After the burial we all went bade to the mess building for our noon meal. Outside, as we took our places at the tables, the midday wind sprang up and whistled around our metal huts and the stripped skeleton of the ship, standing apart at its distance on the landing spot and looking lonely and neglected in the bleak light from the white sky.

  The Leaders of our colony sat at the head of the file of tables that stretched the length of the mess hut. Their table was just large enough for the four of them and was set a little apart from the rest so that they could discuss important matters in relative privacy. The other, large tables stretched away in order, with the ones at the for end with the small chairs and the low tops for the very young children—those who were just barely able to eat by themselves without supervision. These, the children, had as a group been unusually silent and solemn during the burial procedures, impressed by the emotions of their elders. But now, as they started to eat, their natural energy and exuberance began to break free of this restraint and show itself all the more noticeably for having been held down this long. In fact they began to pose quite a small disciplinary problem, and this necessitating the attentions of their elders, a diversion was created, which together with the warmth and the good effect of the hot food, bred a lightening of spirits among us adults as well. Our natural mood of optimism, which the Colonial Office had required in selecting us for a place on the immigration rosters, pressed down before by the awareness of death in our midst, began to rise again. And it continued to rise, like a warm tide throughout the length of the hut, until finally it reached the four who sat at the head table. But here it lapped unavailingly against the occupied minds of those who, twenty-four hours a day, breathed the constant atmosphere of responsibility for us all.

  To talk and not be heard, they must lower their voices and lean their heads together. And this, while a perfectly natural action, had a tendency to impart an air of tenseness to their discussions. So they sat now, following the burial, in such an atmosphere of tenseness; and although the rest of us did not discover what they were then saying until long afterward—indeed until Maria Wama told us about it months later—there were those among us at the long tables who, glancing upward, noticed something perhaps graver than usual about their talking at that meal.

  In particular, it had been Kurt Meklin—Kurt, with his old lined face thrust forward above his plate like some gray guardian of ancient privilege, who had been urging some point upon the other three all through the meal. But what it was, he had avoided stating openly, talking instead in half-hints, and obscure ambiguities, his black hard eyes sliding over to glance at Lydia, and then away again, and then back again. Until, finally, when the last plates had been removed and the coffee served, Lydia rose at last to the challenge and spoke out unequivocally.

  “All right, Kurt!” she said—she, the strong old woman, meeting the clever old man eye to eye. “You’ve been hinting and hawing around ever since we got back from the burying. Now, what’s wrong with it?”

  “Well, now that you ask me, Lydia,” said Kurt. “It’s a question—a question of what she died of.”

  Gothrud, who had sat the whole meal with his head hanging and eating almost nothing, now suddenly raised his eyes and looked across at Kurt

  “What land of a question’s that?” demanded Lydia. “You saw me enter it on the records—death from natural causes.”

  “I’ll tell you what she really died of,” said Gothrud, suddenly.

  “Well now,” said Kurt, interrupting Gothrud, and with another of his side-glances at Lydia. “Do you think that’s sufficient?”

  “Sufficient? Why shouldn’t it be sufficient?”

  “Well now, of course, Lydia…” said Kurt. “I know nothing of doctoring myself, and we all know that the Colonial Office experts gave Our Planet a clean bill of health before they shipped our little colony out here. But I should think—just for the record, if nothing else—you’d have wanted to make an examination to determine the cause of death.”

  “I did.”

  “Naturally—but just a surface examination. Of course with the colony in a sentimental mood about the girl—eh, Van?”

  Van Meyer, the youngest of them all, was turning his coffee cup around and around between his thick fingers and staring at it. His heavy cheeks were slablike on either side of his mouth.

  “Leave me out of it,” he said, without looking up.

  Lydia sniffed at him, and turned back to Kurt.

