakness, humor, humanity.

They had been given shirts and slacks, and the labor of climbing the hill had made them warm. Toni still occasionally touched her sagging belly unbelievingiy, and looked enviously at Phyllis, whose figure was as trim and supple as ever. Toni had hardly said a word since she landed on Secundis, so disturbed was she. Toni wasn't vain, but her attractiveness was a known, necessary part of her existence. Secundis she hardly noticed.

Pertwee had been noticing it. It was very nearly a beautiful world. Perhaps, when one was used to it, it would be beautiful. What it lacked, principally, was light. There was no sparkle about it. Its air envelope was so heavy and dense, its clouds so thick, the sunlight that filtered through so weak that the Secundis landscape was lowering, overcast, its mountains dark, menacing masses, its forests black and forbidding. Yet even so, it was a world of size and variety and grandeur, compared with Mundis.

On the two worlds, Mundis and Secundis, there should be two flourishing, friendly settlements, patiently building up again what had been destroyed on Earth. Instead there were two groups preparing to fight, like the two last men alive battling for the honor of being last man alive.

It was all the Clades' fault, of course -- and yet . . . wasn't it also the fault of mankind? Wasn't it a fault in every human being, a fatal flaw that was bound to mean the end of man this time, next time, the time after?

The Clade display was probably very impressive, but Pertwee didn't see it. He was staring gloomily at the ground at his feet.

3

The birth and growth of Freedom was one of the most spectacular triumphs of human history. Most notable about the job was the smoothness and deftness of the operation, each thing ready just as a place was prepared for it, nobody waiting for anything, nobody rushed.

First most people were busy making tools of one sort or another; with unlimited power that was often just a matter of deciding what one was going to be doing, and working out what kind of mechanical assistance one would need. Cutting and shaping and polishing stone or iron was no more difficult than patting butter into shape, Carrying the products was a job for the new trolleys and trucks that appeared overnight. Material was never a problem. One used what was at hand, and by the time something better was needed, more was there.

The trolleys were a case in point. At first they were crude platforms on fixed axles, riding on solid wheels, each needing one of the six power-units to run it, though it was like harnessing together a team of horses to draw a pin out of the ground. Presently the hexum-powered engines couldn't be spared for this menial task; they were replaced on the trolleys by little electric motors driven by batteries charged by one of the engines. The motors, put together on a trial-and-error basis by Dick and Bentley and their helpers, often burned out at first, but soon they whined happily and smoothly whatever they were called on to do.

There was no rubber for tires; rubber trees wouldn't grow on Mundis. The finality of that made the finding of something else to do the job easier -- it wasn't a substitute for rubber that was sought, it was something to do the various jobs on a world which would never have rubber. Plastic was the answer as far as insulation was concerned, plastic and varnishes; plastic was tried for the tires too, and soon a truck was fitted with big clumsy tires of a dirty yellow color, plastic on a cloth base. They weren't very successful, but other tires replaced them, pneumatic and non-pneumatic, thick and thin, hard and soft. Eventually there were two candidates left in the field, a tough, springy non-pneumatic job which would have been perfect but for the fact that no satisfactory method had been found for ensuring it wouldn't go on fire when the friction was great enough, and a pneumatic tire which needed an air pressure so high it was rather hard. But by this time the problem could be considered solved, as far as it needed to be solved at the moment. There were no tire companies in opposition, trying to make a living.

Meantime the steering on the trucks had become more delicate and springing, ball bearings and nuts and bolts began to appear (earlier all joints had been permanent). As the roads improved, speeds of more than seven miles an hour seemed desirable, and the electric motors came off and went back on, quite prepared to drive the trucks at anything up to twenty miles an hour now.

There was no hold-up, because only the founder colonists had preconceived ideas about what was possible, how, why, and where. Occasionally one af them wasted time trying to do something that couldn't be done yet; the youngsters left cranes and bulldozers and glass lenses and steel girders and oil refining until they came naturally. At first the old people were completely certain that their experience of civilization and technology and engineering and machines was going to be invaluable, and the young people, at last, would really appreciate them and see how much they knew . . .

What happened was the founder would say: "See, it used to be done this way," and the youngsters would watch, at first with interest and then impatiently, as the older man found he didn't have the things he used to have at hand, things weren't available, he had forgotten the trick, the new materials didn't behave as the old ones had. Then the young Mundans would take over and do the thing unscientifically, without finesse or grace or the professional touch -- but they'd /do/ it, ignoring the founder colonist's protests that that wasn't the way. Often it wasn't the way. Things fell down, or apart, and had to be put up or together again. The second time they were generally done better, for no one had time to do jobs three times.

The best work was done by old and young people in collaboration, like Dick and Bentley. The older people would explain in general how the job used to be done, and the young people would either agree that that was a good way to do it, or shake their heads and say they'd try something else. The young Mundans, after all, knew Mundis. They weren't concerned about how things had been done in Chicago or New York or London. It required little or no thought for them to work out what was available to them at any time, while the old people, in thinking of a device which had once worked, were inclined to forget that there was now no gasoline or rubber or asbestos or whatever it was. Even after twenty-odd years on Mundis the founders were inclined to forget that a certain essential ingredient was missing. The youngsters didn't have to think. Without examining a plan in detail they would say: "What are you going to do about the so-and-so?"

And the truth was that nobody could do anything about the so-and-so, just yet. So the thing had to be done another way, if at all.

The old people would have held themselves up again and again trying to do things which couldn't economically be done yet -- the economics being time and trouble. But the youngsters wouldn't have got nearly as far as they did without the experience of the old people.

Three men had more to do with the building of Freedom than anyone else, They were Abner Carlass, Fred Mitchell, and Bob Foley.

Abner had never seen a city except on the pictures in microfilm. But he had always wanted to plan the greatest, most beautiful, gracious, friendly city ever, and he regarded the fact that he had never seen a town as his greatest asset. He knew the theory of town planning, he knew what towns needed and somehow had to have, and he had planned all his life, for fun, over the problems that were now dumped in his lap.

