“You can’t go against human nature,” Forsythe said for the fifteenth time. “People are people, and they’ll always want to take care of their own before they share with others.” “_Some_ people, Forsythe,” said Harris drily. “Fortunately or otherwise, there are a number of us who consider loyalty to self and species above loyalty to any institution or set of institutions, however traditional.” “I suppose,” said Forsythe in his booming voice, “that the UN is not an institution--and you are not loyal to it?” “A specious argument, I fear,” replied Harris, stroking his neat black mustache. “I’ll grant you that institutions are necessary, man being what he is. But it is therefore necessary for us to create and serve institutions that grow constantly larger in scope and embrace more and more people in their pattern of expansion. Should we not instead draw a line and say, ‘Here I stop--I go no further.’” “What will happen when we colonize the planets?” Sven Ryan asked. Harris regarded the inventor with mild astonishment, while Forsythe looked actually baleful. The American cabinet member said, “I thought the space-dream was halted for the time being, after the last Moon-mission failed. How much did that one cost you people? Forty-one billions, wasn’t it?” “And the lives of seventeen men and women when the appropriations bill was cut--thanks largely to American influence in the UN,” retorted the inventor hotly. “If they’d come back as ordered, no one would have died,” said Forsythe angrily. “What was the sense of maintaining a Moon station when all they could do was observe conditions there--at the staggering cost of fifteen billion dollars a year?” “I opposed the appropriations cut, Mr. Ryan,” Ian Harris reminded him. “However, expenses were running a bit hog-wild.” “Do you think of nothing but dollars?” Ryan asked pugnaciously. His hangover safely buried, he had acquired a new belligerence. Hamilton broke the embarrassed silence that followed. Laying his napkin on the table, he rose and asked, “Don’t you think we’d better be getting on with the test?” Actually, he was on the inventor’s side of the argument, but he dared not risk alienating the others. Leaving the dining room, they were taken underground, where they donned temperature-proof aluminum coveralls. Then they rode a swift, monorail subway to the proving ground. Hamilton wished his chest would stop itching. It always began the moment he found himself unable to scratch it. Miss Alderman caught his arm for an instant as they left the monorail at the end of their journey. “What have you got in mind, Chief?” she asked him in a cautious whisper. “Wait and see,” was his whispered reply. “We’ve still got an ace or two up our sleeves.” “I hope so,” she said earnestly. “If Mr. Forsythe gets frightened enough, I’m afraid he’ll ask the Americans to drop a bomb on the whole base.”