Ballantyne reflected on what he knew of Alpha Centauri. Even the fantastically fast new exploratory ships took ten years to cross the interstellar gulf to its wild planets, and there had only been three expeditions so far. The third had brought back a group of curious natives who were to report to their queen what the strangers' homeland was like. He imagined that the spacemen had had quite a time, with that score of turbulent barbarians crammed into a narrow hull though of course they'd passed almost the whole voyage in suspended animation. The visitors had spent about a year now on Earth and Luna, staring, asking endless questions, wondering what their hosts did with themselves now that the U. N. had brought the nations together and ended war. There hadn't been much trouble. Occasionally one of them would get mad and break somebody's jaw, and then there'd been the one who was invited to speak at a women's club.... He chuckled to himself. "Are these Yovians humans like you?" asked Dyann. "Uh-huh," he nodded. "The moons were colonized from Earth about a hundred and twenty-five years ago. They declared their independence about sixty years past, and nobody thought it was worth the trouble to fight about it. Though maybe we should have." "Vy that?" "Oh well, the colonists were misfits originally, remnants of the old Eurasian militarisms. They did do heroic work in settling and developing the Jovian System, but they live under a dictatorship and make no bones about despising Earth and considering themselves the destined rulers of all the planets. Last year they grabbed the Saturnian colonies on the thinnest of pretexts, and Earth was too chicken-livered to do more than give them a reproachful look. Not that the U. N. has much of a navy these days, compared to theirs." Dyann shrugged and went on unpacking. She hung an extra sword on the wall, unshipped her armor and put it up, and slipped into a loose fur-trimmed robe. Urushkidan slithered to the floor and opened his own trunk, pulling out a score of fat books which he placed on the shelf over his bunk and expropriated the little table for his papers, pencils, and humidor. "You know--ah--Dr. Urushkidan--" said Ballantyne uneasily, "I wish you weren't going to Jupiter." "And why not?" asked the Martian belligerently. "Well, doesn't your reformulation of general relativity indicate a way to build a ship which can go faster than light?" "Among oter tings, yes." Urushkidan blew a malodorous cloud of smoke. "Well, I don't think the Jovians are interested in science for its own sake. I think they want to get you and your knowledge so they can build such ships themselves which would be the last thing they need to take over the Solar System." "A Martian," said Urushkidan condescendingly, "is not concerned wit te squabblings of te lower animals. Noting personal, of course."