Rog was quite dictatorial over Abner. Hard things were said about Rog; there were frowns and angry whispers and even open threats. But Rog was insistent that Abner in every particular was to have his own way, unhampered by the old people's experience of other cities and the young people's enthusiastic but impractical advice.

And day by day, week by week, people came to accept Abner's ideas and see that Rog had been right.

Fred Mitchell had never been very important in the Mundan community, just a youngster who could build a good house and someone who had better be consulted about every important building that was going to be put up, in case it should fall down again. Fred wasn't impressive when he was giving his advice. He wasn't too good on reasons, but he would say he wouldn't do it that way and he thought maybe this wall had better he stronger but there was no need for such a heavy partition and did this room have to be so long and narrow? If he couldn't get his ideas across any other way, he would do the thing, and that would explain it.

Right from the early days of New Paris when people wanted a house that would look like a house they would talk to Bob Foley. His house in New Paris, still, was not only the best-looking house but the one that would last longest. He would grumble when people came to him, but not so much as when they didn't, and really it was the one pleasure of his life to get a piece of paper and build a house on it, placing cupboards and doors and windows and lavatories in the best, the /only/ place for them to be, and wander around later and see it was being done properly.

The two young men and the old man didn't confine themselves to one branch of building a city, nor did they try to do everything. Not one of them was in a union, so it didn't matter if Bob Foley was caught with a trowel in his hand or if Abner drew a complete plan of a house or Fred put up a house without a plan at all. If they were town planner and architect and builder they were also, all of them, men who liked to know what they were doing and why they were doing it and what they were working with.

They respected each other because they were good at their jobs. You had to respect someone who did something you needed in your job, and did it well, and admitted you did your job well too.

Rog left them pretty much alone. He knew his limitations. Alice wandered around, naturally enough, as Fred's wife, and saw what was going on, and told Rog. That worked better than Rog himself being called on for suggestions and making the wrong ones or not knowing any to make, good or bad. He thought he would know a good city if he saw one. But he had no delusion that he was the man to build it -- he merely believed that he was better than anyone else at finding the people who would do it well.

4

Bentley and Dick were the busiest men in the settlement, naturally. Everybody was using machines, but hardly anyone pretended to understand them. That was coming, gradually. There were three main classes. People like Rog and Alice and Abner and Jimmy Doran would use machines, quite well, aware of their purpose but not of their principle. Others like Fred and Brad and Mary Bentley, of all people, would tinker with them, driven by sheer curiosity and their own mechanical aptitude, and would soon handle them with a new confidence born of a knowledge of what made them tick. But only Dick and Bentley, so far, had the gift of creation. A few others showed signs of it, no more. Only they could assess the demands of a job and visualize the machine to do it.

At first they had to make the machines too, after making the tools with which to make them, after wresting the material to make the tools from the earth with raw power, after finding out how to apply the raw power usefully. But soon other workers took over. New skills in the Mundans weren't really developed, merely uncovered. Soon others were not only carrying out the plans which Dick and Bentley laid down, but coming to them with plans of their own almost worked out, needing only a few minutes' thought on the part of one of them to be practical projects.

It was Fred who planned and made the first drill, practically on his own, in the free time he could find from building, twelve hours a day. It could bore into rock and it could clear ground flat and it could dig enormous holes. The day it was in operation Fred started making a derrick.

And for the first time Fred was more important than his wife -- a lot more important. He didn't think of it like that. He was far too modest. But he did expand a little and developed a swagger and expressed an opinion more readily now that it occurred to him for the first time that it was worth while having an opinion.

Alice was pleased too. No woman likes to be always apologizing to herself and to everyone else for her husband. That would obviously never be necessary again. Fred would never have Alice's brains, but Alice would never have Fred's mechanical aptitude, and for at least a few months that counted more.

Alice wasn't idle, of course. Rog was still technically directing operations, and she helped him. But really they were helping and co-ordinating rather than directing anything. She was impressed by the way Rog could postulate and inspire and start a colossal effort and then step aside coolly and look on while others continued with the work. He took all responsibility and shared it out carefully, precisely, brilliantly. Only when it was clear he had made a mistake did he take any responsibility back.

Even the responsibility for co-ordination had been surrendered. That was Mary's. More than Rog, more than her daughter, Mary had the gift of handling people doing jobs and seeing that the jobs came out right and at the right time. So Alice, who had thought she was somebody, was comforted slightly, when she found herself running errands, by the thought that her father, mother, and husband were three of the most important people around, and that Rog Foley, who had planned and started and directed all this, was probably running errands too.

Rog found Bentley in a fairly slack moment. Dick was working on one of the atomic engines which had made all this possible. Bentley was stretching his back as if tired, but Rog saw his eyes dancing with glee. The true scientist likes to see things happening -- likes to have theories tested in the field and feel progress and the growth of knowledge about him.

"Freedom is healthy enough, Jim," said Rog soberly. "But how about the Clades?"

The glee didn't leave Bentley's eyes, though his face sobered a little. "I appreciate that you haven't kept asking that, Rog," he said, "and left me in peace until I had an answer. I've got one. Let us have three more weeks and the Clades won't he any stronger than we are."

Rog's eyes searched his face. "How is that?" he asked. "They have their ship and all its equipment, and we destroyed most of ours. It will take years before some of it can be replaced -- you told me that yourself. Even now . . . "

"Attack," said Bentley, "is just directed power. True, we should he able to direct it better if we had some of the weapons the Clades presumably has, and which we once had; if we had the lenses we won't he able to grind for years yet, the metals we can't refine so far, the precision manufacture that only comes in closer and closer approach to perfection over decades of technology.

"But basically, a weapon is still just directed power. And if we can't direct it so well we just have to throw in more power. We'll he able to do that."

"Why? Surely the Clades has as much power as we have? And isn't it practically unlimited?"

