Tourists could snow- or water-ski on air-repulsion boards, or parafly over cities and towns and the huge, crumbling motorways, their journeys replete with guides and aerial commentary. It was all very civilized, and the lines at any one attraction were never allowed to get too long.

  Earth, the birthplace of humanity, the exhausted cradle of mankind, had been transformed into a peaceful, quiet worldwide park where harried families from Ronin or Lincoln could come and refresh their spirits while exhausting their credit balances. The whole planet had been transformed into a Smooth Operation, and a clean one at that. Any necessary “dirty” industries had been exiled to the moon.

  There was no unemployment to speak of, and except for the sameness, native Terrans were generally a contented clan, happy to be free of the constant confrontations that bedeviled the more developed worlds. Still, applications to emigrate were frequent. Though beautiful, Earth was known far and wide as a pretty dull place. There wasn’t much of anything to do there except look at the monuments.

  What excitement there was concentrated around the shuttle receiving ports like Brisbane and Mojave, Tripoli and Johannesburg. Excitement, but no innovation. Nothing new. Earth stayed the same, its culture frozen in time, willingly resistant to alteration. The currents of galactic change swirled around but did not impinge on its citizens.

  The only real movement came in the form of those who visited and wished to remain. Because after tourism, retirement was Earth’s biggest industry. Devoid of excitement man’s ancestral home might be, but peace and quiet, clean air and space it had in abundance. To a retiree from Washington III or Edo or Aparima, it seemed spatially as well as spiritually close to heaven.

  Near the parks and plains, unblemished mountains and refurbished rivers, retirement communities materialized, together with the requisite medical and other support facilities. People who could afford it flocked from the powerful industrial worlds to spend their golden years immersed in the tranquillity of Earth. All who did so felt a strong sense of “coming home.” Once comfortably ensconced in Old Europe, or Africa, or North America, few ever opted later to move on.

  Earth welcomed them all with open arms and amenable banking facilities. The retirement industry was, as it had always been, a relatively clean one. It did not upset the carefully coiffed status quo, and its representatives did not make a lot of noise. There were engineers and heavy-machine operators, famous performers and thrifty custodial personnel, farmers and industrialists. Both those who came and those who greeted them benefited. Retirement to Earth was a long-established and much admired tradition. The gerontological tilt they gave the population seemed natural in light of the planet’s age.

  So Earth spun around benign old Sol, a revered backwater satisfied to be out of the galactic mainstream, its visitors and its permanent population coexisting and equally content.

  III

  The two fleets shimmied in emptiness like stimulated nebulae; dozens, hundreds of bright sparks, each one representing a fully armed death-dealing warship. They confronted each other in normal space, it being quite impossible to do battle at faster-than-light speeds, in a region far from any civilized world, lest its inhabitants inadvertently be subjected to the incredible destructive energies they were capable of pouring upon one another.

  Differences of long standing needed to be settled. Ancient disputes demanded resolution. The Rovarik vessels glowed green and blue, bright against the surrounding starfield. The vast fleet formed a half ring around the monstrous ringed world mutually agreed upon as the rendezvous for combat.

  Lingering in the nearby asteroid belt, the Totamites assembled, smaller vessels crowding close to massive command ships. Armed with high-velocity missiles, they would strike first, to be followed by the pulse-beam-equipped capital craft.

  Enough firepower had been assembled in that small corner of space to ravage entire worlds, but their commanders were only interested in each other as they maneuvered cautiously for position. Once battle had been formally joined, it would be difficult if not impossible for either side to break off until some sort of final resolution had been achieved.

  The Rovarik commander considered his enemy’s position within the asteroid belt. That drifting mass of rock could complicate strategy, and he knew he would have to include it in all battle calculations. Just as the Totamites had to take into account the Rovarik location close to the gas giant and its moons. Individual ships, whole battle groupings, were constantly altering their locations as they tried to position themselves to optimum advantage for the forthcoming battle.

