The man behind him drew and shot him in the head.

  The result was ugly to see. As soon as he knew he was fully in charge, Thornberg did his best to comfort June.

  “As a matter of fact,” he told Sorensen, “I was bluffing. That was just a ball; the poison alone was real. Not that it made much difference at that stage, except to me.”

  “We’ll need Matilda for a while yet,” said Sorensen. “Want to stay on?”

  “Sure, provided I can take a vacation when my son comes home.”

  “That shouldn’t be long now. You’ll be glad to hear we’ve finally contacted the Venus units of the Space Guard, on their way back. The commander agreed to stay out of the fighting, on the grounds that his service’s obligation is to the legitimate government and we’ll need an election to determine what that is. Your boy will be safe.”

  Thornberg could find no words of response. Instead he remarked with hard-held casualness, “You know, I’m surprised to learn you were an undergrounder.”

  “We got a few into Security, who wrangled things so they gave each other clearances and loyalty checks.” Sorensen grimaced. “That was the only part of it I enjoyed, though, till quite lately.”

  He leaned back in his chair, which creaked under his weight. In civilian clothes which nothing but an armband made into the uniform of a Libertarian officer, he did seem an altogether different man. Where his bulk had formerly crowded Thornberg’s office, today his vitality irradiated it.

  “Then Sam Hall came along,” he said. “They had their suspicions at first in Security. My bosses were evil but not stupid. Well, I got myself assigned to the job of checking you out. Right away I guessed you harbored disruptive thoughts; so I gave you a clean bill of health. Afterward I cooked up that fantasy of the psychological mask and got several high-ranking men worried. When you followed my lead, I was sure you were on our side. Consequently, though the Libertarian command knew all along where Matilda was, of course they left her alone!”

  “You must have joined them in person very recently.”

  “Yeah, the witch-hunt you started inside of Security was getting too close to me. Well worth a risk, though, to see those cockroaches busily stepping on each other.”

  Thornberg sat quiet awhile, then leaned over his desk. “I haven’t enlisted under your banner yet,” he said gravely. “I had to assume the Libertarian words about freedom were not mere rhetoric. But…you mentioned Matilda. You want me to continue in my work here. What are your plans for her?”

  Sorensen turned equally serious. “I was waiting for you to ask that, Thorny. Look. Besides needing her to help us find some people we want rather badly, we are responsible for the sheer physical survival of the country. I’d feel easier too if we could take her apart this minute. But—”

  “Yes?”

  “But we’ve got to transcribe a lot of information first, strictly practical facts. Then we wipe everything else and ceremoniously dynamite this building. You’re invited, no, urgently asked to sit on the board that decides the details—in other words, we want you to help work yourself out of a job.”

  “Thank you,” Thornberg whispered.

  After a moment, in a sudden tide of happiness, he chuckled. “And that will be the end of Sam Hall,” he said. “He’ll go to whatever Valhalla there is for the great characters of fiction. I can see him squabbling with Sherlock Holmes and shocking the hell out of King Arthur and striking up a beautiful friendship with Long John Silver. Do you know how the ballad ends?” He sang softly: “Now up in heaven I dwell, in heaven I dwell…”

  Unfortunately, the conclusion is pretty rugged. Sam Hall never was satisfied.

  ROBIN HOOD’S BARN

  Svoboda was about sixty years old. He did not know his exact age. The Low-level seldom counted such things, and his earliest memory was of weeping in an alley while rain fell past an overhead beltway that roared. Afterward his mother died and someone, who claimed to be his father, but probably wasn’t, sold him to Inky the thiefmaster.

  Sixty was ancient for a man of the masses, whether he slunk cat-fashion through soot and noise and sudden death in a city Lowlevel or—more healthfully if with less freedom—squirmed along a mine shaft or tended engine on a plankton reaper. For an upperlevel Citizen, or a Guardian, sixty was only middle-aged. Svoboda, who had spent half his life in either category, looked as old as Satan but could hope for another two decades.

  If you wanted to call it hope, he thought wryly.