"You're no scientist, Rog," said Bentley, "but you have imagination. Remember this, for a start -- the power of the atom is always finite. Granted, it's enormous; granted, it's so far beyond our comprehension that we call it unlimited, not unreasonably. But there's a very real, very essential difference between what is infinite and what is merely fantastically large.

"Infinity plus one equals infinity. But your fantastically large number plus one is a different number altogether. It's bigger."

Rog saw Bentley's point. "You mean," he said, "that we and the Clades start off more or less equal, and we only have to add a little they haven't got to be stronger?"

"Exactly. Theoretically, other things being equal, fifty express rifles will lose to fifty express rifles plus a bow and arrow. Now, we can obviously build up more power. You don't want too much on a ship -- you shunt away what you have no use for. On land, in our own base, we can have twice the reserve of the Clades -- enough to balance all her advantages and tip the scales the other way. We should be ready in three weeks, I'd say."

He paused and let his eyes wander over Rog's face. "Scientists never used to take responsibility for the things they created, Rog," he said soberly. "They just discovered things and handed them out free, more or less. Then, out here, we tried to change that. I tried to hide something I knew. But for the Clades I'd have kept it hidden. Now -- we'll never know whether what I was trying to do was right or wrong, whether it would have worked or wouldn't have worked.

"We're back to normal -- scientists handing things out free. I can give you the power that might destroy the Clades, used a certain way, and depending on what they do, but it's you who'll have to decide what to do with it."

Rog nodded.

"I suppose we always hope against all reason," Bentley reflected. "Anyway, I do hope that this time the old problem will be handled right. However 'right' is."

"So," said Rog, "do I."

XI

1

Hardly any light reached Outpost from Brinsen's Star -- much, much less than Sol had given Pluto. To scrutinize the dead world's surface Corey had to use his searchlights.

He searched the barren, frozen rock for two weeks. Then he had Pertwee and Toni brought before him. Mathers, Sloan, and Phyllis were there. The world below gave them weight -- not much, but enough.

"I believe you have lied again," he said grimly.

"How can you know?" Pertwee asked. "You have not examined a twentieth of the surface of this world yet."

"No. It would take a year, and even then one could not be sure they were not here. I believe this is another trick. Lieutenant Mathers!"

"Yes, sir."

"Draw your sword."

Pertwee glanced swiftly at Mathers. He hadn't noticed he was in full ceremonial uniform. He should have done, he told himself. It would have given him time to guess that something was going to happen and to work out what to do about it.

Mathers drew it out. It wasn't a very fine sword, for the Clades weren't good steelworkers as yet -- and, of course, there had been no swords on the ship when it left Earth. Spaceships had no room for such ceremonial luxuries. But it had a very sharp point; Worsley had discovered that.

"Place the tip directly above Toni's heart."

"This isn't very sensible," said Pertwee evenly. "I warn you, if anything happens to Toni and you only have me to question, I shall die before I tell you anything. I'll know, you see, that I'm your only source of information, and if I -- "

"The only useful information we ever got out of either of you," said Corey wearily, "was that there were other Mundans, It seems to me we'll lose little. Lieutenant, do as I say."

Without hesitation Mathers raised his sword arm so that it and the weapon made a straight line to Toni's left breast. Toni backed against the wall, involuntarily. Mathers closed the gap. He was proud of his skill with the sword. It was obvious that he was enjoying this. He had possessed Toni; he didn't mind in the least hurting or killing her now.

"Lean on the sword gradually," said Corey, "so that in two minutes she will be dead. Now, Pertwee?"

The sword touched the cloth over Toni's breast. Mather's hand and arm were steady; Toni watched, fascinated. The point indented the cloth, then cut it. Toni winced.

"What do you want now?" asked Pertwee.

"The truth. You have lied often. We have wasted days, weeks, months because of you and this woman. We are wasting no more. /Where are the Mundans?/ Don't stop, Lieutenant."

There was suddenly a little red mark under the point of the sword. Toni tried to draw her breast in further, but couldn't.

"Very well," said Pertwee. He had to tell his story so that the Clades would go to Outpost, and it had had to be that the Mundans were there waiting for them, expecting them, wanting them to come. Only that way was it credible.

But now that story was out of date. Obviously no one was on Outpost, waiting for them, expecting them. Pertwee couldn't make them believe that the Mundans were there, but hiding. It was too late to tell the story that way. And if he let Toni die, Corey would still order the ship back to Mundis. They had delayed it all they could.

"We needed time," he said. "Our ship was buried, as I told you -- buried deep."

He waited. Corey nodded to Mathers, and he dropped his sword reluctantly. Pertwee went on: "We blew out a vast hole in the ground, and lowered the ship to the bottom. When we filled it in again the grass grew over it so that even someone who knew there was a ship there would have a lot of hard digging before he reached the top of it."

He allowed triumph to come into his voice. "While you were on Mundis we couldn't even start. It would have been a long job, and if you were high up you could see excavations like that for hundreds of miles. So we had to get you clear of Mundis."

"Whatever else happens," Corey promised in the cold fury so typical of the Clades, "your part in this affair will be justly assessed and rewarded when it's over. I shouldn't have listened to anything from you that wasn't screamed in agony. I should have -- "

"You should have acted like a human being, and I'd have led you to Lemon that first day, God help me!"

Corey gave an order. And Pertwee knew that he wouldn't see anyone again until the Clades had found the new Mundan settlement, for Corey meant what he said. Pertwee was taken along a narrow corridor and left in a steel room which was as black and silent as the grave.

"The sword again, Lieutenant," said Corey, when Pertwee was gone. "As before."

Once more the tip touched Toni's breast. "Is what Pertwee said true?" Corey demanded.

Silence. Again a spurt of blood. Mathers licked dry lips delicately.

Phyllis said: "I think, Sir, she wants him to kill her."

Corey cursed. "What can you do with these people?" he demanded. "How can you get them to answer a simple question?"

