Fortunately Clifford didn't realize that he had scored, and scuttled back to the shelter of the _Manual_. "Perhaps you don't know enough about the new system in Alpha Centauri," he said, a trifle wildly. "It has two suns surrounded by three planets, Thalia, Aglaia, and Euphrosyne. Each of these planets is slightly smaller than Earth, so that the decrease in gravity is just great enough to be pleasant, without being so marked as to be inconvenient. The atmosphere is almost exactly like that of Earth's, except that it contains several beneficial elements which are absent here--and the climate is more temperate. Owing to the fact that the planets are partially shielded from the suns by cloud layers, the temperature--except immediately at the poles and the equators, where it is slightly more extreme--is always equable, resembling that of Southern California...." "Sounds charming," said Johnson. "I too have read the Colonial Office handouts.... I wonder what the people who wrote them'll do now that there's no longer any necessity for attracting colonists--everybody's already up in Alpha Centauri. Oh, well; there'll be other systems to conquer and colonize." "The word _conquer_ is hardly correct," the commander said stiffly, "since not one of the three planets had any indigenous life forms that was intelligent." "Or life forms that you recognized as intelligent," Johnson suggested gently. Although why should there be such a premium placed on intelligence, he wondered. Was intelligence the sole criterion on which the right to life and to freedom should be based? The commander frowned and looked at his chronometer again. "Well," he finally said, "since you feel that way and you're sure you've quite made up your mind, my men _are_ anxious to go." "Of course they are," Johnson said, managing to convey just the right amount of reproach. Clifford flushed and started to walk away. "I'll stand out of the way of your jets!" Johnson called after him. "It would be so anticlimactic to have me burned to a crisp after all this. Bon voyage!" There was no reply. Johnson watched the silver vessel shoot up into the sky and thought, "Now is the time for me to feel a pang, or even a twinge, but I don't at all. I feel relieved, in fact, but that's probably the result of getting rid of that fool Clifford." He crossed the field briskly, pulling off his jacket and discarding his tie as he went. His ground car remained where he had parked it--in an area clearly marked _No Parking_.