(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.