"Ask it," said Toni wearily. "Without swords or torture or threats. I don't care any more. Is it true? I don't know. It could be. It could be a lie. Nobody ever told me."

The commodore's mood changed as Toni spoke so disinterestedly, so apathetically. "Have we broken you at last, little Mundan?" he asked with interest, almost with amusement.

"Not by what you've done," said Toni quietly. "By what you are, perhaps. Are you really men and women, you Clades? Or do you just look like the human beings I know?"

Corey struck her across the face.

"Yes, that's right," she said. "That's exactly what I meant."

The commodore turned on his heel. "Back to Mundis," he ordered. "We'll search every square inch until we find these people. And when we do, they'll surrender or die."

"Sir," said Sloan slowly, "that's a matter for . . . "

He was going to point out that they had nothing to lose by a friendiy approach to the Mundans, when at last they found them; that their orders had been to help the Mundans, not destroy them; that Toni's people might be strong and as stubborn and courageous as she was; that they were the Clades' fellow men, after all, in a galaxy short of that commodity after the solar system had destroyed itself; and above all that the commodore, though the supreme commander, was not the Clades, just one man . . .

But Corey said coldly: "I know what you are going to say, Captain. I regard it as mutiny. Do you still wish to say it?"

"No, sir," said Sloan expressionlessly.

He might have the balance of power and he might not. He wasn't prepared to put it to the test yet.

2

It was almost dusk, but there was still plenty of light. Rog sat on a rock spur, alone, twenty feet up, and looked and thought.

Freedom had stopped growing. The rest of the work was refinement. There was a lump in Rog's throat at the beauty of it. Could. there ever have been a city as beautiful? Everything was graceful, pleasing, giving a sense of completeness. One looked at the city from one angle, and everything fitted in satisfyingly with everything else; one moved a few steps to the left or to the right, and there was a subtle, kaleidoscopic change.

Nothing in that city was pretentious, and nothing was humble. Every house was proud to be a house, glad that no other house was exactly like it. The halls and theaters and ballrooms were grander than any house, but none were allowed to be vain or sensual or febrile. Solidity and grace were mingled as far as possible; nothing in Freedom was thin or spidery, though there were plenty of slender lines, and nothing was heavy or massive.

It was Abner Carliss's dream, and now the whole human race could share it, if they would. Rog smiled as he realized that Abner had planned the whole so that statues would be a false note. One couldn't imagine a statue in Freedom. So there would be no statue to Abner Carliss, the only Mundan so far, Rog thought, to whom they might have erected one.

The evening sun still shone on the city, but the ground below Rog was in black shadow. He saw the white movement, however, which meant that someone was coming to talk to him, and waited philosophically.

It was June. She climbed surefootedly beside him and sat with him. He knew she wouldn't speak if he frowned or gave any other sign that he didn't want her to speak. That had never changed.

"June," he said, "can I say something that ought to be said without having you think at once I want rid of you?"

She started, but his tone was kind. She said cautiously: "Does that mean that you don't want rid of me, but . . . " Her voice broke, despite her care.

He took her in his arms. "That was just what I /didn't/ want," he said gently. "Look, June, stop blaming yourself for everything. If our marriage has never really come alive, it's not your fault, do you understand? Do you think you could stop blaming yourself? Try, anyway."

He kissed her forehead. "Then, perhaps," he said quietly, "it really will come alive."

"You mean," she said, "I might still have a child."

"Hell, no," said Rog a little impatientiy. He was impatient with himself principally. He shouldn't have allowed her to think that -- now it would be difficult to clear the idea from her mind. "There are plenty of children. That's not as vital as it used to be. Even if we don't have children . . . "

But suddenly, as he spoke, he knew it wasn't going to work out, anyway. After all these weeks, all that had happened, she was still too much in awe of him. She couldn't share his life because she didn't try. She would never step up beside him. She'd always stay a few steps lower down.

So he added, rather absently: "Anyway, it may be my fault there are no children. I didn't have any with Toni either."

He had done all he could about June, he felt. The rest was up to her -- he might be wrong. He put her from his mind, though his arms were still about her.

The first day on which the Cladss might have been back, if it had gone to Outpost and returned immediately, was past. They hadn't been ready then. But it was reasonable to suppose that it would search the dead world for at least a week; with Pertwee doing what he could to keep them there. Then, too, they might spend quite a while searching Mundis before they found Freedom.

But the sands were running out. In the next week, Rog calculated, on the basis of facts Bentley had supplied, the long-delayed encounter would come.

They had set up listening posts five miles from Freedom, each with someone on duty day and night. Seconds would count; the sentries had had nothing to do but close a switch, and Freedom would be ready. That meant a big wastage in trained manpower, though. Dick and Bentley between them had built a simple alarm which would be triggered by the sound of the Clades' engines over silent Mundis. At one after another out-post the alarm was installed. Now Freedom trusted entirely to it for the first warning. A split second after the first murmur of engines was picked up five miles away, everyone in Freedom would be alert, waiting.

Now that Freedom had the tools and equipment to do jobs easily, Rog had had a funkhole dug several miles from the city. There were always a hundred people there. Rog didn't like the idea, but he felt this had to be done. If the Clades appeared and it and Freedom destroyed each other, at least there would be people left to start again. Or, a little better, if there was rescue work to be done, there would be a hundred rescuers. Alice was left in charge of that party, and Dick was generally with them.

There was more protection than there seemed to be for those who remained in the city. And the buildings themselves could take a lot more than one would imagine, looking at them. The Carliss-Foley-Mitchell combination built gracefully but cunningly. Strength was a prerequisite, though it might be strength hidden, even strength denied.

