thoughts
away from the girl. He wondered if the Governors of Mars were
sufficiently in key with the current feelings of Earthfolk to understand
fully how deep the repercussions from his speech might go. He wondered
if they had considered fully the possibility of interplanetary war.

True, Mars was undoubtedly better equipped to defend itself against such
attack than was Earth. Like the mother planet it had its share of robot
rockets capable of launching a counterattack. And thanks to the
comparative sparseness and decentralization of its population it was far
less vulnerable to attack.

But war between the planets would be destructive of far more than cities
and the people that lived in them. It would mean inevitably a breakdown
of the entire fabric of civilized humanity--a tenuous fabric, true, but
all that existed to maintain man.

And an isolated Mars, even if self-sufficient, would be a sorry
substitute for a red planet that was part of the United Worlds. It would
mean a setback of generations, perhaps centuries.

He began to feel a new understanding of the importance of his mission.
With understanding came something akin to fear lest he should not be
able to accomplish it without disaster. It was going to be his job to
inaugurate some sort of therapy for Earth's illness. It was, in effect,
one man against a planet.

Considering the men and women with whom he had talked that day he was
unable to take the assassination threat too seriously. Somehow these
neurotics and warped zealots, with their allergies and distortion kits,
seemed unlikely to undertake or carry through any such drastic action.
Their very inhibitions would forbid it.

Not that Maria had been exactly inhibited. Damn! The girl refused to
stay out of his thoughts. He recalled what she had told him of her
conspiracy against the computers, of its aims and methods. And again he
smiled wryly to himself.

They were like spoiled children, he thought. A little group of
over-intense young men and women, neurotic, excitable, unstable, meeting
in one another's houses or in expensive cafes, plotting little coups
that never quite came off.

From certain unguarded phrases Maria had dropped during the less
frenetic periods of their evening together, he gathered that their
current aim was actual physical sabotage of Giac, the mightiest of all
computers about to be unveiled, before it went into work.

They didn't even realize, he thought, that sabotage would