their isolation period. Now, One’s spokesmen are mostly
keeping quiet, and we’re hoping they will eventually
plump for non-interference themselves.
“In their place, we have Cyclops beating the drum, as
a result of the Carrig affair in my personal opinion, and a
whole lot of charitably-minded but short-sighted people
from the older worlds, including and especially Earth.
What they fail to understand1 sayis that Earth-type
luxury isn’t the perfect human way of life. They want to
impose it as a standard everywhere, whether or not the
recipients enjoy the cultures they have at present,
whether or not these cultures are productive, creative
ones.”
“Thirteen’s certainly isn’t,” Maddalena muttered.
Langenschmidt didn’t answer. His eyes had turned
towards the window, and widened on seeing a line of
brilliant sparks like stitches sewn upward across the blue
of the sky.
“Hullo!” he exclaimed. “That’s an emergency rocket.
Some fisherman in difficulties, presumably. We’re always
having to nursemaid local folkeither fisherman who go
too far to sea with inadequate equipment, or upper-crust
playboys out wolfshark-hunring whose nerve fails them
at the crucial moment. Still, it interrupts the monotony.”
He addressed himself to a communicator panel
discreetly blended with the room’s no-nonsense decor.
“Anyone taking action on that emergency rocket just
now?”
Pause. Then a disembodied voice, sounding irritated,
answered him. “Sorry, commandant, what was that?”
And, as if re-hearing the question in memory: “Oh! The
rocket! Yes, I’ll send someone dut to gaff the guy and
drag hmi ashore.”
“Fine.” Langenschmidt’s attention reverted to Mad-
dalena. “You know,’ I think before we finish this argu-
ment, I’d better give you a chance to see galactic
civilisation, Cyclops-style, so that you can learn all over
again what a shallow thing it really is. Take the situation
here at present as a shining example. We have this
woman Alura Quist, who runs things, as I told you. She’s
certainly very capable and ruthless. But to have to con-
fine her efforts to Cyclops, which is so poor it still runs
on fission rather than fusion, galls her. She doesn’t see
why Corps personnel should enjoy longevity payments,
to start with, when she is aging and having to send clear
back to Earth for even her cosmetic treatments. I think
in fact some of her hostility to us is due to nothing more
abstract than simple jealousy. A woman afraid of losing
her youthful looks is a sad case. She has an official lover,
one of the handsomest men I’ve ever seen, who’s also a
kind of planetary hero, a former spaceman who suffered
some kind of crippling injury in creditable circum-
stances. I don’t know the full details. She treats him like
aa tame animal, as it were. Shows him off: here he is,
the famous Justin Kolb, and he’s my lover. Follow me?”
Maddalena gave a listless nod. She had heard all this,
apart from the story of Kolb, at the time of the Carrig
affair, when a group of Cyclopean entrepreneurs learned
from a failed Corps probationer the location of ZRP
Fourteen and its deposits of high-yield radioactives.
They had operated a mine with local slave-labour for a
considerable time before the Patrol managed to displace
them, and Cyclops had smarted ever since under the
knowledge that a bunch of ZRP barbarians had dropped
civilised menso-calleddown a volcano, the standard
punishment for the crimes they had committed by the
local ethical yardstick.
“I honestly don’t think Quist has any interest in the
ZRP’s as such,” Langenschmidt pursued. “She wants to
get back at the Corps for personal reasons of jealousy,
and the existence of a fund of hostility due to the ep-
isode on Fourteen provides her with a handle. If we
were to abandon non-interference for sound, rational
reasons. I’d swallow the decision gagging, maybe, but
I’d stomach it. But to do it for such a”
The disembodied voice spoke again from the commu-
nicator. “Commandant? ”
“Yes?” Langenschmidt half-turned in his chair.
“That signal rocket. I thought you’d be interested to
know about it.”
“Not especially, but tell me anyway.”
“We’ve found one of the Grarignol fishermena boy,
rather, not more than seventeen, they say. He’s tangled
with a wolfshark being hunted by auhrather notori-