'T FORGET YOU GOT A
DINNER DATE WITH THE SEC-GEN TONIGHT.

[Illustration]

Lindsay suppressed a smile and said, "In conclusion, I am qualified by
the governors of Mars to promise that if we receive another shipment of
British hunting boots we shall destroy them immediately upon
unloading--and refuse categorically to ship further beryllium to Earth.

"On Mars we raise animals for food, not for sport--we consider human
beings as the only fit athletic competition for other humans--and we see
small purpose in expending our resources mining beryllium or other
metals for payment that is worse than worthless. In short, we will not
be a dumping ground for Earth's surplus goods. I thank you."

The faint echo of his words came back to him as he stepped down from the
rostrum and walked slowly to his solitary seat in the otherwise empty
section allotted to representatives of alien planets. Otherwise there
was no sound in the huge assemblage.

He felt a tremendous lift of tension, the joyousness of a man who has
satisfied a lifelong yearning to toss a brick through a plate-glass
window and knows he will be arrested for it and doesn't care.

There was going to be hell to pay--and Lindsay was honestly looking
forward to it. While Secretary General Carlo Bergozza, his dark-green
spectacles resembling parenthesis marks on either side of his thin eagle
beak, went through the motions of adjourning the Congress for
forty-eight hours, Lindsay considered his mission and its purpose.

Earth--a planet whose age-old feuds had been largely vitiated by the
increasing rule of computer-judgment--and Mars, the one settled alien
planet on which no computer had ever been built, were drifting
dangerously apart.

It was, Lindsay thought with a trace of grimness, the same ancient story
of the mother country and her overseas colonies, the same basic and
seemingly inevitable trend, social and economic, that had led to the
revolt of North America against England, three hundred years earlier.

On a far vaster and costlier scale, of course.

Lindsay had been sent to Earth, as his planet's first representative at
the new United Worlds Congress, to see that this trend was halted before
it led to irrevocable division. And not by allowing Mars to become a
mere feeder and dumping ground for the parent planet.

Well, he had tossed a monkey wrench into the machinery of interplanetary
sweetness and light, he thought. Making his way slowly out with the res