  Suddenly a salient of Rovariks darted forward from near a major moon. A cluster of Totamites, engines flaring, swept outward to meet them in a sweeping double-concentric formation known as The Palm. Weaponry abruptly drenched vacuum with enough energy to temporarily surpass the local sun.

  Ships slipped free or fled into tachyspace. Others, caught by the force of modern weaponry, evaporated: crews, complex machinery, everything obliterated by missile or pulsebeam, reduced to their component atoms or subatomic particles by forces unimagined a scant several hundred years earlier.

  The Rovarik commander continued to strike from the cover of the ringed world and its satellites. One battle group surprised a cluster of Totamites advancing to attack, only to find themselves surprised in turn by a single Totamite dreadnought which had camouflaged itself to resemble perfectly a wandering asteroid. Other Totamite vessels revealed themselves to be similarly disguised.

  Ships vanished in coruscating eruptions of destructive energy while frantic commands flashed from both command vessels as each side tried to monitor and anticipate its opponent’s strategy. Vessels attacked, retreated, realigned their positions.

  In a grand maneuver two dozen of the fastest Rovarik craft, which had spent the entire chronology of battle simply trying to get behind the asteroid belt, smashed into the center of the Totamite reserve from behind, cutting a broad swath through the heart of the enemy’s strength before their catastrophic intrusion was noted.

  The Totamite commander looked on in disbelief as one after another of his best ships was reduced to incandescent gas. In a sputtering rage he confronted the maddeningly confident face of his opposite number and delivered himself of profound disapproval.

  Whereupon Wallace Hawkins glanced up from where he was currently embroiled in a tense game of checkers with the ever placid Kahei Shimoda, and snapped, “Will you two keep it down over there?” He shook his head in disgust, returned to his game, and carefully jumped one black disc with his red one, removing the captured piece from the board with an irritated sweep of one hand.

  “I swear I don’t know why those two can’t use the simulator quietly.”

  Shimoda’s visage hovered moonlike over his end of the game board. He nudged a black disc forward to confront one of Hawkins’s. “They get involved.”

  “Hell, it’s just a goddamn game.” Off to their right, increasing noise rose from the vicinity of the simulated interstellar battle.

  “You cheated!” Iranaputra insisted loudly. He was waving his hands as he spoke. “I saw you take those two dozen ships outside the designated game boundary!”

  “Nonsense.” The Retired Honorable Colonel Wesley Chapell Follingston-Heath considered the transparent dome of the simulator and the hundreds of bright lights within, the climactic interstellar battle it portrayed temporarily having been put on hold by his opponent, who’d jabbed the pause button with indecent force. He leaned back in his chair, straight and handsome as he’d been in youth, though his face was lined and his mustache and goatee and flat-cropped kinky hair mostly gone to gray.

  It wasn’t just his calm self-assurance which infuriated his opponent, but also the realization that he was probably right. That didn’t prevent the determined Iranaputra from continuously trying to beat him, even though he was only a retired waste-disposal supervisor from Pandalia V and Follingston-Heath had been an officer in His Majesty’s Royal Fusiliers of the Victoria League of Worlds. As Follingston-Heath was always ready to remind his friends and occasional visitors.

  Iranaputra persisted. After all, it wasn’t as if they were fighting with real ships. Hadn’t supervising waste disposal for an entire half continent required considerable organizational talents, if of a slightly different nature? Still, it was a good day when he could force Follingston-Heath to a draw. More commonly he lost.

  But this time, this time, he was sure that his opponent was cheating.

  “One who cheats a stranger may claim victory,” he declared loudly, shaking a finger at the much taller Follingston-Heath, “but he who cheats his friends will never achieve Nirvana. Buddha, the sixty-third book of the Teachings.”

  “Piffle, Victor.” Follingston-Heath’s opponent was fond of quoting ancient scriptures and writings ad nauseam. Everyone at Lake Woneapenigong Retirement Village suspected that Iranaputra’s aphorisms were of doubtful scholarly veracity at best. But it was a difficult assertion to prove, since they usually hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about.

