“You see?” smiled Svoboda. He shook his head. “No, no. Besides such practical, immediate difficulties, mass arrests involve a danger of provoking new conspiracies to overthrow the Federation. I’m not that stupid, my friends. I propose to undermine the Constitutionalist movement, not batter at it.”

  “But see here,” objected Chandra, “if it’s a simple question of a propaganda campaign, you don’t need all of us to—”

  “More than propaganda. I want to close the Constitutionalist schools. Never mind the adults; it’s the next generation that we’re worried about anyway.”

  “You wouldn’t let their brats into our schools, would you?” gasped Dilolo.

  “I assure you, they don’t have vermin,” said Svoboda. “Of course, they might be infected with a little originality. But no, I’m not that drastic. However, my idea is radical enough to need full Commission approval. It involves reviving the old concept of free compulsory education.”

  After the hubbub had faded, which it did because he sat and ignored it, he went on: “Oh, modified, to be sure. I don’t plan to rope in the hopeless seventy-five per cent of the population. Let them go their merry way. We can rig admission standards to keep them out, easily enough. What I do want is a decree that all basic education will be financed by the government and must meet official requirements. Which means my requirements. I’ll leave the apprentice centers, academies, monasteries, and other useful or harmless institutions alone. But the schools maintained according to Constitutionalist principles will be found to have a deplorably low academic level. I’ll fire their teachers and put in some good loyal hacks and some good loyal propaganda.”

  “There’ll be trouble,” warned Dilolo.

  “Yes. But not too much. Of course the parents will object. But what can they say? Here the state, in a sudden gush of benevolence, is lifting the burden of school costs off their shoulders—never mind where the taxes come from—and making sure that their children will be properly taught and properly adjusted to society. If they want to instill their funny little beliefs in addition, why, they can do it in the evenings and on holidays.”

  “Ha!” Chandra laughed. “A lot of good that will do.”

  “Just so,” agreed Svoboda. “A philosophy has to be lived; you can’t acquire it in an hour a day from a weary father who lectures you while you’d rather be out playing ball. Your non-Constitutionalist classmates are going to ridicule your oddities. And at the same time, the parents will scarcely be able to stir up popular support. This simply isn’t the kind of issue which brings on revolutions. We will, almost literally, kill Constitutionalism in its cradle.”

  “You haven’t yet proven that it’s worth the trouble of killing,” said Novikov.

  Larkin put in vindictively: “I know why it is. Because Mr. Svoboda’s only son is a Constitutionalist, that’s the reason. Because they broke up over the issue ten years ago and haven’t spoken since!”

  Svoboda’s eyes turned quite pale. He held them on Larkin for a very long time. Finally Larkin squirmed, twisted a pencil in his fingers, looked away, looked back, and wiped sweat off his face.

  Svoboda continued to stare. It grew very still in the room—in all the rooms. At the end, Svoboda sighed. “I shall lay the detailed facts and analysis before you, gentlemen,” he said. “I shall prove that Constitutionalism has the seeds of social change in it: radical change. Do you want the World Wars back again? Or even a bourgeoisie strong enough to try for a voice in government? That sounds less dramatic, but I assure you, the Guardians will be killed just as dead. Now, in order to prove my contention, I shall begin with—”

  The address which Theron Wolfe had given turned out to be on the fiftieth floor in a district once proud. Joshua Coffin could remember almost a century back, how the sky town had reared alone among trees and gardens, and only a dun cloud in the east bespoke the city. But now the city had engulfed this tower with mean plastic shells of tenement. In another generation, this would be Lowlevel.

  “However,” said Wolfe, “I have lived here all my life, and gotten a sentimental attachment to the place.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Coffin was startled.

  “It might be hard for a spaceman to realize.” Wolfe smiled. “Or for most better-to-do Citizens, as far as that goes. They are even more nomadic than you, First Officer. Generally you have to be of Guardian family, with an estate, or one of the nameless mass too poor to move anywhere, to strike roots nowadays. But I am a middle-class exception.” He stroked his beard and added after a moment, sardonically: “Besides which, it would be hard to find a comparable apartment. You must realize that Earth’s population has doubled since you left.”

