“And to buy those shoddy things, meant only to wear out, you would have to slave your lives away for the capitalists,” said Miller. “The people must produce for the people.”

  Andy traded a glance with the Mayor. “Look, Freeborn,” he said gently, “you don’t seem to get the point. We don’t want such gadgets. It isn’t worthwhile scheming and working to get more than we have, not while there are girls to love in springtime and deer to hunt in fall. And when we do work, we’d rather work for ourselves, not for somebody else, whether you call the somebody else a capitalist or the people. Now let’s go sit down and take it easy before lunch.”

  Wedged between the legs of the Folks, I heard Si Johansen mutter to Joseph Arakelian: “I don’t get it. What would we do with that machinery? If I had some damn machine to make furniture for me, what’d I do with my hands?”

  Joseph lifted his shoulders. “Beats me, Si. Personally, I’d go nuts watching two people wear the same identical pattern.”

  “It might be kind of nice at that,” said Red to me, “having a car like they show in Uncle Jim’s magazines.”

  “Where’d you go in it?” asked Bob.

  “Gee, I dunno. To Canada, maybe. But shucks, I can go to Canada any time I can talk my dad into checking out a flitter.”

  “Sure,” said Bob. “And if you’re going less than a hundred miles, you got a horse, haven’t you? Who wants an old car?”

  I wriggled through the crowd toward the Plaza, where the women were setting up outdoor tables and bringing food for a banquet. The crowd was so thick around our guest where he sat that I couldn’t get near, but Stinky and I skun up into the Plaza Tree, a huge gray oak, and crawled along a branch till we hung just above his head. It was a bare and liver-spotted head, wobbling on a thread of neck, but he darted it around and spoke shrill.

  Andy and the Mayor sat near him, puffing their pipes, and Uncle Jim was there too. The Folks had let him in so they could watch the fireworks. That was thoughtless, but how could we know? Uncle Jim had always been peaceful, and we’d never had two crazy men in town.

  “…forces of reaction,” Comrade Miller was saying. “I’m not sure precisely which forces engineered the dissolution of the Soviet Union. News was already getting hard to come by, not many telecasts anymore and—well, I must admit I doubt either the capitalists or the Chinese were behind the tragedy. Both those systems were pretty far gone by then.”

  “Whatever did happen in Russia?” wondered Ed Mulligan. He was the town psychocounsellor, who’d trained at Menninger, clear out in Kansas. “Actual events, I mean. I never would have thought the Communists would allow freedom, not from what I’ve read of them.”

  “What you call freedom,” Miller said scornfully. “I suspect, myself, revisionism took hold. Once that had led to corruption, the whole poor country was ripe for a counter-revolutionary takeover.”

  “Now that isn’t true,” said Uncle Jim. “I followed the news too, remember. The Communists in Russia got corrupt and easygoing of their own accord. Tyrants always do. They didn’t foresee what changes the new technology would make, and blithely introduced it. Soon their Iron Curtain rusted away. Nobody listened to them anymore.”

  “Pretty correct, Jim,” said Andy. He saw my face among the twigs, and winked at me. “Some violence did occur, the breakup was more complicated than you think, but that’s essentially what happened. Trouble is, you can’t seem to realize it happened in the U.S.A. also.”

  Miller shook his withered head. “Marx proved that technological advances mean inevitable progress towards socialism,” he said. “Oh, the cause has been set back, but the day is coming.”

  “Why, maybe you’re right up to a point,” said Andy. “But you see, science and society went beyond that point. Maybe I can give you a simple explanation.”

  “If you wish,” said Miller, grumpy-like.

  “Well, I’ve studied the period. Technology made it possible for a few people and acres to feed the whole country, till millions of acres were lying idle; you could buy them for peanuts. Meanwhile the cities were overtaxed, underrepresented, and choked by their own traffic. Along came the cheap sunpower unit and the high-capacity accumulator. Those let a man supply most of his own wants, not work his heart out for someone else to pay the inflated prices demanded by an economy where every single business was subsidized or protected at the taxpayer’s expense. Also, by living in the new way, a man cut down his money income to the point where he had to pay almost no taxes—he actually lived better on a shorter work week.