  Iranaputra seemed even shorter next to Follingston-Heath. He was of slim stature, compact and dark, though not nearly so dark as his opponent. Mina thought him handsome, but then as everyone knew, Mina Gelmann had no taste. She liked everybody. Many of the male retirees at the Village envied him his straight black hair, still only lightly flecked with gray at the temples. Good follicular genes, she knew. He kept it shoulder-length in defiance of the Village’s nominal grooming regulations. The small ongoing rebellion made him feel alive.

  He rose from his chair and continued to harangue the imperturbable Follingston-Heath with words and gestures, while the object of his irritation calmly folded his hands on his lap and smiled maddeningly. As usual, Follingston-Heath was immaculately dressed out in standard Victoria League off-duty uniform, the iridescent olive-green devoid of ostentatious decorations. The simulated buttons flashed in the soft lighting, and the half-high collar was stiff and straight at the back of the neck, its upper edge perfectly meeting the lowermost of FH’s white curls.

  It was the retired officer’s preferred manner of dress because, as he was fond of saying to the occasional visitor struck by his bearing and language, it blended well with the woods and helped to conceal him when he sat on the shore of the nearby lake to watch the deer and moose and smaller animals who filled the surrounding forest.

  In contrast Iranaputra wore a simple beige imitationmuslin open-neck shirt and pants. He liked to keep his apartment hot, and preferred to put on a jacket whenever he went outside. It was colder here in the upstate of Newyork Province than on his homeworld of Pandalia, but comfortably drier.

  The two men continued to argue, prompting Hawkins to bawl at them a second time. As he did so, Shimoda reached out to place thick fingers on his friend’s wrist. A statistician by trade, he’d spent his whole life working with numbers. A widower for ten years, his two children and several grandchildren gladly piddled along on Yushu V secure in the knowledge that their estimable grandfather was happy and content in retirement on Old Earth. Their respective professions also involved work with numbers, prompting Iranaputra to comment on several occasions that there must be a heretofore-overlooked gene for math.

  Shimoda took the jokes with a smile, as he did most everything else. His considerable girth was a matter of personal choice, since medication was available which would have enabled him to divest himself of his excess avoirdupois. He chose not to make use of it, content with, as he put it, his “expanded capacity for living.” Not to mention his lifelong passion for sumo.

  As a young man he’d wrestled professionally on the side, never advancing beyond the local semi-pro leagues. But he still kept in shape … or out of it, depending on one’s cultural perspective. It seemed an odd avocation for a statistician, but the ring allowed him a means for expressing his frustrations outside the workplace, and he’d made good use of it for many years.

  Six feet tall, he weighed more than Iranaputra and Hawkins combined. With his bald pate and pale skin he looked like a giant ambulatory billiard ball. His appetite challenged the Woneapenigong Village kitchen staff, which in addition to other specialties always made sure there was plenty of sticky rice around for Shimoda to snack on. Lake Woneapenigong was a “B” class retirement village—not top level, but better than average—and the staff took pride in a satisfied clientele. Shimoda did use medication, however, to stave off complications from potential arteriosclerosis and related diseases.

  No one ever saw him excited. His tolerance was admirable, and despite his bulk he’d never had a stroke. He kept up with his sumo, though in order to do so he had to make regular visits to the provincial capital at Albany to find any worthy opponents in his weight and age bracket. One was a true professional, who was careful with him, and the others talented amateurs for whom the sport was a useful discipline.

  Certainly he was no less healthy than the easily agitated Iranaputra or the perpetually dour Hawkins. To maintain the latter’s equilibrium, Shimoda would sometimes allow his opponent and friend to beat him at checkers, though not frequently. Not that Hawkins was a bad player: he was simply impatient, too often moving pieces around out of anger and frustration, perversely neglecting his own skill. Hawkins was not a happy man.