  “Stop talking gibberish!” she commanded. ^

  “Gibberish…sorry, Lydia,” said Kurt. “1 don’t have the advantages of your medical education. A pharmacist really knows so little. But—it’s just that I think you’ve left the record rather vague. Natural causes really doesn’t tell us exactly what she died of.”

  “What she died of!” broke in Gothrud with sudden, low-voiced violence. “She died of a broken heart.”

  “Don’t be a fool, Gothrud,” said his wife, without looking at him. “And keep your voice down, you, Kurt. Do you want the whole colony to hear? Now, out with it. You sat with us and agreed to bury her. If you had any questions, you should have come out with them then.”

  “But I had to bend to the sentimentality of the colony,” said Kurt. “It was best to let it go then. Later, I thought, later we can…” He fell silent, making a small, expressive gesture with his hand.

  “Later we can do what?” grated Lydia.

  “Why, I should think that naturally—as a matter of record—that in a case like this you’d want to do an autopsy on her.”

  “Autopsy!” The word jolted a little from Lydia’s lips. “Why, certainly,” said Kurt, spreading his hands. “This way is much simpler than insisting on it in open Assembly. After curfew tonight, when everybody is in barracks—”

  A low strangled cry from Gothrud interrupted him. From the moment in which the word autopsy had left Kurt’s lips, he had been sitting in frozen horror. Now, it seemed, he managed at last to draw breath into his lungs to speak with.

  “Autopsy!” he cried, in a thin, tearing, half-strangled whisper. “Autopsy! She didn’t want to be touched! We agreed not to burn her; and now you’d—No—”

  “Why, Gothrud—” said Kurt.

  “Don’t Why Gothrud me!” said Gothrud, his deep sunk eyes at last flaming into violence. “A decision’s been made by the colony. And none of you are going to set it aside.”

  “We are the Leaders,” said Kurt.

  “Leaders!” Gothrud laughed bitterly. “The ex-druggist—you, Kurt. The ex-nurse and—” He glanced at Van Meyer— “the ex-caterer’s son, the ex-nothing.”

  Van Meyer held his cup and stared at it.

  “And the ex-high school teacher,” said Kurt, softly.

  “Exactly!” said Gothrud, lifting his head to meet him stare for stare. “The ex-high school teacher. Me. As little an ex as the rest of you, Kurt, and as big a Leader right now. And a Leader that says you’ve got no right to touch my Juny to settle your two-bit intriguing and feed your egos—” He choked.

  “Gothrud—” said Kurt. “Gothrud, you’re overwrought. You—”

  Gothrud coughed raspingly and went on. “I tell you—” He choked again, and had to stop.

  Lydia spoke swiftly to him, in low, furious German. “Shut upl Will you kill yourself, old man?”

  “That’s being done for me,” Gothrud answered her in English, and faced up to Kurt again. “You hear me!” he said. “We’re nothings. Leaders, Great executives. Only none of us has been five miles from the landing spot. Only none of us organized this colony. None of us flew the ship, or assigned the work, or built the huts, or planned the plantings. All we did was sign the roster back on Earth, and polite young experts with twice our brains did it all for us. By what right are we Leaders?”

  “We were elected!” snapped Kurt.

  “Fools elected by fools!” Gothrud’s head was beginning to swim from the violence of his effort in the argument. Through a gathering mist, he seemed to see Kurt’s face ripple as if it were under water, and rippling, sneer at him. With a great effort, he gripped the edge of the table and went on.

  “I tell you,” he rasped, “that people have rights. That you won’t—that you can’t—that—”

  His tongue had suddenly gone stubborn and refused to obey him. It rattled unintelligibly in his mouth and around him the room was being obscured by the white mist. Gothrud felt a sudden constriction in his throat; and, gasping abruptly for breath, he pushed back his chair and tried to stand up, clawing at his collar to loosen it.

  Through the black specks that swarmed suddenly before his eyes, he was conscious of Van Meyer rising beside him and of Lydia’s voice ordering the younger man to catch him before he fell.

