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up there, frailies and bucearos seeking their nests, starlarks rising to hunt through the dusk. The air blew cool and bore wild scents from the hinterland eastward.
    How beautiful this is,
passed through him as he came outdoors, together with a few lines from his favorite poet, penned more than two centuries ago:
    God gave all men all earth to love,
    But, since our hearts are small,
    Ordained for each one spot should prove
    Belovéd over all;
    —and at the same time:
No, damnation, it
isn’t
enough! We have a whole universe to live in, if we can break past the powermongers
.
    Sharply to him came the memories—Earth seen from space, tiny, gorgeously beswirled, infinitely precious; Lunar craters beneath a blaze of stars; a Martial dawn, red, red, red over sandsand boulders and colors; the mighty sight of many-banded Jupiter; his first glimpse of Phoebus athwart new constellations. What else had Joelle witnessed? What else could he?
    “Nice weather,” said one of the officers. “Looks like we won’t get the summer storms till Hektos or Hebdomos this year.”
    “Yeah,” Brodersen responded like a machine. A part of him noted that the young men beside him had been born here. They used the Demetrian calendar automatically. Few were the atoms in them that had come from Earth. What did they individually think about the prospect of humankind getting the freedom of the cosmos? Doubtless they’d say that was a great idea… until some neo-collectivist gave them an estimate of the social cost. What then? He forbore to ask.
    Instead he steered for the Eglise de St. Michel suburb. (Traffic was not so thick in Eopolis that autopilots were mandatory.) Hidden Mountain Road lay gold at evening, houses and gardens widely separated, native meadows and woodlands in between. His own dwelling was designed for the climate, a Hawaiian-style bungalow in half a hectare of lodix lawn and Terrestrial flowers. “How do you fellows plan to get back?” he asked as he pulled into the carport.
    “We’ll be around here till we’re relieved, sir,” was the answer.
    “M-m-m… hm. Want to stop in for a cup of coffee?”
    “We’d better not, sir. Thanks anyway.”
    Brodersen grinned at his passengers’ embarrassment, which very slightly eased the anger in him, and got out. They moved off the property and vanished behind a tall davisia hedge, doubtless to take stations watchful of both his front and rear entrances.
    After patting his German shepherd hello, he went on into the house. The living room was long and high, paneled like the office where he had been, a stone fireplace that he had built himself standing archaic opposite a broad window showing the patio. It was full of fragrances from the blooms his wife had brought in. She had music going, some of her cherished Sibelius, but softly, while she sat in a lounger, the cat on her lap, and studied an engineering report. (After he hired her, he soon found she rated rapid promotion; after they were married, he made her his full partner. These days Elisabet Leino occupied much of her time with matters outside of Chehalis Enterprises—civic, theatrical, horticultural, not to mention two lively youngsters—but the company still could not have managed well without her.)
    “Hi,” she said, laid the papers down and rose, expecting tokiss him. She was a rangy woman, ivory-skinned, brown-haired, husky-voiced, today clad in a dress whose shortness did justice to her legs. Sharp, almost Classical features lost their look of gladness. “You’ve got a faceful of riptides. It went badly, didn’t it?”
    “I want beer,” he growled, and hauled a bottle from a cooler cabinet behind a small bar. His manners came back to him. “Uh, you too?”
    She walked across to embrace him lightly. “I’ll wait for cocktail hour. What happened, darling?”
    “Plenty, and all ungood.” He poured into a silver mug from a set he’d brought back from his last trip to Earth, baggage charges be damned, for their