The city was strong and there was protection against blast for everyone who would be in it, because Rog was calculating on a strong possibility that an atom bomb would be detonated in the air above Freedom. Twenty-five men with three beams had no job but to watch the smooth metal keel of the Clades, two-thirds of the way along, at the point from which a bomb would emerge if Corey should decide the Mundan city must be destroyed. Whenever there was a crack in the blank metal, those beams would meet on it. And the bomb, though it would do Freedom no good, would do the Clades much less,

This was the bad time for Freedom, the waiting time. If he could, Rog would have sent for the Clades. People would go mad under a strain like this. Already Alice had been sent four gunners who thought they had seen the Clades.

And with the recollection Rog realized that he should never be so far from his post, now. He was fully three hundred yards from it, with no means of getting there but running. A minute . . . and Freedom might he gone in a minute.

He stood up. June stood with him. "Rog," she said, "let's call it off, shall we?"

It took Rog long seconds to fix his mind on what she was talking about. At first he thought she meant call off the Clade-Mundan dispute, and wondered if there was some way of doing that which he had never noticed.

"I know why you did it," said June. "You had to marry someone. But it doesn't matter now, or for a long time. You should be free, not having to think about me."

"June . . . " said Rog. He wanted to say what he knew she still wanted to hear. But to Rog, honor and kindness and chivalry were subject to common sense. It would he better for June, for him, and for Abner if June, instead of having her impulsive suggestion refused, should find it acted on at once.

"You're perfectly right, June," said Rog warmly. He knew he was hurting her, but believed it was a clean hurt. "Don't let's play out a fantastic situation because we won't admit we made a mistake."

He couldn't see June's face in the darkness. He was glad; this was one time when he didn't want to see it.

3

"There!" said Corey exultantly.

He didn't have to give any order; it had been given long ago. The Clades, having sighted something which was clearly the Mundan settlement, though there was no time to see any details, instantly withdrew again. It had been nosing along quietly, and now as it dropped to the ground whatever it was that had been seen was over the horizon.

Toni was brought into the big observation room in the nose of the ship, in the care of Phyllis. Soon afterwards Pertwee appeared, still blinking. Toni cried out at sight of him. His skin was white and he had a ragged beard. He had been allowed to keep himself clean, for the Clades were risking no disease, but he was shaky on his feet and seemed to have difficulty in keeping his balance.

Sloan was there, and Fenham came in silently as Pertwee's eyes slowly learned to give his mind clear images again. The sound of feet in the corridors of the ship was a dull roar.

Mathers came in with a dripping print. It was a picture which had been taken in the few seconds when the Mundan town had been visible from the ship. Corey scrutinized it.

"Plan Three," he said.

Sloan was looking at the picture now. "I don't like the look of this, sir," he said, "That city -- "

"I don't recall asking for your opinion, Captain," said Corey. "All discussion is over. This is action."

"But Plan Three, sir -- "

"That'll do, captain."

"I wish to support Captain Sloan, sir," said Phyllis. "I think I know what his objections are. I agree."

"This," the commodore declared slowly, "is a fighting ship, manned by a trained fighting force, and this is the first opportunity it has had to fight. And immediately we sight the probable enemy, two of my chief officers suddenly decide -- "

"Pardon me, sir," said Phyllis. "I think you know there is nothing sudden about this."

Pertwee, gradually coming to life after an eternity when the only event was a meal or an opportunity to wash or change his clothes in pitch blackness, looked up with his old keenness at that. Phyllis was burning her boats. She had decided, apparently, after a glance at the print of the Mundan City, to throw in her lot with him, Toni, and the Mundans. Later it might be too late to jump. PertWee noticed, too, that Sloan, without orders, was recording the proceedings.

"I am with you, of course, sir," said Mathers.

"Then relay Plan Three."

There were two control rooms in the ship, and this, exposed as it was, wasn't either of them. Corey's order placed Mathers at the board which was rather a communication point than anything rise. Corey nodded to Fenham, and she went out again, presumably to one of the control rooms. Phyllis and Sloan exchanged glances which weren't lost on Pertwee. One or both of them should have been employed instead of Fenham and Mathers, it seemed.

Mathers at the board could see very little. Corey meant to give the orders, so Mathers didn't have to see. The signals were pre-arranged, coded. As the situation changed Corey would give an order, Mathers would interpret it, relay a laconic signal to some point in the ship, and there someone would do something he was standing ready to do.

A speaker at Mathers's left ear said "Ess two."

"Landing complete, force clear," said Mathers.

They couldn't see it from the observation room, which at the moment showed only a few square yards of bracken, but a big land force had been disembarked. At the signal that the landing was complete, the ship rose again. Wyness must be in command of the land force, Pertwee realized.

The ship moved forward, and Pertwee's eyes completed their recovery just in time for him to see the city as soon and as plainly as the others did.

He knew he was there largely so that his reactions could be studied, and had determined not to give anything away, whatever happened, whatever he saw. But as he saw what the Mundans had done he gasped in amazement.

To Pertwee what Corey did then was insane, for one glance at the city had shown Pertwee that the Mundans had succeeded in everything they had attempted. As a community they had suddenly, brilliantly, found the Midas touch. But what Corey had seen was different. He saw a clean, graceful city, open, defenseless. He saw slender, effete buildings that would hardly survive a storm on Secundis. He saw open spaces and freedom in every sweeping line of the Mundan settlement.

He saw beauty. Beauty was weakness. There could be no strength, nothing for Clades to fear, in that city.

He spoke rapidly to Mathers, and the Clades swooped on the city. Even inside it they could hear every word from the amplifiers at full power.

"Your leaders will march out and we shall pick them up. They will bring back to you the terms of the Clade-Mundan alliance. Do not be alarmed. There will be no disorder. Anyone making a disturbance will he shot. You have ten minutes. Your leaders will march out and we shall pick them up. They will bring back to you the terms . . . "

There must have been other recordings waiting to be relayed by amplifier to the Mundans. The commodore, on a glance at the city, had decided which would be the first message to pass between Mundan and Clade. And that was it.

Pertwee had never in his life felt more helpless. He almost wished that he was down below with a rifle, however futile a rifle might be. Then he could do something, if it was only to fire a useless shot that wouldn't even reach the steel hide of the monster over the city.