  “More and more, people tended to drift out and settle in small country communities. They consumed less, which brought on a great depression, and that drove still more people out to fend for themselves. By the time big business and organized labor realized what was happening and tried to get laws passed against what they called un-American practices, it was too late; nobody was interested. Everything happened so gradually, you see. But it happened, and I think for the better.”

  “Ridiculous!” said Miller. “Capitalism went bankrupt, as Marx foresaw two hundred years ago, but its vicious influence was still so powerful that instead of advancing to collectivism you went back to being peasants.”

  “Please,” said the Mayor. I could see he was annoyed, and thought that maybe peasants were somebody not Freeborn. “Uh, maybe we can pass the time with a little singing.”

  Though he had no voice to speak of, courtesy demanded that Miller be asked to perform first. He rose and quavered out something about a guy named Joe Hill. It had a nice tune, but even a nine-year-old like me knew it was lousy poetics. A childish a-b-c-b scheme of masculine rhymes and not a double metaphor anywhere. Besides, who cares what happened to some little tramp when we have hunting songs and epics about interplanetary explorers to make? I was glad when Andy took over and gave us some music with muscle in it.

  Lunch was called. I slipped down from the Tree and found a seat nearby. Comrade Miller and Uncle Jim glowered at each other across the table, but nothing much was said till after the meal, a couple of hours later. People had kind of lost interest in the stranger as they learned he’d spent his time huddled in a dead city, and wandered off for the dancing and games. Andy hung around, not wanting to but because he was Miller’s host.

  The Communist sighed and got up. “You’ve been nice to me,” he said.

  “I thought we were a bunch of capitalists,” sneered Uncle Jim.

  “It’s man I’m interested in, wherever he is and whatever conditions he has to live under,” said Miller.

  Uncle Jim lifted his voice with his cane: “Man! You claim to care for man, you who killed and enslaved him?”

  “Oh, come off it, Jim,” said Andy. “That was a long time ago. Who cares at this late date?”

  “I do!” Uncle Jim started crying, but he looked at Miller and walked toward him, stiff-legged, fingers crooked. “They killed my father. Men died by the tens of thousands—for an ideal. And you don’t care! The whole damn country has lost its guts!”

  I stood under the Tree, one hand on the rough comfort of its bark. I was a little afraid, because I did not understand. Surely Andy, who had been sent by the United Townships Research Foundation the long black way to Mars, just to gather knowledge, was no coward. Surely my father, a gentle man and full of laughter, did not lack guts. What was it we were supposed to want?

  “Why, you bootlicking belly-crawling lackey,” yelled Miller, “it was you who gutted them! It was you who murdered working men, and roped their sons into your dummy unions, and…and…what about the Mexican peons?”

  Andy tried to come between them. Miller’s staff clattered on his head. Andy stepped back, wiping blood off, looking helpless, as the old crazy men howled at each other. He couldn’t use force; he might hurt them.

  Perhaps, in that moment, he realized. “It’s all right, Freeborns,” he said quickly. “It’s all right. We’ll listen to you. Look, you can have a nice debate tonight, right in Townhall, and everybody will come and—”

  He was too late. Uncle Jim and Comrade Miller were already fighting, thin arms locked and dim eyes full of tears because they had no strength left to destroy what they hated. But I think, now, that the hate arose from a baffled love. They both loved us in a queer, maimed fashion, and we did not care, we did not care.

  Andy got some men together and separated the two and they were led off to different houses for a nap. When Dr. Simmons looked in on Uncle Jim a few hours later, he was gone. The doctor hurried off to find the Communist, and he was gone, too.

  I only learned that afterward, since I went off to play tag and pom-pom-pullaway with the other kids down where the river flowed cool and dark. It was in the same river, next morning, that Constable Thompson found the Communist and the Republican. Nobody knew what had happened. They met under the Trees, alone, at dusk, when bonfires were being lit and the Elders making merry around them and lovers stealing off into the woods. That’s all we can be sure of. We gave them a decent funeral.

