“W-would you…revive the old government?”

  “Not precisely. The country and its people are too changed from what they were. I think, however, we could bring back Jefferson’s original idea. We could write a basic law which does not compromise with the state, and hope that in time the people will again understand.”

  He had spoken as if at a sacrament. Abruptly he shook himself, laughed a little, and raised his glass. “Well!” he said. “You didn’t come here for a lecture. A vuestra salud.”

  My hand still shook when I drank with him.

  “We’d better discuss your personal plans,” he suggested. “I know you’ve had a hatful of business lately, but none of us dare stay longer than overnight here. Where might you like to go?”

  “Sir?” I didn’t grasp his meaning at once. Drug or no, my brain was turning slowly under its burdens. “Why…home. Back to base. Where else?”

  “Oh, no. Can’t be. I said you have proved you are not a man we want to risk.”

  “Bu-but…if I don’t go back, it’s a giveaway!”

  “No fears. We have experts at this sort of thing. You will be provided unquestionable reasons why your leave should be extended. A nervous collapse, maybe, plausible in view of the recent strains on you, and fakeable to fool any military medic into prescribing a rest cure. Why, your family can probably join you at some pleasant spot.” Sotomayor chuckled. “Oh, you’ll work hard. We want you in consultation, and between times I want to educate you. We’ll try to arrange a suitable replacement at Reed. But one missile base is actually less important than the duties I have in mind for you,”

  I dropped my glass. The room whirled. Through a blur I saw Sotomayor jump up and bend over me, heard his voice: “What’s the matter? Are you sick?”

  Yes, I was. From a blow to the…the belly.

  I rallied, and knew I might argue for being returned home, and knew it would be no use. Fending off his anxious hands, I got to my feet. “Exhaustion, I guess,” I slurred. “Be okay in a minute. Which way’s uh bathroom?”

  “Here.” He took my arm again.

  When the door had closed on him, I stood in tiled sterility and confronted my face. But adrenalin pumped through me, and Mannix’s chemicals were still there. Everything Mannix had done was still there.

  If I stalled until too late…the Lomonosov Institute might or might not survive. If it did, I might or might not be admitted. If it didn’t, something equivalent might or might not be built elsewhere in some latter year. I might or might not get the benefit thereof, before I was too old.

  Meanwhile Bonnie—and my duty was not, not to anybody’s vague dream—and I had barely a minute to decide—and it would take longer than that to change my most recent programming—

  Act! yelled the chemicals.

  I zipped down my pants, took my gun in my right hand, and opened the door.

  Sotomayor had waited outside. At his back I saw the main room, water, moon, stars. Astonishment smashed his dignity. “Dowling, ¿esta usted loco? What the flaming hell—?”

  Each word I spoke made me more sure, more efficient. “This is a weapon. Stand back.”

  Instead, he approached. I remembered he had been in single combats and remained vigorous and leathery. I aimed past him and squeezed as I had been taught. The flash of light burned a hole through carpet and floorboards at his feet. Smoke spurted from the pockmark. It smelled harsh.

  Sotomayor halted, knees bent, hands cocked. Once, hunting in the piny woods of my boyhood, we’d cornered a bobcat. It had stood the way he did, teeth peeled but body crouched moveless, watching every instant for a chance to break free.

  I nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “A zap gun. Sorry, I’ve changed teams.”

  He didn’t stir, didn’t speak, until he forced me to add: “Back. To yonder phone I see. I’ve got a call to make.” My lips twitched sideways. “I can’t very well do otherwise, can I?”

  “Has that thing—” he whispered, “has that thing been substituted for the original?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Forget your machismo. I’ve got the glands.”

  “Pugilist,” he breathed, almost wonderingly. Faintly through the blood-filled stiffness of me, I felt surprise. “What?”

  “The ancient Romans often did the same to their pugilists,” he said in monotone. “Slaves who boxed in the arenas, iron on their fists. The man kept his physical strength, you see, but his bitterness made him fight without fear or pity…Yes. Pavlov and those who used Pavlov’s discoveries frequently got good reconditioning results from castration. Such a fundamental shock. This is more efficient. Yes.”

  Fury leaped in me. “Shut your mouth! They’ll grow me back what I’ve lost. I love my wife.”

  Sotomayor shook his head. “Love is a convenient instrument for the almighty state, no?”

  He had no right to look that scornful, like some aristocrat. History had dismissed them, the damned feudal oppressors; and when the men in this house were seized, and the information, his own castle would crash down.

  He made a move. I leveled my weapon. His right hand simply gestured, touching brow, lips, breast, left and right shoulders. “Move!” I ordered.

  He did—straight at me, shouting loud enough to wake the dead in Philadelphia.

  I fired into his mouth. His head disintegrated. A cooked eyeball rolled out. But he had such speed that his corpse knocked me over.

  I tore free of the embrace of those arms, spat out his blood, and leaped to lock the hall door. Knocking began a minute afterward, and the cry, “What’s wrong? Let me in!”