  He was also, along with Gelmann, a native Earther, born in a poor district of Baltimore. Of them all, he’d traveled the shortest distance to retire. In his forty years of local work lay the source of his sarcasm, which even his best friends could but rarely alleviate. Unlike those who saved to retire to Earth, Wallace Hawkins could not afford to retire anywhere else.

  “Why bother anyway?” he often said. “Isn’t this the best place?” His friends felt sorry for him.

  Hawkins had spent his whole life in the Park Service, helping to replant the Amazon, revegetate the Himalayas, cleanse the Great Barrier Reef, excoriate toxic waste from the Siberian steppe, and repopulate the vast herds of Africa. He’d been all over and had seen more of the planet than even wealthy tourists, making filthy places clean again, fit for visitors and retirees. Under his skillful direction flowers and corals bloomed, the land became green, the waters blue.

  Wallace Hawkins had had a hand in the creation of more natural beauty than most human beings, and the result had made him bitter.

  He hated it all: the fluorescent-jade Irrawaddy, the glistening Andes, the windswept, bison-trod Great Plains, and the newly pristine coral reefs of the Caribbean. On more than one occasion he’d loudly declared that if given a choice he’d have taken a bulldozer to the lot. He’d participated in ecological resurrection not out of love for the planet or the natural world, but because it was the best job he was able to get upon completing his education, and he’d stuck with it down through the decades lest he lose his valuable accumulated seniority.

  Not that he minded the dirt or working all day in isolated places with heavy equipment and powerful chemicals. He’d grumbled and griped his way through a long and respected career. Never married either, though there’d been a string of lady friends, especially in the early years. That surprised neither his friends nor his enemies. It was obvious to anyone who knew him that Wallace Hawkins would have been an impossible man to live with.

  When career was said and done, he’d retired. On Earth, not because it was his first choice, but because unlike Shimoda or Follingston-Heath, he couldn’t have afforded to go anywhere else. He’d chosen upstate Newyork Province because it was cool and comparatively cheap, and he was heartily sick of the kind of hot, humid locales where he’d toiled for so many years. Also, it was relatively untouched by the global landscapers. The lake, the trees, the mountains, stood pretty much as they had for thousands of years, untrammeled by the hand of man and therefore not in need of his well-meaning cosmetic attentions.

  Hawkins hated what Earth had become, and the fact that he’d had a hand in making it that way.

  “Earthers used to be tough,” he was fond of reminding his friends whenever the opportunity arose … and sometimes when it didn’t. “We’re the ones who settled the worlds. We’re the ones who sent people all over to hell and gone, using only the resources of one small, self-abused planet. All the leagues and alliances and independents were born here. Now we’re just a damn picnic area and old fogies’ home. A place for people to gawk at and moon over and retire to. Snooze World.”

  “That is as it should be,” Shimoda would tell him. “It is only natural that development and expansion should take place on and proceed from the outer worlds, recently settled and burgeoning with fresh life and energy and new ideas. There are twenty-four worlds in the First Federal Federation, fifteen in the Keiretsu, even seven in the good ol’ LFN. Earth can’t compete with them and shouldn’t try. In a violent argument Earth couldn’t stand up to a strong independent like Pandalia, much less one of the leagues, and it shouldn’t have to.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Hawkins would reply. “That’s what bothers me. Not only have we used up all our resources, we’ve exported all our determination as well. Least I’ve got you guys. You ain’t much, but you’re a piece better than most.”

  Shimoda and Gelmann, Follingston-Heath and Iranaputra, accepted his backhanded compliments and ignored his insults because they thought they understood him and the source of his frustrations and anger. But most of all they felt sorry for him, because not many other residents of Lake Woneapenigong Village would have anything to do with him. They had retired in search of peace and contentment, and Wallace Hawkins was a font of bilious recrimination.

  He was also a pretty decent checkers player, Shimoda had discovered. Not great, but better than most. Sadly sumo left him cold. “Sorta like watching icebergs calve,” Hawkins had growled once when asked his opinion of the sport.