Toni was staring at the wonderful sight below. Sloan and Phyllis stood immobile, knowing that for them this was more than a battle, it was a personal issue. If Plan Three worked, Corey was right, they were wrong, and Corey would take full advantage of it.

Two minutes.

Then alarm bells rang. Mathers snapped a speaker switch. "Heavy beam on tail," said a voice. Corey barked something, Mathers spoke rapidly, flicking switches. Long seconds, then two miles away something concealed in the grass of the plain glowed, exploded, and was suddenly a ridiculous little puff of smoke. The beam had been traced and destroyed.

"Heavy beam on tail," the speaker reported, "From other side of city this time."

"Plan Sevenl" said Corey. Mathers moved again, and the ship lurched as acceleration gripped it. "Heavy beam on tail," said the speaker. "Bombs ready," Mathers reported. Corey gestured impatiently.

Something dropped from the ship, well forward. It wasn't an atom bomb, and it wasn't aimed at the city. This was a demonstration, now that a demonstration was obviously necessary. It would shatter every window in the city, but wouldn't do much more damage than that.

Something happened to it. There was another ridiculous little puff of smoke, in mid-air this time.

"City center, full power," said Corey.

"You can't!" Sloan shouted. "Even if we all die . . . "

"City center, full power!" Corey barked.

Mathers leaned forward, Then he dropped away from the switchboard. Phyllis had shot him through the head so that his body couldn't continue its movement and press the switch. Corey whirled, his gun in his hand. But Sloan was going to need all his allies, particularly Phyllis. He kicked the commodore's wrist and the gun slid along the floor.

Phyllis didn't know it, but she had saved the Clares, not the Mundans.

It was only three seconds later that the ground slid under the ship and the six people in the room, five alive and one dead, were thrown violently across it. "Tail gone,"sald the speaker, with gloomy finality.

There was no defense against the atom. And Mundis, after all, had used it first.

The ground force was beaten by an old weapon. Several things were ready, but when one of the watchers in the pillboxes well clear of the city reported that the Clades had no masks, Rog merely opened the cocks and Freedom was surrounded by a belt of heavy, rolling gas. None of the Clades died, except one who shot himself in falling.

But none of them remained on their feet either. And the ship, just to prove the Mundans still had the Midas touch, dropped into the belt of gas too, with all its airvents open, its tail gone and the hull split in places by the heavy landing. By that time the issue wasn't in doubt -- but it could have been a lot more difficult and costly for Rog and the Mundam.

4

"And that," said Bentley, "was why we were conditioned against nuclear energy. There's no defense. Used efficiently, as you used it, Rog, it may mean victory without loss. It isn't often used like that."

He noted with mild irritation that Rog wasn't listening. They were walking along the corridor that ran round the new Council Chamber. It wasn't finished. Hardly any interiors were, so far. Rog was looking about him, wondering what Abner meant to do to the bare walls and roof.

"A more usual result," said Bentley more loudly, "is what would have happened but for Phyllis Barton and your detonation squad that wasn't needed. Total destruction of both sides."

Rog brought his thoughts back from picturing the Council buildings as they would be when Abner was finished with them. A change had come over Abner's work already, since he had married June. It hadn't lost its vigor, but instead of the dash and boldness there was a new precision, as if the whole thing had been complete in his mind from the first instant.

"Yes," he said, "I suppose it would be." He pushed open the door of the Chamber itself. They were the last to take their places.

Jessie Bendall was busy elsewhere, as matron in charge of the nursing staff. Quite a few Clades had been wounded in the fall of the ship. Alice presided, with Brad beside her. Seated at the table, dispersed among the Mundans, were Corey, Sloan, Phyllis, Fenham and Wyness. They wore their uniforms, except Phyllis. She had a certain pride that prevented her from becoming a Mundan at once, but she was relaxing, softening. Habits of years were dropping from her, but the Mundans in her case didn't try to hurry the process.

Alice tapped for order, a little self-consciously. "We are going to try to run this," she said, "as a free, open meeting."

"Cut the pretense," said Corey.

"There's no pretense, yet," Alice told him.

"My men are prisoners, those you haven't killed. My ship is a wreck. We are here to be told what you are going to do with us."

"You are here," said Mary quietly, "to help us to decide what we are all going to do."

Rog rose. "He's right, Mary," he said. "This is pretense. We are going to force something on them. Freedom. But I won't make a fine speech, for only those who agreed with me would understand what I was saying. Corey, you're here by courtesy. You've no fight here, because you aren't the duly elected representative of your people. Meantime you'll have to do, you and your officers."

Corey didn't admit his interest, but he understood this. He had never admitted that he and Rog understood each other, but it was so.

It was a week since the Clades had lowered itself to the plain. During that time the five Clade officers had lived with Mundans. The rest of the Clades were kept in a camp; there wasn't much else that could be done with them yet. But the process of taking them into the life of Freedom had definitely begun.

The sexes were kept apart. The women were being trained to be human again. That was routine. It wasn't always easy, and not particularly rewarding so far, but it is always easier to give back self-respect than to take it away.

There was nothing very encouraging about the way the majority of the men reacted, either. Freed of their masters, they were all trying to be masters themselves. But already a few, a very few so far, were out of the camp and working with Mundans, interested if a little puzzled sometimes. Gradually they would be technicians, workers, builders rather than Clades.

Corey knew all this. But like all the Clades he believd what he wished, having been trained to disregard certain unwelcome facets of reality.

Pertwee was sitting opposite Corey. He was the handsomest man at the meeting. He had life and happiness and a future he had never expected to have, and he had Toni. She wasn't there because, though Toni might be one of the great names in Mundan history, that didn't make her a thinker and a Councilor.

Rog nodded to him. "Tell them what we've worked out, he said. "When there is a full Council again it will have to vote on it. We may as well be thinking of it."