  “I know,” said Coffin. It emerged harsher than he had intended.

  “But come in.” Wolfe took his arm and led him off the terrace. They entered a living room archaic with broad windows, solid furniture, paneling which might be actual wood, shelves of books both folio and micro, a few age-cracked oil paintings. The merchant’s wife, plain and fiftyish, bowed to her guest and went back to the kitchen. She actually cooked her own food? Coffin was irrationally touched.

  “Please sit down.” Wolfe waved a hand at a worn, ugly chair—an antique, but highly functional. “Unless of course you prefer the modern fashion of sitting cross-legged on a rug. Even Guardians are beginning to think it’s stylish.” Horsehair rustled under Coffin’s weight. “Smoke?”

  “No, thank you.” The spaceman realized his tone had been too prim, and tried to rationalize. “It’s not a common habit in my profession. Mass-ratio, you know, approximately nine to one for an interstellar journey—” He stopped. “Pardon me. I did not mean to talk shop.”

  “Oh, but I would much prefer you did. That’s why I invited you here, after catching your lecture.” Wolfe took a cigarillo from the box. “How about a drink?”

  Coffin accepted a small glass of dry sherry. The genuine article, doubtless fabulously expensive. In a way it was a shame to waste it on his unappreciative palate.

  He looked at Wolfe. The merchant was big, plump, still hearty in middle age, with a neat gray Vandyke on an unusual broad face. The space between his eyes gave him a curious withdrawn look, as if a part of him always stood aside from the world and watched. He wore a formal robe over dress pajamas, but his feet were bare in slippers. The colors were as sober as the rest of this room.

  Wolfe sat down, sipped, rolled smoke around his mouth, and said, “A shame so few people heard your lecture, First Officer. It was most interesting.”

  “I am not a very good speaker,” said Coffin, correctly enough.

  “The subject matter, though. To think, a planet of Epsilon Eridani where men can live!”

  Coffin felt a thickness of anger. Before he could stop himself, his tongue threw out: “You must be the thousandth person who has said I was at Epsilon Eridani. For your information, Epsilon is a miserable dwarf of no use to any Christian. It is e Eridani which the Ranger visited. I thought you heard my lecture.”

  “Slip of my mind. Sorry.” Wolfe was more urbane than contrite.

  Coffin bowed his head, hot-faced. “No. I beg your pardon, sir. I was heedless and ill-mannered.”

  “Forget it,” said Wolfe. “I believe I understand why you’re so tense. How long were you away, now? Eighty-seven years, of which eighty-two, less watches, were spent in deepsleep. It was the climax of your career, an experience such as it is granted few men to have. Then you came back. Your home was gone, your kinfolk scattered, the people and mores changed almost beyond recognition. Worst of all, there’s hardly a soul who cares. You offer them a new world, and they yawn at you when they do not jeer.”

  Coffin sat quiet a while, twirling the sherry glass in his fingers. He was a long man with a jagged Yankee face under hair just starting to be grizzled. He still affected snug-fitting tunic and trousers of black, buttons with an American eagle, everything knife-creased, though even in the space service the uniform was now ludicrously archaic.

  “Well,” he said at last, struggling for words, “I expected a…a different world…when I came back. Of course. But somehow I did not expect it would be different in this fashion. We, my companions and I, like all interstellar spacemen, we knew we had chosen a special way of life. But it was in the service of man, which is the service of God. We expected to return to the Society, at least, our own spacemen’s nation within all nations—do you understand that?” It ripped from him: “But the Society was so dwindled!”

  Wolfe nodded. “Not many people realize it yet, First Officer,” he said, “but space travel is dying.”

  “Why?” mumbled Coffin. “What have we done, that this is visited upon us?”

  “We have eaten up our resources with the same abandon with which we have increased our numbers. Therefore the Four Horsemen have ridden out. Exploration is becoming too costly.”

