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“and you could take her anywhere.”
    “If I were qualified—which I am not. Master Astronaut, Orbital Only—that’s me.”
    “But you’re still a spaceman, Captain. I’d like to have a talk, spaceman to spaceman. But . . .”
    “Don’t worry about Pedro and Miguel, sir. They’re like me, members of the OAP, the Original Anarchist Party. We’re allowed by our gracious President to blow off steam as long as we don’t do anything. . . .”
    “What could we do, Raoul?” came a voice from behind Grimes.
    He turned to see that the other two crew members had taken seats at the rear of the control cab.
    He said softly, “What could you do? I don’t know. Yet. I spent the voyage from Earth running through all the official spools on Liberia . . .” (He remembered guiltily that there had been times when instead of watching and listening to the playmaster in his suite he had been doing other things.) “Before I left I was given a briefing of sorts. I still don’t know nearly as much as I should. You have the first-hand knowledge. I don’t.”
    “All right, sir,” said Raoul. “I’ll start at the top. There’s our revered President, Estrelita O’Higgins. . . .”
    “Mphm,” grunted Grimes. He remembered how she had looked in the screen of the playmaster. Tall, splendidly bosomed, black-haired and with rather too much jaw to be pretty. But she was undeniably handsome. In the right circumstances she might be beautiful.
    “Then there’s your boy, Colonel Bardon. . . .”
    “Not my boy,” said Grimes.
    “He’s Earth-appointed, isn’t he? Just as you are, sir. Most people say that he’s got Estrelita eating out of his hand—but it could well be the other way around.”
    “Or mutual,” said Grimes.
    They made a good pair, Estrelita and the Colonel, he had thought when he saw them in one of the sequences presented by the data spools. The tall, handsome woman in a superbly tailored blue denim suit, the tall, handsome man in his glittering full dress. Like her, he had too much jaw. In his case it was framed by black, mutton chop whiskers.
    “Whoever is eating out of whose hand,” Raoul went on, “it’s the Terran Garrison that really runs Liberia. They get first pick of everything. Then the Secret Police get their pickings. Then the ordinary police. The real Liberians don’t get picked on much. There’s some grumbling, of course, but we aren’t badly off. It’s the slaves who suffer. . . .”
    “The indentured labor,” corrected Grimes.
    “You’re hair-splitting, sir. When an indenture runs out the only way that a laborer can obtain further employment is to sign up again. All his wages, such as they are, have gone to the purchase of the little luxuries that make life bearable. And not only luxuries. There are habit-forming drugs, like Dassan dreamsticks. . . .”
    “They’re illegal,” said Grimes, “on all federated worlds.”
    The pilot laughed harshly. “Of course they are. But that doesn’t worry Bardon’s Bullies.” He returned his attention to his instruments and made minor adjustments; the beat of the tender’s inertial drive changed tempo. “I’ve time to tell you a story, sir, before we come in to Port Libertad. There was a girl, a refugee, from New Dallas. You must have heard about what happened there. An independent colony that thought that it could thumb its nose at the Federation and at everybody else. Then the Duchy of Waldegren wanted the planet—and took it. We took a few thousand refugees. A lot of the prettier girls finished up in the houses owned—not all that secretly—by Bardon. Mary Lou was one of them. That’s where I met her, in a dive called the Pink Pussy Cat. And—don’t laugh, please!—we . . . fell in love. I was going to buy her out of that place. But some bastard got her hooked on dreamsticks and. . . .”
    “She withered away to nothing,” said Miguel.
    Grimes said nothing. What could he say?
    Raoul broke the silence, speaking in a deliberately