Pertwee shook his head. "It's not only more yours than mine, Rog," he said, "I think you can put it more clearly. But let me introduce it."

He looked round the room. It wasn't like the old Council room in Lemon; Abner, while most of the Mundans had been thinking of the Clades, had thought of nothing but the beauty that could he wrought in stone and concrete and wood. There was nothing grand about the chamber, but it was simple and tasteful and quite lovely.

Pertwee only glanced casuaily at Phyllis. She had been living with him and Toni. It was odd, it was ironic, but reasonable enough. They weren't friends yet, the three of them, but they were gradually coming nearer to understanding each other, allowing for the years that stretched behind each of them and what had happened in those years.

Fenham would be given a responsible job and she would do it very well and extremely unlmaginatively. It had better be a job that called for cold calculation, for that was the thing which had taken her high among the Clades, her only talent.

Sloan lived empirically. He had done what he could get away with under Corey, he would do what he could get away with among the Mundans. But Phyllis said he was human. It wasn't yet completely settled whether Phyllis would know.

Wyness was finding the change easier than anyone else did. Perhaps he was shallow. Perhaps, like so many of the younger Clades, or the young Mundans for that matter, he was a little what he wanted to be, a lot what his friends wanted him to be. Wyness would settle easily and be no problem -- far less a problem than Phyllis was, because there was so much more to Phyllis.

Corey . . . Pertwee sighed.

"We all know the problems of the situation," he said, "so I won't say anything about them except that Rog has the beginnings of some answers. That's all they are yet -- beginnings."

He paused. "You all know, of course, that Rog saved Mundis, if that's the way we're going to put it. But perhaps you don't know that Mundis, as so often happens, is ungrateful."

A murmur of protest swelled to a roar. Pertwee shrugged and waited for silence. "Yes, there's been a change," he said, when he could be heard, "A week ago Rog was wonderful. Now we're beginning to find that Rog Foley didn't really do so much, that the job wasn't nearly as difficult as everyone made out, and that maybe Rog didn't do it so well after all -- "

He wasn't allowed to go any further. He grinned faintly at Rog and Bentley. He had made his point. The Mundans had reached the stage of grumbling a little about Rog, but they wouldn't let anyone deprecate his achievements in public. Pertwee sat down, and Rog rose in a roar of acclaim.

"Thanks, Pertwee," he said. The indifference in his tone would have sounded ungracious to anyone who didn't know him. To some people he was the most conceited person alive, to others he was wholly lacking in conceit. It all depended on whether their definition of conceit included vanity or not. Rog had none. Supreme confidence in his own ability, yes.

"This is the picture as Pertwee and I see it," he said. "Think about it. We can talk about it later, modify it, vote on it.

"Atomic power may or may not be a tragedy, but it's certainly a fact. What do you do with unwelcome facts -- refuse to see them? Keeping nuclear power from a people who once had it only works so long as you keep them primitive. You can rub it off the slate -- and it could be a serious mistake to hide the slate.

"So we're going to use atomic power.

"If a people are free, you can't force them not to be something. If you prevent any group forming as a group, freedom doesn't exist. But then, you have to do that, sometimes, for security. Security and freedom are sometimes equal to the same thing, but they're never equal to each other. Sometimes you have to give up a little security to have freedom. And almost always there will be people around trying to make you give up a little freedom and promising you absolute security. Limit the amount of freedom anyone can have, and you institute security. Limit the amount of security there can be and you give freedom a chance.

"So we must be content with limited security and limited freedom, not as much of one or the other as we can possibly have.

"Push one group two inches down and it doesn't plan and pray and fight for equality, it strives to be two inches above the other group. Put them on a level and you cut out the main purpose of fighting. You even stop them being a group.

"So we put everyone on the same level, and mean it."

He was going too fast for them, and he knew it. This was the preliminary statement. This was to start people really thinking about the future. The next time Rog or someone else expressed these ideas, they would be familiar, therefore not frightening, possibly even things that might be done, things that sounded like good things to do.

"But short of inequality, actual superiority and inferiority," Rog went on, ~it can be a good idea to have groups. We had a Gap, and disagreed -- we had groups, the Clades hadn't. Nobody was allowed to have another group. And which proved the stronger?"

He saw that as far as Phyllis was concerned, he had really made a point.

"I think we should mildly encourage differences, mildly limit them," he observed. "But let's go on.

"If you don't allow for change, you're going to have a man of thirty in diapers. Things once agreed should be graded so that there's nothing you can't shift, but some things you could move every day, some bring out the sweat on you, and some you need the neighbors' help to budge.

"Just one thing more meantime. When a man doesn't know where he's going, he gets tired more easily. People without a purpose in life are corpses that still have to be fed. There are always things to strive for, but sometimes people get together and work out one that swallows all the rest. The purpose of a group shouldn't be just dominion, as the Clades' was. And in case the rest of us get too cocky, the purpose of a small community shouldn't be just to be a bigger community, either.

"Let's see if we can work out some more worthwhile purposes, shall we?"

5

The helicopter was experimental, Dick's own design. Rog didn't take it too high. He was still fond of life, and Dick had suggested that the machine be used meantime at not more than fifty feet. Besides, Rog's flying experience was small.

He landed beside Lake Antonia. There was no one there at the moment, but on the hillside there was a big pile of materials which was being augmented every day by cargo planes from Freedom.

Pertwee had pointed out that one of the things the colonies had lacked, both Lemon and Base One (it turned out there was only a Base One) was travel. On Earth, restless spirits could join the army or the army, or at least go to another city. On the two planets it had been impossible.

So a second town was being built at Lake Antonia just so that travel could begin again. It would mean the building of a road a thousand miles long, but even the people who would have to build it seemed to favor the idea. There was talk, too, of rebuilding Lemon.

And then, of course, there was travel to Secundis. The Clades there hadn't given any trouble -- not that anyone thought they would. New masters, Clade or Mundan, it was all the same to them. Making them step up was like giving the women back their self-respect, a long, difficult job.