  His left foot was paining him again. It was a lump within the special shoe. When he was twelve or so, scrambling over a garden wall with a silver chalice contributed by one Engineer Harkavy, an explosive slug from a guard’s pistol had smashed all the bones. He got away somehow, but it was a cruel thing to happen to one of the most agile and promising lads in the Brotherhood. Inky reapprenticed him to a fence, which forced him to learn reading and writing and thus started him on a long road up. Twenty-five years afterward, when Svoboda was Commissioner of Astronautics, a medic recommended prosthetizing the broken foot.

  “I could make you one that you could hardly tell from the real thing, sir,” he offered.

  “Undoubtedly,” said Svoboda. “I have seen our older Guardians tottering around with prosthetic hearts and prosthetic stomachs and a sort of prosthetic eye. I am sure the onward march of science will soon come to a prosthetic brain, which can hardly be told from the real thing. Some of my colleagues led me to think this has already been achieved.” He shrugged skinny shoulders. “No. I’m too busy. Later, perhaps.”

  The busyness consisted in breaking out of the Astronautical Department, a notorious dead-end street into which nervous superiors had maneuvered him. And having done so, he was at once preoccupied with something else. There had never been time. You had to run pretty fast just to stay where you were.

  How many people nowadays had read “Alice”? he wondered.

  But the foot often did pain him. He stopped to let the throbbing ease.

  “Are you all right, sir?” asked Iyeyasu.

  Svoboda looked at the gray-clad giant and smiled. His other six guards were nonentities, the usual efficient impersonal killing machines. Iyeyasu did not pack a gun; he was a karate man, and he could reach into your rib cage and pull your lungs out if you displeased Svoboda.

  “I’ll do,” said the Commissioner of Psychologics. “Don’t inquire exactly what I’ll do, but there must be something.”

  Iyeyasu offered an arm and his master leaned on it. The contrast was ridiculous. Svoboda stood barely one hundred fifty centimeters tall, with a hairless dome of skull and a face all dark wrinkles and scimitar nose. His childish frame was gaudy in a cloak like fire, iridescent high-collared tunic, and deep-blue trousers cut in the latest bell-bottomed style. Whereas the Okinawan wore gray, and had a shoulder-length black mane and hands deformed by a lifetime’s cracking bricks and punching through boards.

  Svoboda fumbled with yellow-stained fingers after a cigarette. He stood on a landing terrace, immensely high up. Below was none of the parkscape which most Commissioners chose for their buildings; Svoboda had put his departmental tower in the same city which spawned him. It stretched under his feet, as far as he could gaze through air-borne filth. But past the floating docks, on the world’s very eastern edge, he could see a mercury gleam that was the open Atlantic.

  Dusk was creeping over the planet, spires etched themselves black across a surly red sundown. Highlevel walls and streets began to glow. Lowlevel was a darkness beneath, and a muted unending growl of beltways, generators, auto factories, sparks to show a window waking to life or a pedicar headlamp or the flashes of men going in cudgel-armed parties for fear of the Brotherhood.

  Svoboda drew smoke through his nostrils. His eyes wandered past the aircar which had borne him here from his oceanic house to the sky. Venus stood forth, white against royal blue. He sighed and gestured at it. “Do you know,” he said, “I’m almost glad the colony there has been discontinued. Not because it wasn’t paying for itself, but for a better reason.”

  “What is that, sir?” Iyeyasu sensed that the commissioner wanted to talk. They had been together for many years.

  “Now there’s one place you can go to get away from humankind.”

  “Venus air is no good, sir. You can go to the stars and get away, and not wear armor.”

  “But nine years in deepsleep to the nearest star. A bit extreme for a vacation.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And then the planets you find are as bad as Venus…or they’re like Earth, but not enough like Earth, and men break their hearts. Come on, let’s go play at being important.”

  Svoboda leaned back onto his crutch and went quickly over the terrace, through an arched portal and down a long luminous-walled corridor. His guards fanned out, ahead and behind, their eyes never still; Iyeyasu stayed close. Not that Svoboda expected assassins. There was a night shift here, because Psychologics was a major fief within the Federation government, but no one on this floor.