  It was the talk of the town for a week, and in fact the whole Ohio region heard about it; but after a while the talk died and the old crazy men lay forgotten. That was the year the Brotherhood came to power in the north, and men wondered what this could mean. The next spring they learned, and there was an alliance made and war went across the hills. For the Brotherhood gang, just as it had threatened, cut Trees down wholesale and planted none. Such evil cannot go unpunished.

  Birthright

  The cab obtained clearance from certain machines and landed on the roof of the Winged Cross. Emil Dalmady paid and stepped out. When it took off, he felt suddenly very alone, The garden was fragrant around him in a warm deep-blue summer’s dusk; at this height, the sounds of Chicago Integrate were a murmur as of a distant ocean; the other towers and the skyways between them were a forest through which flitted will-o’-the-wisp aircars and beneath which—as if Earth had gone transparent—a fantastic galaxy of many-colored lights was blinking awake farther than eye could reach. But the penthouse bulking ahead might have been a hill where a grizzly bear had its den.

  The man squared his shoulders. Haul in, he told himself. He won’t eat you. Anger lifted afresh. I might just eat him. He strode forward: a stocky, muscular figure in a blue zipskin, features broad and high of cheekbones, snubnosed, eyes green and slightly tilted, hair reddish black.

  But despite stiffened will, the fact remained that he had not expected a personal interview with any merchant prince of the Polesotechnic League, and in one of the latter’s own homes. When a live butler had admitted him, and he had crossed an improbably long stretch of trollcat rug to the Vie-Wall end of a luxury-cluttered living room, and was confronting Nicholas van Rijn, his throat tightened and his palms grew wet.

  “Good evening,” the host rumbled. “Welcome.” His corpulent corpus did not rise from the lounger. Dalmady didn’t mind. Not only bulk but height would have dwarfed him. Van Rijn waved a hand at a facing seat; the other gripped a liter tankard of beer. “Sit. Relax. You look quivery like a blanc-mange before a firing squad. What you drink, smoke, chew, sniff, or elsewise make amusements with?”

  Dalmady lowered himself to an edge. Van Rijn’s great hook-beaked, multi-chinned, moustached and goateed visage, framed in black shoulder-length ringlets, crinkled with a grin. Beneath the sloping brow, small jet eyes glittered at the newcomer. “Relax,” he urged again. “Give the form-fitting a chance; Not so fun-making an embrace like a pretty girl, but less extracting, ha? I think maybe a little glass Genever and bitters over dry ice is a tranquilizator for you.” He clapped.

  “Sir,” Dalmady said, harshly in his tension; “I don’t want to seem ungracious, but—”

  “But you came to Earth breathing flame and brimrocks, and went through six echelons of the toughest no-saying secretaries and officers what the Solar Spice and Liquors Company has got, like a bulldozer chasing a cowdozer, demanding to see whoever the crockhead was what fired you after what you done yonderways. Nobody had a chance to explain. Trouble was. they assumptioned you knew things what they take for granted. So natural, what they said sounded to you like a flush off and you hurricaned your way from them to somebody else.”

  Van Rijn offered a cigar out of a gold humidor whose workmanship Dalmady couldn’t identify except that it was nonhuman. The young man shook his head. The merchant selected one himself, bit off the end and spat that expertly into a receptor, and inhaled the tobacco to ignition. “Well,” he continued, “somebody would have got through into you at last, only then I learned about you and ordered this meeting. I would have wanted to talk at you anyhows. Now I shall clarify everything like Hindu butter.”

  His geniality was well-nigh as overwhelming as his wrath would have been, assuming the legends about him were true. And he could be setting me up for a thunderbolt, Dalmady thought, and clung to his indignation as he answered:

  “Sir, if your outfit is dissatisfied with my conduct on Suleiman, it might at least have told me why, rather than sending a curt message that I was being replaced and should report to HQ. Unless you can prove to me that I bungled, I will not accept demotion. It’s a question of personal honor more than professional standing. They think that way where I come from. I’ll quit. And…there are plenty of other companies in the League that will be glad to hire me.”

