"You Humanists talk a lot about 'man's right to variability,'" said Valeria. "If you really carry off that revolution your writings advocate you'll just trade one power group for another--and more fanatic, less lawful, than the present one." "Not necessarily," said Lundgard. "After all, the Union will probably break up. It can't last forever. All we want to do is hasten the day because we feel that it's outlived its usefulness." Bo shook his head. "I can't see it," he said heavily. "I just can't see it. All those people--the Lunarites, the violent clansmen on Venus, the stiff correct Martians, the asteroid rockhounds, even those mysterious Jovians--they all came from Earth. It was Earth's help that made their planets habitable. We're all men, all one race." "A fiction," said Lundgard. "The human race is a fiction. There are only small groups with their own conflicting interests." "And if those conflicts are allowed to break into war--" said Valeria. "Do you know what a lithium bomb can do?" There was a reckless gleam in Lundgard's eyes. "If a period of interplanetary wars is necessary, let's get it over with," he answered. "Enough men will survive to build something better. This age has gotten stale. It's petrifying. There have been plenty of shake-ups in history--the fall of Rome, the Reformation, the Napoleonic Wars, the World Wars. It's been man's way of progressing." "I don't know about all those," said Bo slowly. "I just know I wouldn't want to live through such a time." "You're soft," said Lundgard. "Down underneath you're soft." He laughed disarmingly. "Pardon me. I didn't mean anything personal. I'll never convince you and you'll never convince me, so let's keep it friendly. I hope you'll have some free time on Luna, Valeria. I know a little grill where they serve the best synthosteaks in the System." "All right," she smiled. "It's a date." Bo mumbled some excuse and went aft. He was still calling her Dr. McKittrick. IV You can't just lie here and let him come kill you. There was a picture behind his eyes; he didn't know if it was a dream or a long buried memory. He stood under an aspen which quivered and rustled as if it laughed to itself softly, softly, when the wind embraced it. And the wind was blowing up a red granite slope, wild and salt from the Sound, and there were towering clouds lifting over Denmark to the west. The sunlight rained and streamed through aspen leaves, broken, shaken, falling in spatters against the earth, and he, Bo Jonsson, laughed with the wind and the tree and the far watery glitter of the Sound. He opened his eyes, wearily, like an old man. Orion was marching past, and there was a blaze on crags five miles off which told of the rising sun. The asteroid spun swiftly; he had been here for many of its days now, and each day burdened him like a year. Got to get out of here, he knew.