eath. After he had
replaced them his condition seemed improved.

Lindsay offered him a cigarette, which was refused, and selected one for
himself. He said, "What happens if I pursue trend X?"

"You'll be assassinated," du Fresne told him nervously. "And the results
of such assassination will be disastrous for both planets. Earth will
have to go to war."

"Then why not ship us goods we can use?" Lindsay asked quietly.

Du Fresne looked at him as despairingly as his glasses would permit. He
said, "You just don't understand. Why didn't your people send someone
better attuned to our problems?"

"Perhaps because they felt Mars would be better represented by someone
attuned to its own problems," Lindsay told him. "Don't tell me your
precious computers recommend murder and war."

"They don't recommend anything," said du Fresne. "They merely advise
what will happen under given sets of conditions."

"Perhaps if you used sensible judgment instead of machines to make your
decisions you could prevent my assassination," said Lindsay, finishing
his scotch on the rocks. "Who knows?" he added. "You might even be able
to prevent an interplanetary war!"

When he left, du Fresne's nose was again growing red and the Minister of
Computation was fumbling for another evapochief.

* * * * *

Riding the escaramp to his office on the one-twentieth floor of the UW
building, Lindsay pondered the strange people of the mother planet among
whom his assignment was causing him to live. One inch over six feet, he
was not outstandingly tall--but he felt tall among them, with their
slump harnesses and disfiguring spectacles and the women so hidden
beneath their shapeless coveralls and harmopan makeup.

He was not unprepared for the appearance of Earthfolk, of course, but he
had not yet adjusted to seeing them constantly around him in such large
numbers. To him their deliberate distortion was as shocking as, he
supposed wryly, his own unaltered naturalness was to them.

There was still something illogical about the cult of everyday ugliness
that had overtaken the mother planet in the last two generations, under
the guise of social harmony. It dated back, of course, to the great Dr.
Ludmilla Hartwig, psychiatric synthesizer of the final decades of the
twentieth century.

It was she who had correctly interpreted the growing distrust of the
handsome and the beautiful among the great bulk of the less favored, the