  “But…substitutes…new alloys, aluminum…must still be abundant…thermonuclear energy, thermionic conversion, dielectric storage—”

  “Oh, yes,” said Wolfe. He blew a smoke ring. “But it’s not enough. Theoretically, we can supply unlimited amounts of fusion power. But there is so little for that power to work on. Light metal and plastics can only do so much, then you need steel. Machines need oil. Well, lean ores can be processed, organics can be synthesized, and so forth. But all at a steadily rising cost. And what you do produce has to be spread thinner every year: more people. Of course, there’s no longer any pretense at equal sharing. If we tried that, we’d all be down on Lowlevel. Instead, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The usual historic pattern, Egypt, Babylon, Rome, India, China, now all Earth. So the conscientious Guardian—there are more than you might think—doesn’t feel right about spending millions, which could be used to alleviate quite a bit of Citizen misery, on mere discovery. And the non-conscientious Guardian doesn’t give a damn.”

  Coffin was startled. He looked hard at the other.

  “I have heard mention of something called, er, Constitutionalism,” he said slowly. “Do you subscribe to the doctrine?”

  “More or less,” admitted Wolfe. “Though that’s a rather gaudy name for a very simple thing, an ideal of seeing the world as it actually is and behaving accordingly. Anker never called his system anything in particular. Laird was a rather gaudy man, and—” He paused, smoked with the care of a thrifty person remembering what tobacco cost, and went on: “You’re probably as much of a Constitutionalist, First Officer, as the average among us.”

  “I beg your pardon, no. It seems, from what I’ve heard, to be a hea…a Gentile belief.”

  “But it isn’t a belief. That’s the whole point. We’re among the last holdouts against a rising tide of Faith. The masses, and lately even a few upper-levels, turn via mysticism and marijuana toward a more tolerable pseudo-existence. I prefer to inhabit the objective universe.”

  Coffin grimaced. He had seen abominations. There was a smiling idol where his father’s white church had overlooked the sea.

  He changed the subject: “But don’t the leaders, at least, understand that space travel is the only way to escape the economic trap? If Earth is growing exhausted, we have an entire galaxy of planets.”

  “That doesn’t help Earth much,” said Wolfe. “Consider the problem of hauling minerals nine years from the nearest star, with a nine-to-one mass ratio. Or how much bottom do you think it would take to drain off population faster than it could be replaced here at home? No, no, even interplanetary exploitation has about stopped paying for itself. As for colonizing—Rustum is the first planet yet found where men could live without special apparatus.”

  Coffin said, driven by a reluctant honesty: “As I explained, sir, a good deal of equipment would still be needed. With one or two exceptions, we didn’t find any native life forms in five years of study which can be eaten by man. And then of course the gravity is wearing, and only the highlands are really habitable,”

  “There you are,” said Wolfe.

  “But it could be done!” exploded Coffin. “My lectures have outlined the methods. And it would keep the tradition alive—knowing that there was a colony, a place where a man could still find elbow room—and we could keep looking for still better planets.”

  “We won’t,” said Wolfe bluntly. “There’s another trouble with your emigration idea. The wage slave Citizen—sometimes, on Lowlevel, an actual slave, in spite of fancy doubletalk about contract—he can’t afford such an expensive passage. And why should the state pay his fare? It won’t lessen the number of mouths at home; it will only make the state that much poorer, in its efforts to fill those mouths. Nor is the Citizen himself interested, as a rule. Do you think an ignorant, superstitious child of crowds and walls and machines can survive, plowing soil on an empty world under an alien sun? Do you think he even wants to try?” He spread his hands. “As for the literate, technically minded class of people, they have it pretty good so far. Why should they uproot?”

  “I am becoming aware of all this,” nodded Coffin.

  Wolfe’s wide face tightened into a grin. “Another thing, First Officer. Suppose, somehow, this colony were established. Would you want to go live there yourself?”

  “Good heavens, no!” Coffin jerked upright.

  “Why not?”

  “Because…because I’m a spaceman. And there wouldn’t be any spaceships operating out of Rustum for generations. The colonists will, uh, would have too much else to do.”

