you to Defense and you can tell them anything you
want. But don't try to sneak back in this ship! It'll be guarded!"

The groundcar was enclosed, with room for a driver and the three from
the Med Ship. But armed men festooned themselves about its exterior
and it went bumping and rolling to the massive ground-layer girders of
the grid. It rolled out under them and onto a paved highway. It picked
up speed.

There were buildings on either side of the road, but few showed
lights. This was night, and the men at the landing-grid had set a
pattern of hunger, so that the silence and the dark buildings did not
seem a sign of tranquility and sleep, but of exhaustion and despair.

The highway lamps were few, by comparison with other inhabited worlds,
and the groundcar needed lights of its own to guide its driver over a
paved surface that needed repair. By those moving lights other
depressing things could be seen: untidiness, buildings not kept up to
perfection, evidences of apathy, the road, which hadn't been cleaned
lately, litter here and there.

Even the fact that there were no stars added to the feeling of
wretchedness and gloom and, ultimately, of hunger.

Maril spoke nervously to the driver.

"The famine isn't any better?"

He moved his head in negation, but did not speak. There was a splotch
of blue pigment at the back of his neck. It extended upward into his
hair.

"I left two years ago," said Maril. "It was just beginning then.
Rationing hadn't started."

The driver said evenly, "There's rationing now!"

The car went on and on. A vast open space appeared ahead. Lights about
its perimeter seemed few and pale.

"Everything seems worse. Even the lights."

"Using all the power," said the driver, "to warm up ground to grow
crops where it ought to be winter. Not doing too well, either."

Calhoun knew, somehow, that Maril moistened her lips.

"I was sent," she explained to the driver, "to go ashore on Trent and
then make my way to Weald. I mailed reports of what I found out back
to Trent. Somebody got them back to here whenever it was possible."

The driver said, "Everybody knows the man on Trent disappeared. Maybe
he got caught, maybe somebody saw him without make-up. Or maybe he
just quit being one of us. What's the difference? No use!"

Calhoun found himself wincing a little. The driver was not angry. He
was hopeless. But men should not despair. They shouldn't accept
hostility from those about them as a d