Rog jumped down and Phyllis followed him from the helicopter. One could still tell a Clade at a glance, as a rule. Pride prevented most of them from hiding themselves among the Mundans, cutting their hair the same way, dressing the same way. Little things were enough. It wasn't, as a rule, a defiant declaration that they were Clades. It was rather a refusal to pretend to be a Mundan.

Phyllis wore her hair shorter than any Mundan girl would have done, and her clothes weren't cuffed, though otherwise Mundan in style.

They swam in the lake, and as usual Phyllis easily won everything they turned into a contest. But as she remarked when they came out of the water, shaking themselves, Rog was improving to such an extent that this might not always happen.

Her manner of complimenting him was stilted, awkward. It was new for her to try to compliment anyone, to consider other people's feelings. Rog didn't comment, however. One way to help Clades towards acting warmly, naturally, was to pretend they were.

"If you'd been one of us, Rog," she said, as they dropped to the grass, "you'd have been our leader, and the Clades would have won."

"Perhaps," said Rog. He was more interested in Phyllis. He smiled faintly; for once he was interested in a woman as a woman, and couldn't make anything of it. It would be some time yet, he calculated, before Phyllis's ideas would have changed sufficiently for marriage to seem at all attractive to her; Certainly quite a while before she would be proud that she was desirable without being, at the same time, a little disgusted at the idea of being a childbearing woman instead of an officer.

"Will you ever marry?" he asked.

Phyllis thought it over. Among the Mundans she had found a different kind of life. It worked, it was consistent. Soon it became quite apparent that it was going to be her life of the future, The Clades would never rise again.

The Clades, in fact, had been a curious anomaly. They had left a world fighting just to exist. A world where if someone was alive, that meant he was strong or guarded by someone who was strong, or important, or very lucky.

Then the Clades leaped into space and a new life grew up. It was very like the old one, full of effort and dangers, except that the dangers were no longer quite real. The people on the ship had to be tough and keep getting tougher, and with singie-mindedness they had done so.

But there was nothing, really, to temper their steel. On and on they went, and they come to a world. It wasn't as easy a world as Mundis, certainly. It toughened their bodies, but it supplied no real conflict.

When there was conflict, the conflict they had been waiting for, the Clades were no more prepared for it, no better at it, than the Mundans, who had had nothing but the Gap to show them that there were different realities, and that what one man might /know/ to be the truth, another man might /know/ to be a lie.

A victory might have tempered the Clades, but there was no victory. In a few weeks after their first and only defeat the Clades had fallen apart. There was a curious outbreak of courtesy -- a reaction from the fact that there had never been anything like courtesy, save military courtesy, among the Clades. They had been very polite to each other and to the Mundans. It wasn't real, and already it was beginning to die. But it showed how lost and bewildered the Clades were without a leader.

Then they had a leader. Rog. It came about inevitably. Rog was the man who had beaten them. He was the stronger.

The women among them had been at first scared, then arrogant. They found that arrogance got them nowhere with either the Mundans or their own doubtful, confused menfolk. A few found an answer in marriage to men who had previously been their mates under the old Clade system.

But then a few of the Clade women discovered the exciting game of yes-no-maybe-sometime-never. Not many, because the Mundan girls had grown up proudly and were competition too powerful for the newly developed Clade women, but a few, since they knew it was possible.

What happened to Phyllis showed them it was possible. She had turned down the first three offers of marriage angrily, ashamed that such a suggestion should be made to her. But with the next three or four she began to get an inkling of the fact that this was a matter for pride, not shame, though she couldn't feel it yet.

And then she came to a truer understanding, a fusion of the more accurate elements in both points of view, when she realized that so far she had been asked only by the inevitable sensationmongers, the men who wanted to marry her because she had been a leading Clade, just as they would have wanted to marry any girl who happened to be in the public eye.

"I don't know yet," she said. Her voice sounded cold, and she knew it. She didn't want it to sound like that, but she didn't know what to do about it. "Eventually, perhaps," she added, trying to put some warmth into her tone, and failing.

Rog knew when to pursue a subject and when to leave it alone. "Pertwee really had something," he said, "when he said we were missing travel. I never traveled, so I didn't know. But he's right. We should never have built our own little villages and said, in effect, 'We're finished -- the job's done.' "

"Phyllis felt a stirring of interest "You mean . . . ? "

"The stars," said Rog. "Some people want to consolidate. Let them. I want to move on. Some of you Clades would come with me, I know."

"You wouldn't leave Freedom just like that. I know how you -- feel about it." And since she wasn't watching how she spoke so carefully, trying to put warmth into it, the warmth came.

"The great thing about Freedom was building it," said Rog. "Now it's built. Let's build something else."

He grinned suddenly. "It wouldn't be tomorrow, anyway. But some day -- it would be nice to take a ship somewhere, and make sure it got there, and people could live there, and that the new settlement was strong and healthy -- "

"So that's what you meant," said Phyllis, "about /purposes/. You always have to have one, don't you?"

. She hesitated. Then, not looking at him, she said: "If you do go, I'll come with you."

"I'm glad," Rog told her, without too much enthusiasm -- yet. "I hoped you would, Phyllis. I think you and I could work together well."

For the tirst time in her life Phyllis found herself wishing a proposition had been put to her as a woman and not as an officer. She suppressed the thought instantly, but she knew it would return. She didn't know that her expression had told Rog exactly what she was thinking.

It was with inner amusement that he added: "There won't be any risk of emotion ever clouding /your/ judgment, Phyllis."

She frowned. "Did it ever cloud yours?" she asked.

"I don't think so. I hope not."

The frown cleared. "Then that's all right," she said.

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THE TIME DISSOLVER by Jerry Sohl (T 186)

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ROG FOLEY had never seen Earth -- and he never would. For all that was left of Earth was an atomic funeral pyre in the sky.

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