it can't get out of, a vicious, painful, torturous trap, and the
world has been struggling for seven decades to get out. It hasn't
succeeded. And the time is drawing rapidly nigh for the farmer to come.
Something had to be done, and done fast, before it was too late. The fox
had to chew off its leg. And I had to bring the world to the brink of a
major war."

Shandor shook his head, his mind buzzing. "I don't see what you mean. We
never had a chance for peace, we never had a chance to get our feet on
the ground from one round to the next. No time to do anything worthwhile
in the past seventy years--I don't see what you mean about a trap."

Ingersoll settled back in his chair, the light catching his face in
sharp profile. "It's been a century of almost continuous war," he said.
"You've pointed out the whole trouble. We haven't had time to catch our
breath, to make a real peace. The first World War was a sorry affair, by
our standards--almost a relic of earlier European wars. Trench fighting,
poor rifles, soap-box aircraft--nothing to distinguish it from earlier
wars but its scope. But twenty uneasy years went by, and another war
began, a very different sort of war. This one had fast aircraft, fast
mechanized forces, heavy bombing, and finally, to cap the climax,
atomics. That second World War could hold up its head as a real,
strapping, fighting war in any society of wars. It was a stiff war, and
a terrible one. Quite a bit of progress, for twenty years. But
essentially, it was a war of ideologies, just as the previous one had
been. A war of intolerance, of unmixable ideas--"

The old man paused, and drew a sip of water from the canister in the
corner. "Somewhere, somehow, the world had missed the boat. Those wars
didn't solve anything, they didn't even make a very strong pretense.
They just made things worse. Somewhere, human society had gotten into a
trap, a vicious circle. It had reached the end of its progressive
tether, it had no place to go, no place to expand, to great common goal.
So ideologies arose to try to solve the dilemma of a basically static
society, and they fought wars. And they reached a point, finally, where
they could destroy themselves unless they broke the vicious circle,
somehow."

Shandor looked up, a deep frown on his face. "You're trying to say that
they needed a new frontier."

"Exactly! They desperately needed it. There was only one more frontier
they could reach for. A frontier which, on