The recorded voice stopped. He ran back the spool, set for sixty-speed,
and transmitted it to the radio office. In twenty minutes, a copy would be
aboard the ship that would hyper out for Terra that night. While he was
finishing, his communication screen buzzed.

"Dr. Kellogg's screening you, Mr. Grego," the girl in the outside office
told him.

He nodded. Her hands moved, and she vanished in a polychromatic explosion;
when it cleared, the chief of the Division of Scientific Study and
Research was looking out of the screen instead. Looking slightly upward at
the showback over his own screen, Victor was getting his warm,
sympathetic, sincere and slightly too toothy smile on straight.

"Hello, Leonard. Everything going all right?"

It either was and Leonard Kellogg wanted more credit than he deserved or
it wasn't and he was trying to get somebody else blamed for it before
anybody could blame him.

"Good afternoon, Victor." Just the right shade of deference about using
the first name--big wheel to bigger wheel. "Has Nick Emmert been talking
to you about the Big Blackwater project today?"

Nick was the Federation's resident-general; on Zarathustra he was, to all
intents and purposes, the Terran Federation Government. He was also a
large stockholder in the chartered Zarathustra Company.

"No. Is he likely to?"

"Well, I wondered, Victor. He was on my screen just now. He says there's
some adverse talk about the effect on the rainfall in the Piedmont area of
Beta Continent. He was worried about it."

"Well, it would affect the rainfall. After all, we drained half a million
square miles of swamp, and the prevailing winds are from the west. There'd
be less atmospheric moisture to the east of it. Who's talking adversely
about it, and what worries Nick?"

"Well, Nick's afraid of the effect on public opinion on Terra. You know
how strong conservation sentiment is; everybody's very much opposed to any
sort of destructive exploitation."

"Good Lord! The man doesn't call the creation of five hundred thousand
square miles of new farmland destructive exploitation, does he?"

"Well, no, Nick doesn't call it that; of course not. But he's concerned
about some garbled story getting to Terra about our upsetting the
ecological balance and causing droughts. Fact is, I'm rather concerned
myself."

He knew what was worrying both of them. Emmert was afraid the Federation
Colonial Office would blame him for drawing fire on them from