  At the hall’s end was a teleconference room. Svoboda hobbled to an easy-chair, Iyeyasu helped him into it and set a desk in front of him. Most of the men who looked from the screens had advisors beside them. Svoboda was alone, except for his guards. He had always worked alone.

  Premier Selim nodded. Behind his image was a window opening on palm trees. “Ah, there you are, Commissioner,” he said. “We were just beginning to wonder.”

  “I apologize for lateness,” said Svoboda. “As you know, I never transact business from my home, so I had to come here for the conference. Well, a caisson under my house sprang a leak, the gyrostabilizers failed, and before I knew what had happened I was reading the time off a seasick octopus. It was ten minutes slow.”

  Security Chief Chandra blinked, opened a bearded mouth to protest, then nodded. “Ah, you make a joke. I see. Ha.” He sat in India at sunrise; but the rulers of Earth were used to irregular hours.

  “Let us begin,” said Selim. “We will dispense with formalities. However, before we start the business at hand, is there anything else of urgency?”

  “Er—” Rathjen, the present Commissioner of Astronautics, spoke timidly. He was the weak son of the late Premier; his father had given him the post and nobody since had cared to take it away. “Er, yes, gentlemen, I should again like to raise the question of repair funds for…I mean to say, we have several perfectly good spaceships which only need a few million in repair funds to, er, reach the stars again. And then all the astronautical academies, really, the quality of new recruits is as low as the quantity. I should think, that is, if we—Mr. Svoboda especially, it seems to be in his department—an intensive propaganda campaign, directed at younger sons of the Guardian families…or Citizens of professional Status…persuading them of the importance, giving the profession the, er, the glamor it once had—”

  “Please,” interrupted Selim. “Another time.”

  “I might make a remark, though,” said Svoboda.

  “What?” Novikov of Mines turned a surprised eye on him. “You are the one who brought this special conference about. Do you want to waste it on irrelevancies?”

  “‘Nothing is irrelevant,’” murmured Svoboda.

  “What?” said Chandra.

  “I was only quoting Anker, the philosophical father of Constitutionalism,” Svoboda told him. “Some day you might try understanding the things you want to suppress. I have been assured that it works wonders.”

  Chandra flushed with annoyance. “But I don’t want—” he began, and decided otherwise.

  Selim looked baffled. Rathjen said plaintively, “You were going to comment. on my business, Mr. Svoboda.”

  “So I was.” The small man struck a fresh cigarette and inhaled deeply. His eyes, a startling electric blue in the mummy face, leaped from screen to screen. “Commissioner Novikov could give you a good reason for the decay of astronautics: more people and fewer resources every day. We can no more afford interstellar exploration than we can afford representative government. The vestiges of both are being eliminated as fast as the anguish of yourself, and the Constitutionalists, permits. Which I know is not as fast as some of you gentlemen would like. But by pushing social change too hard, the government provoked the North American Rebellion twenty years ago.” He grinned. “Therefore we must take the lesson to heart and not goad the Astronautical Department into revolt. It is easier to operate a few spaceships for a few more generations than to storm barricades of filing cabinets manned by desperate bureaucrats waving the bloody flag in triplicate. But you on your side must not expect us to expand, or even maintain, your fleet.”

  “Mr. Svoboda!” gasped Rathjen.

  Selim cleared his throat. “We all know the Psychologics Commissioner’s sense of humor,” he said ponderously. “But since he has mentioned the Constitutionalists, I trust he means to proceed to our real business.”

  The dozen faces turned upon Svoboda and did not let go. He veiled his own stare in smoke and answered, “Very well. I daresay Commissioner-baiting is a cruel sport, and we’d all do better to pick good-looking Citizen girls off the streets for several weeks of Special Instruction.” Now Larkin of Pelagiculture was the one who glared. “Perhaps you aren’t all familiar with the issue on hand. I’ve submitted a special report on the Constitutionalists to Premier Selim, Mr. Chandra, and the Commandant of North America. It proved so controversial that the whole Guardian Commission has been asked to debate it.”

