The older man looked at me with the superiority of age towards youth. "Young man," he said, "you have not read history; you do not understand this love and family doctrine; it exists in the outside world today just as it did two centuries ago. The Germans in the days of the old surface wars made too free with the enemy's women, and that is why they ran us into cover here and penned us up. These mongrel people will fight for their women when they will fight for nothing else. We have not bred all the lust out of our workmen either. It is merely dormant. Once they are loosed in the outer world they will not understand this thing and they will again make free with the enemy's women, and then we shall all be exterminated." Dr. Zimmern got up and filled a pipe with synthetic tobacco and puffed energetically as he walked about the room. "What do you say about this protium ore?" he asked; "will you be able to solve the problem?" "Yes," I said, "I think I shall." "I hope so," replied my host, "and yet sometimes I do not care; somehow I want this thing to come to an end. I want to see what is outside there. I think, perhaps, I would like to fly. "What troubles me is that I do not see how we can ever do it. We have bred and trained our race into specialization and stupidity. We wouldn't know how to go out and join this World State if they would let us." Dr. Zimmern paced the room in silence for a time. "Do you know," he said, "I should like to see a negro, a black man with kinky hair--it must be queer." "Yes," I answered, "there must be many queer things out there." CHAPTER VI IN WHICH I LEARN THAT COMPETITION IS STILL THE LIFE OF THE OLDEST TRADE IN THE WORLD ~1~ When I told Dr. Zimmern that I should solve the problem of the increase of the supply of protium I may have been guilty of speaking of hopes as if they were certainties. My optimism was based on the discovery that the exact chemical state of the protium in the ore was unknown, and that it did not exist equally in all samples of the ore. After some further months of labour I succeeded in determining the exact chemical ingredients of the ore, and from this I worked rapidly toward a new process of extraction that would greatly increase the total yield of the precious element. But this fact I kept from my assistants whose work I directed to futile researches while I worked alone after hours in following up the lead I had discovered. During the progress of this work I was not always in the laboratory. I had become a not infrequent visitor to the Level of the Free Women. The continuous carnival of amusement had an attraction for me, as it must have had for any tired and lonely man. But it was not merely the lure of sensuous pleasures that appealed to me, for I was also fascinated with the deeper and more tragic aspect of life beneath the gaudy surface of hectic joy.