"I know you don't. But too many of our friends were within sight and hearing of the whole mess. Sooner or later their attitude would make you unhappy about a man who talked big, and then backed down." * * * * * His insistence widened Linda's eyes. The civilized Venusians were always ready to take the sensible, the expedient way. Had they been otherwise, had they not been the descendants of sensible Terrestrian ancestors, they would have been included in the devastation which had left all but small and widely scattered patches of Terra uninhabitable for the past seven-hundred years. Rather, those who today were Venusians would have been struggling savages, scraping out a living in some uncontaminated area. Verrill's was an almost Terrestrian stubbornness; something primitive and atavistic, very much like that queer quirk which made some Venusians return to their native Earth to set up trading-posts, where they bartered with the barbarian tribesmen for tobacco and wines, spices and jewels and perfumes, all manner of luxuries which Venus did not offer. Linda made her final appeal: "Leaving all this, to scramble around in that terrible waste and desolation--oh, do be sensible!" Her voice, and the kiss that followed it, made Verrill at once aware of what generations of Venusians had taken for granted. He looked across the gardens and the lake, and up at the prodigious span of girders. The original purpose of the structure had been to house a military outpost that was to have outflanked a comparable one on Luna. In the years just before The War, engineers and scientists had been sent from Terra to build those enormous domes, plastic-sheathed and air-tight, to exclude the raging dust-storms and the overwhelming concentration of formaldehyde which made up most of the natural Venusian atmosphere. Rather than rely on any system depending upon chemically prepared oxygen, they had established gardens, orchards, fields of plant-life which liberated sufficient oxygen to maintain the required balance. This was to have been simply a garrison. According to plan, it would have played a decisive part in the final clash for Terrestrian supremacy. Meanwhile, there had come to be little difference between the rival dictatorships, except in the wording of their slogans. The Anglo-Capitalist Bloc had borrowed all the kinds and twists of regimentation of the rival bloc. The difference finally became one of flavor rather than principle.