  “Come on, Gothrud,” said the voice of Van Meyer, close to his ear. “You’ve been under too much of a strain. You better lie down. Come on, I’ll help you.”

  Through the haze he was conscious of being half-assisted, half-carried from the dining room. There was a short space of confusion, and then things cleared for him, to allow him to find himself lying on his bunk in the room he shared with Lydia. Van Meyer, alone with him, stood over the washstand, filling a hypodermic syringe from a small frosted bottle of minimal, his gross bulk hunched over concen-tratedly with a sort of awkward and pathetic kindness. “Feeling better?” he asked Gothrud.

  “I’m all right,” Gothrud answered. But the words came out thick and unnaturally. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to give you a shot to make you sleep,” said Van.

  “Van—” said Gothrud. “Van—” Talking was really a tremendous effort. He swallowed desperately and went on. “You understand about Juny—don’t you?”

  “Why, yes, Gothrud.”

  “She shouldn’t have come, you see. We made her—because she had no other family, Lydia and I. She never wanted to come. We talked her into it. She was just coming out of being a child—”

  “Don’t talk, Gothrud,” said Van, struggling with the delicate plunger of the hypodermic. “You need to rest.”

  “—She was the only one that age. All the rest of us, adults or young children; and her in between, all alone. A whole lost generation, Van, in one lonely little girl.” “Now, Gothrud—”

  “I tell you,”’ cried Gothrud, struggling up onto one elbow, “we robbed her of every reason to live. She should have had love and fun and the company of young people her own age back on Earth. And we brought her here—to this desolate outpost of a world—”

  Van Meyer had finally got the syringe properly filled. He came over to the bed with it and reached for Gothrud’s arm when the older man sank back.

  “That’s why we owe it to her to leave her untouched the way she wanted,” said Gothrud, in a low, feverish voice, as the needle went in. “But it’s not that so much, Van. If it were for some good purpose, I wouldn’t object. But it isn’t. It’s for Lydia—and Kurt. Van—” He grasped the younger man’s arm as he started to turn away from the bunk, and held him, compelling Van Meyer to turn back.

  “Van—” he said. ’Things are going wrong here. You know that. It’s Lydia. Married all those years back on Earth, and I never let myself see it. I watched her drive our son and daughter from our house. I watched her bend Juny to her way and bring her here with us. And Van” —his voice sunk to a whisper—“I never let myself see it until I got here, that awful hunger in her. It’s power, she wants, Van, power. That’s what she’s always wanted, and now she sees a chance of getting it. Listen to me, Van, watch out for her. She did for Juny. It’ll be me next, and then Kurt, and then—”

  “Now, Gothrud—now just relax—” said Van, pulling his arm at last free from the older man’s grasp, which now began to weaken as the drug took hold.

  “Promise me you’ll watch…” whispered Gothrud. “You must. I trust you, Van. You’re weak, but there’s nothing rotten in you. Kurt’s no good. He’s another like Lydia. Watch them. Promise—promise…”

  “I—I promise,” said Van, and the minimal came in on Gothrud with a rush, like a great black wave that swept in and over him, burying him far beneath it, deep, and deep.

  When Gothrud awoke, the room he shared with Lydia was in darkness; and through the single small, high window in the outer wall, with its reinforcing wire mesh patterning the glass, he saw the night sky—for a wonder momentarily free of clouds—and the bright stars of the Cluster. Van Meyer’s shot of minimal must have been a light one, for he had awakened clear-headed and, he felt quite sure, long before it had been planned for him to awaken. He felt positive in his own mind that they would have planned for him to sleep until morning; and only the unpredictable clock of his old body, ticking erratically, now fast and now slowing, running down toward final silence, had tricked them.