  He nodded at Selim. The Premier’s harsh gray face looked a bit startled; it was almost as if Svoboda had given him permission to go ahead. He harrumphed, glanced at the paper on his desk, and said:

  “The trouble is, the Constitutionalists are not a political group. If they were, we could round them up tomorrow. They are not even formally organized, and there are all shades of agreement among them. It’s a philosophy.”

  “Bad!” murmured Svoboda. “Philosophies only rationalize emotional attitudes. The very name of this one is a Freudian slip.”

  “What’s that?” asked Novikov.

  “You ought to know,” said Svoboda sweetly. “You’re rather an expert. To continue, though. Officially, the name ‘Constitutionalism’ only refers to an attitude toward the physical universe, an advocacy of basing thought patterns on the constitution of reality. But I grew up here, where half the population still speaks English. And in English, that word Constitution is loaded! The North American insurrection was brought on when the Federation government persistently and flagrantly violated—not the spirit of their poor old much-amended Constitution; they were always good at that themselves—but the letter of it.”

  “I know that much,” said Chandra. “Don’t think I haven’t investigated these philosophers, as you call them. I know that many were in the revolt, or had fathers who were. But they aren’t dangerous. They may grumble to themselves, but as a class they’re not doing so badly. They’ve no reason to start another futile uprising.” He shrugged. “Actually, most of them must be intelligent enough to see that that bill of rights or whatever it was simply doesn’t work when there are half a billion people on their continent, eighty per cent illiterate.”

  “What are they, anyway?” asked Dilolo of Agriculture.

  “Mostly North American,” said Svoboda. “I mean of the old stock, not the more recent immigrants. But their doctrines are spreading through the educated Citizens all over the world. I imagine if you quizzed, you’d find a fourth of the literate population, rather more than that among scientists and technicians, in substantial agreement with Constitutionalist doctrine. Though, of course, they wouldn’t think of themselves under that name, usually.”

  “In other words,” said Chandra, “it’s not just another new religion. Not for the guts. Nor for Guardians, as a rule”—he gave Svoboda a lingering glance—“or top-level Citizens. So I agree it merited investigation. But I found Constitutionalism appealed to the hard-working, prosperous-but-not-rich man: the sober, solid type, who has won a little more status than his father and hopes his son may have just a little more than himself. Such people aren’t revolutionaries.”

  “And yet,” said Svoboda, “Constitutionalism is becoming a great deal stronger than you would expect from the small number of formal adherents.”

  “How?” asked Larkin.

  “You leave your engineers’ daughters alone, don’t you?” said Svoboda.

  “What has that…I mean, explain yourself before I lodge a criticism!”

  Svoboda grinned. He could break Larkin any time he chose. “The Guardians have the power,” he said, “but what’s left of Earth’s middle class has the influence. There’s a distinction. The masses don’t try to imitate the Guardians, or really listen to us; the gap is too great. Their natural leaders are the lower-middle-class Citizenry. As for us, we may decree the irrigation of Morocco, and round up a million convicts to dig canals and die; but only if the upper-middle-class specialist has assured us it’s feasible. He probably advised it in the first place!

  “The trouble with Constitutionalism is, it’s all too likely to give this middle class an awareness of their potential power, and thereby start them agitating for a corresponding voice in the government. Which could be more than a little bit lethal to us.”

  There was a pause. Svoboda finished his cigarette and struck another. He felt the air wheeze in his throat. All the world’s biomedics couldn’t make up the abuse he visited on lungs and bronchial tubes. But what else was there to do? he thought somewhere in a private darkness.

  Selim said, “This is not a question of personal menace, gentlemen. But the Psychologics Commissioner has persuaded me that if we care about our children and grandchildren, we must think seriously on this matter.”

  “You don’t mean to arrest all the Constitutionalists?” asked Larkin, alarmed. “But you can’t do that! I know how many of my key technical personnel are…I mean, it could be a disaster to every pelagic city on Earth!”