y workers, clerks, semiskilled technicians, all who
do the drudge work of civilization and know they will never do
more. The adults spent their days with television, alcohol and
drugs; the young spent their days with gangs, sex, television and
alcohol. What else was there? Those who could have told him
neither studied nor taught at his schools. What he saw on the
concrete fields between the tall apartment houses marked the
limits of life's possibilities.

He had belonged to a gang called The Golden Spacemen. "Nobody
fools with me," he bragged. "When Harry Read's out, there's a
tiger running loose." No one knew how many times he nearly ran
from other clubs, how carefully he picked the safest spot on the
battle line.

"A man ought to be a man," he once told a girl. "He ought to do a
man's work. Did you ever notice how our fathers look, how they
sleep so much? I don't want to be like that. I want to be
something proud."

He joined the UN Inspector Corps at eighteen, in 1978. The
international cops wore green berets, high buttonless boots, bush
jackets. They were very special men.

For the first time in his life, his father said something about
his ambitions.

"Don't you like America, Harry? Do you _want_ to be without a
country? This is the best country in the world. All my life I've
made a good living. Haven't you had everything you ever wanted?
I've been a king compared to people overseas. Why, you stay here
and go to trade school and in two years you'll be living just
like me."

"I don't want that," Read said.

"What do you mean, you don't want that?"

"You could join the American Army," his mother said. "That's as
good as a trade school. If you have to be a soldier."

"I want to be a UN man. I've already enlisted. I'm in! What do
you care what I do?"

The UN Inspector Corps had been founded to enforce the Nuclear
Disarmament Treaty of 1966. Through the years it had acquired
other jobs. UN men no longer went unarmed. Trained to use small
arms and gas weapons, they guarded certain borders, bodyguarded
diplomats and UN officials, even put down riots that threatened
international peace. As the UN evolved into a strong world
government, the UN Inspector Corps steadily acquired new powers.

Read went through six months training on Madagascar.

Twice he nearly got expelled for picking fights with smaller men.
Rather than resign, he accepted punishment which assigned him to
weeks of dull, filthy extra labor.