  “True, true, in spite of every candle I burn to St. Dismas.” Van Rijn sighed through his cigar, engulfing Dalmady in smoke. “Always they try to pirate my executives what have not yet sworn fealty, like the thieves they are. And I, poor old lonely fat man, trying to run this enterprise personal what stretches across so many whole worlds, even with modern computer technology I get melted down from overwork, and too few men for helpers what is not total gruntbrains, and some of them got to be occupied just luring good executives away from elsewhere.” He took a noisy gulp of beer. “Well.”

  “I suppose you’ve read my report, sir,” was Dalmady’s gambit.

  “Today. So much information flowing from across the light-years, how can this weary old noggle hold it without data flowing back out like ear wax? Let me review to make sure I got it tesseract. Which means—ho, ho!—straight in four dimensions.”

  Van Rijn wallowed deeper into his lounger, bridged hairy fingers, and closed his eyes. The butler appeared with a huge steaming and hissing goblet. If this is his idea of a small drink—! Dalmady thought. Grimly, he forced himself to sit at ease and sip.

  “Now.” The cigar waggled in time to the words. “This star what its discoverer called Osman is out past Antares, on the far edge of present-day regular-basis League activities. One planet is inhabited, called by humans Suleiman. Subjovian; life based on hydrogen, ammonia, methane; primitive natives, but friendly. Turned out, on the biggest continent grows a plant we call…um-m-m…bluejack, what the natives use for a spice and tonic. Analysis showed a complicated blend of chemicals, answering sort of to hormonal stuffs for us, with synergistic effects. No good to oxygen breathers, but maybe we can sell to hydrogen breathers elsewhere.

  “Well, we found very few markets, at least what had anythings to offer we wanted. You need a special biochemistry for bluejack to be beneficent. So synthesis would cost us more, counting investment and freight charges from chemical lab centers, than direct harvesting by natives on Suleiman, paid for in trade goods. Given that, we could show a wee profit. Quite teensy—whole operation is near-as-damn marginal—but as long as things stayed peaceful, well, why not turn a few honest credits?

  “And things was peaceful, too, for years. Natives cooperated fine, bringing in bluejack to warehouses. Outshipping was one of those milk runs where we don’t knot up capital in our own vessels, we contract with a freighter line to make regular calls. Oh, ja, contretemps kept on countertiming—bad seasons, bandits raiding caravans, kings getting too greedy about taxes—usual stuffing, what any competent factor could handle on the spot, so no reports about it ever come to pester me.

  “And then…Ahmed, more beer!…real trouble. Best market for bluejack is on a planet we call Babur. Its star, Mogul, lies in the same general region, about thirty light-years from Osman. Its top country been dealing with Technic civilization off and on for decades. Trying to modernize, they was mainly interested in robotics for some reason; but at last they did pile together enough outplanet exchange for they could commission a few hyperdrive ships built and crews trained. So now the Solar Commonwealth and other powers got to treat them with a little more respect; blast cannon and nuclear missiles sure improve manners, by damn! They is still small tomatoes, but ambitious. And to them, with the big domestic demand, bluejack is not an incidental thing.”

  Van Rijn leaned forward, wrinkling the embroidered robe that circled his paunch. “You wonder why I tell you what you know, ha?” he said. “When I need direct reports on a situation, especial from a world as scarcely known as Suleiman, I can’t study each report from decades. Data retrieval got to make me an abstract. I check with you now, who was spotted there whether the machine give me all what is significant to our talking. Has I been correct so far?”

  “Yes,” Dalmady said. “But—”

  Yvonne Vaillancourt looked up from a console as the factor passed the open door of her collation lab. “What’s wrong, Emil?” she asked. “I heard you clattering the whole way down the hall.”

  Dalmady stopped for a look. Clothing was usually at a minimum in the Earth-conditioned compound, but, while he had grown familiar with the skins of its inhabitants, he never tired of hers. Perhaps, he had thought, her blond shapeliness impressed him the more because he had been born and raised on Altai. The colonists of that chill planet went heavily dressed of necessity. The same need to survive forced austere habits on them; and, isolated in a largely unexplored frontier section, they received scant news about developments in the core civilization.