  “Everything’s all right,” I told the panel. “Comrade Sotomayor slipped and nearly fell. I caught him.”

  “Why’s he silent? Let us in!”

  I’d expected nothing different and was already dragging furniture in front of the door. Blows and kicks, clamor and curses waxed beyond. I scuttled to the telephone—sure, they provided this headquarters well—and punched the number Mannix had given me. An impulse would go directly to a computer which would trace the line and dispatch an emergency squad here. Five minutes?

  They threw themselves at the door, thud, thud, thud. That isn’t as easy as the shows pretend. It would go down before long, though. I used bed, chairs, and tables to barricade the bathroom door. I chinked my fortress with books and placed myself behind, leaving a loophole.

  When they burst through, I shot and I shot and I shot. I grew hoarse from yelling. The air grew sharp with ozone and thick with cooked meat.

  Two dead, several wounded, the attackers retreated. It had dawned on them that I must have summoned help and they’d better get out.

  The choppers descended as they reached the street.

  My rescuers of the civil police hadn’t been told anything, merely given a Condition A order to raid a place. So I must be held with the other survivors to wait for higher authority. Since the matter was obviously important, this house was the jail which would preserve the most discretion.

  But they had no reason to doubt my statement that I was a political agent. I’d better be confined respectfully. The captain offered me my pick of rooms and was surprised when I asked for Sotomayor’s if the mess there had been cleaned up.

  Among other features, it was the farthest away from everybody else, the farthest above the land.

  Also, it had that bottle. I could drink if not sleep. When that didn’t lift my postcombat sadness, I started thumbing through books. There was nothing else to do in the night silence.

  I read: We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of those Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

  I read: We the People of the United States…secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…

  I read: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peacefully to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

  I read: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

  I read: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility toward every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

  I read: “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free,—honourable alike in what we give and what we preserve.”

  I read: But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid…

  When Mannix arrived—in person—he blamed my sobbing on sheer weariness. He may have been right.

  Oh, yes, he kept his promise. My part in this affair could not be completely shielded from suspicion among what rebels escaped the roundup. A marked man, I had my best chance in transferring to the technical branch of the political police. They reward good service.

  So, after our internal crisis was over and the threat of our rockets made the Kunin faction quit, with gratifyingly little damage done the Motherland, I went to Moscow and returned whole.

  Only it’s no good with Bonnie, I’m no good at all.

  INSIDE STRAIGHT

  In the main, sociodynamic theory predicted quite accurately the effects of the secondary drive. It foresaw that once cheap interstellar transportation was available, there would be considerable emigration from the Solar System—men looking for a fresh start, malcontents of all kinds, “peculiar people” desiring to maintain their form of life without interference. It also predicted that these colonies would in turn spawn colonies, again of unsatisfied minority groups, until this part of the Galaxy was sprinkled with human settled planets; and that in their relative isolation, these politically independent worlds would develop some very odd societies.

  However, the economic bias of the Renascence period, and the fact that war was a discarded institution in the Solar System, led these same predictors into errors of detail. It was felt that, since planets useful to man are normally separated by scores of light-years, and since any planet colonized on a high technological level would be quite self-sufficient, there would be little intercourse and no strife between these settlements. In their own reasonableness, the Renascence intellectuals overlooked the fact that man as a whole is not a rational animal, and that exploration and war do not always have economic causes.

  —Simon Vardis

  A Short History of Pre-Commonwealth Politics

  Reel I, Frame 617

  They did not build high on New Hermes. There was plenty of room, and the few cities sprawled across many square kilometers in a complex of low, softly tinted domes and cylindroids. Parks spread green wherever you looked, each breeze woke a thousand bell-trees into a rush of chiming, flowers and the bright-winged summerflits ran wildly colored beneath a serene blue sky. The planetary capital, Arkinshaw, had the same leisurely old-fashioned look as the other towns Ganch had seen; only down by the docks was there a fevered energy and a brawling life.

  The restaurant Wayland had taken him to was incredibly archaic; it even had live service. When they had finished a subtly prepared lunch, the waiter strolled to their table. “Was there anything else, sir?” he asked.

  “I thank you, no,” said Wayland. He was a small, lithe man with close-cropped gray-shot hair and a brown nutcracker face in which lay startlingly bright blue eyes. On him, the local dress—a knee-length plaid tunic, green buskins, and yellow mantle—looked good…which was more than you could say for most of them, reflected Ganch.

  The waiter produced a tray. There was no bill on it, as Ganch had expected, but a pair of dice. Oh, no! he thought. By the Principle, no! Not this again!

  Wayland rattled the cubes in his hand, muttering an incantation. They flipped on the table, eight spots looked up. “Fortune seems to favor you, sir,” said the waiter.

  “May she smile on a more worthy son,” replied Wayland. Ganch noted with disgust that the planet’s urbanity-imperative extended even to servants. The waiter shook the dice and threw.

  “Snake eyes,” he smiled. “Congratulations, sir. I trust you enjoyed the meal.”

