"Oh.... The fuel must have been getting low, Paul. Nothing the boat could do for us after we were back in the woods. He must be at the island." Paul could only say, "I hope so." The thing Spearman had almost said when his anger and disappointment were high, the hint at joining forces with Lantis in abandonment of everything thus far achieved--nothing could be gained by speaking of that now. But some of Spearman's words murmured on in darkness: "_Lantis--terrific organization ... monetary system ... whole world for the taking ... pretty idealism that never worked even on Earth...._" There had always been strain and mutual exasperation in argument with Ed Spearman--long ago, on the ship _Argo_. The Collectivist Party, surviving as an innocuous political group after the horrors of the Civil War of 2010-13, lived strongly in Spearman's mind, not only because his father had fought for it. Lacking the frenzied dogmatism of the antique communism it resembled, it was nevertheless communism's natural heir, a party of iron doctrines simplified for minds that resented analysis and magnified Man out of a dislike for men. Like communism, it needed to imagine a class war and felt that it had a tight vested monopoly of the underdog. The C.P., said one of its late twentieth-century prophets as humorless as his predecessors, "believed in Man." You could always fluster a collectivist by asking for a logical breakdown of that--and make an enemy: they were usually good haters and made a virtue of it. The years following the Civil War had been troubled though materially prosperous, darkened by the build-up of yet another monolithic state under Jenga the Mongol, who had inherited the desolation of the Russo-Chinese war of 1970-76; in those years the Collectivist Party in the Federation, unsupported by any conveniently foreign deity, had become not much more than a serio-comic decayed socialism with a dash of bitters. But it was alive; at the time _Argo_ left the spaceport it had had ten senators and a larger handful of delegates in the Federation Congress. It was respectable, no longer subversive, and owned a small hard core of the aggressively sincere.... Not Wright nor Sears nor anyone had ever been able to convince Edmund Spearman that evil means breed a further evil, which swallows up any good that may have been imagined in the beginning. Spearman could admit that (himself in no way an evil man) he would not do evil--if he could help it. But in the region of theory Spearman held quite simply that you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, and that settled it.... "They should be safe," Wright said. "You and Jocko saw the island." "It's beautiful. I know they're all right." "Yes.... Would you say it was a place where Ann might--oh, how shall I say it?--might attain tranquillity? Not cry too much for the moon?" "If there is any such place in the Galaxy."