  The illuminated clock-face on his bedside table read 21:20 and curfew was at 2100 hours. He fumbled into his clothes, got up, went over to the window and peered out, craning his neck. Yes, the colony was now completely lost in darkness, except for the small, yellow-gleaming windows of the Office Hut. Feverishly he turned and began to climb into his weather suit, struggling hastily into the bulky, overall-like outfit, zipping it tight and pulling the hood over his head. At the last minute, as he was going out the door, he remembered the diary; and, going back, dug through the contents of his locker until his fingers closed over the cylindrical thickness of it. He lifted it out, a faint hint of clean, light, young-girl’s perfume reaching him from it momentarily. Then he stuffed it through the slit of his weather suit to an inside pocket; and went out the door.

  The most direct route to the Office Hut led across the open compound. But as he started across this, leaning against the wind, an obscure fear made his feet turn away from the direct bulk of his destination and veer in the direction of the new grave. He went, chiding himself for his foolishness all the way, for although he knew now that the other three Leaders had held him in secret contempt for a long time, he was equally sure that they would not dare go directly against his wishes in this matter without consulting him.

  So it was that when he came finally to Juny’s grave and saw it gaping black and open under the stars, he could not at first bring himself to believe it. But when he did, all the strength went out of him and he fell on his knees beside the open trench. For a wild moment as he knelt there, he felt that, like a figure out of the Old Testament, he should pray—for guidance, or for a divine vengeance upon the desecrators of the grave of his grandchild. But all that came out of him were the crying reproaches of an old man: “Oh, God, why didn’t you make me stronger? Why didn’t you make me young again when this whole business of immigration was started? I could take a gun and—”

  But he knew he would not take a gun; and if he did, the others would simply walk up and take it away from him. Because he could not shoot anybody. Not even for Juny could he shoot anybody. And after a while he wiped his eyes and got to Ids feet and went on toward the Office Hut, hugging one arm to his side, so that he could feel the round shape of the diary through all his heavy suit insulation.

  When he came to the Office Hut, the door was locked. But he had his key in his pocket as always. His heart pounded and the entry way of the Hut seemed full of a soft mist lurking just at the edge of his vision. He leaned against the wall for a moment to rest, then painfully struggled out of his weather suit. When he had hung it up beside the others on the wall hooks, he opened the inner door of the Hut and went in.

  The three were clustered around the long conference table at the far end of the office, Lydia with her dark old face looking darker and older even than usual above the white gown and gloves of surgery. They looked up at the sound of the opening door; and Van Meyer moved swiftly to block off Gothrud’s vision of the table and came toward him.

  “Gothrud!” he said. “What are you doing here?” And he put his hands on Gothrud’s arms.

  Gothrud struggled feebly to release himself and go around the younger man to the table, but was not strong enough.

  “Let me go. Let me go!” he cried. “What have you done to her? Have you—”

  “No, no,” soothed Van Meyer. Still holding Gothrud’s arms, he steered the older man over to a chair at one of the desks and sat him down in it. All the way across the room, he stayed between Gothrud and the conference table and when he had Gothrud in the chair, he pulled up another for himself and sat down opposite, so that the table was still hidden. Kurt and Lydia came over to stand behind him. All three looked at Gothrud.

  Lydia’s face was hard and bitter as jagged ice. The absorbent face mask around her neck, unfastened on one side and hanging by a single thread, somehow made her look, to Gothrud’s eyes, not like a member of the profession of healing, but like some executioner, interrupted in the course of her duty.

  “You!” she said.

  Gothrud stared up at her, feeling a helpless fascination.

  “You—you mustn’t—” he gasped.

  “Du!” she broke out at him suddenly, in low voiced, furious German. “You old fool! Couldn’t you stay in bed and keep out of trouble? Don’t I have enough trouble on my hands with this one-time pill-peddler trying to undermine my authority, but 1 must suffer with you as well?”

  “Lydia,” he answered hoarsely, in the same language. “You can’t do this thing. You mustn’t let Kurt push you into it. It’s a crime before God and man that you should even consider it.”

  “I consider—I consider the colony.”