  “Yes, indeed,” said Wayland, rising. “My compliments to the chef, and you and he are invited to my next poker game. I’ll have an announcement about it on the telescreens.”

  He and the waiter exchanged bows and compliments. Then Wayland left, ushering Ganch through the door and out onto the slidewalk. They found seats and let it carry them toward the waterfront, which Ganch had expressed a desire to see.

  “Ah—” Ganch cleared his throat. “How was that done?”

  “Eh?” Wayland blinked. “Don’t you even have dice on Dromm?”

  “Oh, yes. But I mean the principle of payment for the meal.”

  “I shook him. Double or nothing. I won.”

  Ganch shook his head. He was a tall, muscular man in a skin-tight black uniform. That and the scarlet eyes in his long bony face (not albinism, but healthy mutation) marked him as belonging to the Great Cadre of Dromm.

  “But then the restaurant loses money,” he said.

  “This time, yes,” nodded Wayland. “It evens out in the course of a day—just as all our commerce evens out, so that in the long run everybody earns his rightful wage or profit.”

  “But suppose one—ah—cheats?”

  Surprisingly, Wayland reddened, and looked around. When he spoke again, it was in a low voice: “Don’t ever use that word, sir, I beg of you. I realize the mores are different on your planet, but here there is one unforgiveable, utterly obscene sin, and it’s the one you just mentioned.” He sat back, breathing heavily for a while, then seemed to cool off and proffered cigars. Ganch declined—tobacco did not grow on Dromm—but Wayland puffed his own into lighting with obvious enjoyment.

  “As a matter of fact,” he said presently, “our whole social conditioning is such as to preclude the possibility of…unfairness. You realize how thoroughly an imperative can be inculcated with modern psychopediatrics. It’s a matter of course that all equipment, from dice and coins to the most elaborate Stellarium set, is periodically checked by a Games Engineer.”

  “I see,” said Ganch doubtfully. He looked around as the slidewalk carried him on. It was a pleasant, sunny day, like most on New Hermes. Only to be expected on a world with two small continents, all the rest of the land split into a multitude of islands. The people he saw had a relaxed appearance—the men in their tunics and mantles, women in their loose filmy gowns, the children in little or nothing. A race of sybarites; they had had it too easy here, and degenerated.

  Sharply he remembered Dromm, its gaunt glacial peaks and wind-scoured deserts, storm and darkness, galloping down from the poles, the huge iron cubicles of cities and the obedient gray-clad masses that filled them. That world had brought forth the Great Cadre, and tempered them in struggle and heartbreak, and given them power first over a people and then over a planet and then over two systems.

  Eventually…who knew? The Galaxy?

  “I am interested in your history,” he said, recalling himself. “Just how was New Hermes settled?”

  “The usual process,” shrugged Wayland. “Our folk came from Caledonia, which had been settled from Old Hermes, whose people were from Earth. A puritanical gang got into control and started making all kinds of senseless restrictions on natural impulses. Finally a small group, our ancestors, could take no more, and went off looking for a planet of their own. That was about three hundred years ago. They went far, into this spiral arm which was then completely unexplored, in the hope of being left alone; and that hope has been realized. To this day, except for a couple of minor wars, we’ve had only casual visitors like yourself.”

  Casual! A grim amusement twisted Ganch’s mouth upward.

  To cover it, he asked: “But surely you’ve had your difficulties? It cannot have been simply a matter of landing here and founding your cities.”

  “Oh, no, of course not. The usual pioneer troubles—unknown diseases, wild animals, storms, a strange ecology. There were some hard times before the machines were constructed. Now, of course, we have it pretty good. There are fifty million of us, and space for many more; but we’re in no hurry to expand the population. We like elbow room.”

  Ganch frowned until he had deduced the meaning of that last phrase. They spoke Anglic here, as on Dromm and most colonies, but naturally an individual dialect had evolved.

  Excitement gripped him. Fifty million! There were two hundred million people on Dromm, and conquered Thanit added half again as many.

  Of course, said his military training, sheer numbers meant little. Automatized equipment made all but the most highly skilled officers and technicians irrelevant. War between systems involved sending a space fleet, which met and beat the enemy fleet in a series of engagements; bases on planets had to be manned, and sometimes taken by ground forces, but the fighting was normally remote from the worlds concerned. Once the enemy navy was broken, its home had to capitulate or be sterilized by bombardment from the skies.

  Still…New Hermes should be an even easier prey than Thanit had been.

  “Haven’t you taken any precautions against…hostiles?” he asked, mostly because the question fitted his assumed character.

  “Oh, yes, to be sure,” said Wayland. “We maintain a navy and marine corps; matter of fact, I’m in the Naval Intelligence Reserve myself, captain’s rank. We had to fight a couple of small wars in the previous century, once with the Corridans—nonhumans out for loot—and once with Oberkassel, whose people were on a religious-fanatic kick. We won them both without much trouble.” He added modestly: “But of course, sir, neither planet was very intelligently guided.”