Read Podkayne of Mars for Free Online

I was, caged up in it like white mice in a bio lab.
    (Well, I admit that Mother didn’t exactly build Deimos; the Martians did that, starting with a spare asteroid that they happened to have handy. But some millions of years back they grew tired of space travel and devoted all their time to the whichness of what and how to unscrew the inscrutable—so when Mother took over the job, Deimos was pretty run down; she had to start in from the ground up and rebuild it completely.)
    In any case, it was certain that everything that I could see through that transparent wall was a product of Mother’s creative, imaginative and hardheaded engineering ability. I began to fume. Clark was off in a corner, talking privately to some stranger—“stranger” to me, at least; Clark, for all his antisocial disposition, always seems to know somebody, or to know somebody who knows somebody, anywhere we go. I sometimes wonder if he is a member of some vast underground secret society; he has such unsavory acquaintances and never brings any of them home.
    Clark is, however, a very satisfactory person to fume with, because, if he isn’t busy, he is always willing to help a person hate anything that needs hating; he can even dig up reasons why a situation is even more vilely unfair than you thought it was. But he was busy, so that left Uncle Tom. So I explained to him bitterly how outrageous I thought it was that we should be penned up like animals—free Mars citizens on one of Mars’ own moons!—simply because a sign read: Passengers must wait until called—by order of Three-Planets Treaty Authority.
    “Politics!” I said bitterly. “I could run it better myself.”
    “I’m sure you could,” he agreed gravely, “but, Flicka, you don’t understand.”
    “I understand all too well!”
    “No, honey bun. You understand that there is no good reason why you should not walk straight through that door and enjoy yourself by shopping until it is time to go inboard the Tricorn. And you are right about that, for there is no need at all for you to be locked up in here when you could be out there making some freeport shopkeeper happy by paying him a high price which seems to you a low price. So you say ‘Politics!’ as if it were a nasty word—and you think that settles it.”
    He sighed. “But you don’t understand. Politics is not evil; politics is the human race’s most magnificent achievement. When politics is good, it’s wonderful . . . and when politics is bad—well, it’s still pretty good.”
    “I guess I don’t understand,” I said slowly.
    “Think about it. Politics is just a name for the way we get things done . . . without fighting. We dicker and compromise and everybody thinks he has received a raw deal, but somehow after a tedious amount of talk we come up with some jury-rigged way to do it without getting anybody’s head bashed in. That’s politics. The only other way to settle a dispute is by bashing a few heads in . . . and that is what happens when one or both sides is no longer willing to dicker. That’s why I say politics is good even when it is bad . . . because the only alternative is force—and somebody gets hurt.”
    “Uh . . . it seems to me that’s a funny way for a revolutionary veteran to talk. From what I’ve heard, Uncle Tom, you were one of the bloodthirsty ones who started the shooting. Or so Daddy says.”
    He grinned. “Mostly I ducked. If dickering won’t work, then you have to fight. But I think maybe it takes a man who has been shot at to appreciate how much better it is to fumble your way through a political compromise rather than have the top of your head blown off.” He frowned and suddenly looked very old. “When to talk and when to fight—That is the most difficult decision to make wisely of all the decisions in life.” Then suddenly he smiled and the years dropped away. “Mankind didn’t invent fighting; it was here long before we were. But we invented politics. Just think of