  “Exactly. And I am a dealer in fabrics. And my neighbor Israel Stein thinks space travel is a glorious thing, but he teaches music. My friend John O’Malley is a protein chemist, who would certainly be useful as such on a new planet and he goes skindiving and blew several years’ savings once on a hunting trip—but his wife has ambitions for their children. And there are others who love their comfort, such as it is; or are afraid; or feel too deeply rooted; or name your own reason. All interested, all sympathetic, but let someone else do it. The people you could get who are ready, willing, and able to go, can’t finance the trip. Q. E. D.”

  “So it seems.” Coffin stared into his empty glass.

  “But I’ve seen all this for myself,” he said after a while, his words wrenched and slow. “I realize my profession is on the way out. And it’s the only profession open to me. More important, to my children, if I ever have any; for of course I would have to marry within the Society, I just can’t find a decent home life anywhere else—” He stopped.

  “I know,” gibed Wolfe, not very sharply. “You beg my pardon. Never mind. Times change, and you are from out of time. I shall not dwell upon the fact that my older daughter is a Guardian’s mistress, nor will I raise your hair by remarking that this does not trouble me in the least. Because there are some rather more important changes in recent months, of which I do disapprove with all my soul, and they are the main reason I invited you here tonight.”

  Coffin looked up. “What?”

  Wolfe cocked his head. “I believe dinner is about ready. Come, First Officer.” He took his guest’s arm again. “Your lectures have been admirably dry and factual, but what I would like from you now is a still more detailed description. Just what Rustum is like, and what equipment would be needed to establish a colony of what minimum size, and the cost…everything. I assume you would rather talk that kind of shop than make polite noises at me. Well, here’s your chance!” Even among his admirers, there were many people who would have been astonished to learn that Torvald Anker was still alive. They knew he was born a century ago, that he had never been rich enough to afford elaborate medical care—for he would give a pauper boy with intelligence the same right to sit at his feet and question him that he refused a wealthy young dullard who offered good fees. So it seemed natural that he would have died.

  His writings bore out that impression. The magnum opus, which men were still debating, was now sixty years old. The last book, a small volume of essays, was published twenty years back, and even it had been a gentle anachronism, the style as easy and the thought as careful as if Earth still held a few countries where speech was free. Since then he had lived in a tiny house on the Sognefjord, avoiding the publicity which he had never courted. The district was a fragment of an older world, where a sparse population still lived largely by individual effort, men spoke with deliberateness in a beautiful language and cared that their children be educated. Anker taught elementary school for a few hours a day, received food and housekeeping in return, and divided the rest of his time between a garden and a final book.

  On a morning in early summer, when dew still lay on his roses, he entered the cottage. It was centuries old, with a red tile roof above ivied walls. From here a man could look down hundreds of meters, wind, sun, and stone, a patch of wildflowers, a single tree, until he saw cliff and cloud reflected in the fjord. Sometimes a gull sailed just in front of the study window.

  Anker sat down at his desk. For a moment he rested, chin in hand. It had been a long climb up from the water’s edge, and he had often been forced to stop for breath. His tall thin body had grown so frail he sometimes thought he could feel the sunshine streaming through. But it needed little sleep, and when the light nights came—the sky was like white roses, someone had written—he must go down to the fjord.

  Well. He sighed, brushed an unruly lock off his forehead, and swiveled the writer into position. The letter from young Hirayama was first on the correspondence pile. It was not very well written, but it had been written, with an immense will to say, and that was what counted. Anker was not opposed to the visiphone per se, but quite apart from avoiding interruptions of thought, he had a duty not to own one. The young men must be forced to write if they wanted contact with him, because writing was as essential to the orderly training of the mind as conversation, perhaps more so, and elsewhere it was a vanishing skill.

  His fingers tapped the keys.

  My dear Saburo,

  Thank you for your confidence in me. I fear it is misplaced. My reputation, such as it is, has been gained largely by imitating Socrates. The longer I think upon matters, the more I believe that the touchstone is the epistemological question. How do we know what we know, and what is it we know? From this query a degree of enlightenment sometimes comes. But I am not at all certain that enlightenment is very similar to wisdom.