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electric were the lights, though kept soft. Waterpower was abundant in these parts. In addition, the use of coal throughout the Union increased year by year at a rate that Maurai found horrifying.
    ‘I don’t understand you, Launy,’ Terai said. A bottle of wine anda fair amount of local whiskey had lubricated his tongue. Sober, he was chary of words. ‘A decent fellow like you, fighting to keep a bunch of whalers in business. It’s not as if you had to. There’s no conscription here, and the war was not called a war anyway. Yes, you’ve told me you did well off your raiding, and it was a great adventure. But you’re doing better off your company, and if a man feels restless – Lesu Haristi, he’s got a whole planet to roam, and half of it still mostly unknown!’
    ‘And more than half of it full of nothing but backward starvelings,’ Launy retorted.
    ‘Oh, now, I’ve traveled rather widely, and it isn’t that bad. Not everywhere.’
    ‘Bad enough, and in enough places.’ Launy’s speech quickened. ‘I haven’t just read books, I’ve seen.’
    ‘M-m, how?’
    ‘My father was an Iron Man till he grew arthritic. He took me, a kid, along with him on his final trip. We went clear to the Lantic coast, prospecting. Plenty of stuff yet in the dead cities. We didn’t run into any danger. But I almost wish we had, because the main reason was that the natives were too miserable to be a menace. Instead, they begged. A lot of women tried to rent themselves out, with their families’ consent – for a needle, a plastic cup, anything useful we could spare. I was too young to pay much heed, but I don’t think those poor, scrawny, rickety-boned creatures got many takers.’
    I like him more than ever,
Terai thought.
He’s straying from my question, maybe on purpose, but he’s not using the change of subject to glamorize himself.
    That would have been easy, his mind went on. The Iron Men were picturesque, and their early exploits had been heroic in a raw fashion as they fought, sneaked, or bargained their way across the Mong-occupied plains in search of metal. Today, however, treaties regulated their passage; Lodge-owned plants near the sources processed materials before those were loaded onto trains that then chugged uneventfully over the prairies and up the mountains; sometimes the freight came from lodes that had been rediscovered, rather than from salvage: coal enormously exceeded it in tonnage. But, true, expeditions did still range through the wilds and barrens of the far East, hunting for the means to give Union industry more muscle.
If
it could only be given more brain and heart.
…
    ‘No, I’ll take a civilized country,’ Launy continued. ‘I’ve been south as far as Corado, and the countries there are all right: political puppets of yours, but living all right. The Mong, too. I’ve visited the Mong, and they’re as different from us as ever in spite of modernizing, but even their serfs eat well and are better educated than you might expect. I’d certainly love to travel through your Federation someday – I mean as a private person – oh, yes. And could be I’ll make it to Yurrup one of these years. Trade’s really begun growing in that direction, hasn’t it? Skyholm must be a wonderful sight. And you can name other lucky areas. But most of ’em –’ He shook his head vehemently. ‘No, thanks. I know about countries where the rich have it good, but I know about their poor, too, and I know about those where everybody is poor, and I tell you, I’ve seen enough.’
    Terai returned to the attack. ‘If you’re so tender-hearted,’ he asked, ‘how can you support the slaughter of whales?’
    ‘You Maurai hunted them in the past. And you tried ranching them, like cattle.’
    ‘That was before out scientists learned – what scientists were finding out shortly before the Downfall – how intelligent the cetaceans are.’ Terai gripped his glass, snuffed the smoky odor, tossed ardency down