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cheese. Here”—flinging open the door to the next section of the plant, a vast twilit room where spidery metal girders supported shielded ultraviolet lamps—“we fortify the protein content of the mix. With absolutely natural substances: yeasts, and fungi with especially high nutritive value. If all goes well we turn as much as eight per cent of the cassava into protein, but even six per cent, the average yield, is a vast improvement.”
    Walking ahead as he talked toward yet another section where the finished product was draped in huge skeins on drying-racks, like knitting-wool, then chopped into finger-sized lengths.
    “And you know something else extraordinary? Cassava’s a tropical plant, of course. Yet it grows better here than under so-called ‘natural’ conditions. Do you know why?”
    Hugh shook his head.
    “Because we draw so much of our water supply from melted snow. That contains less heavy hydrogen—deuterium. A lot of plants simply can’t cope with it.”
    And now the packing room, where men and women in masks and coveralls tamped measured quantities into cardboard cartons lined with polyethylene, then loaded the cartons on to humming fork-lift trucks. Some of them waved on noticing Mr. Bamberley. He grinned almost from ear to ear as he waved back.

    Oh, God. Mine, that is—if any. Not Bamberley’s cosy cheery paterfamilias kind, who is certainly tall and handsome and white-skinned behind his long gray beard. I mean, this guy paid for the clothes I’m wearing, the college I attend, the car I drive—even if it is only a sluggish electric. So I’d like to like him. If you can’t like the people who are kind to you ...
    And he makes it so difficult! Always this feeling, just when you think you’re there, that something isn’t right. Like he gives all the time to Earth Community Chest, and supplies this cheap food to Globe Relief, and out of eight adopted sons not one a crippled Vietnamese ...
    Hollow. That’s the word. Hollow.

    But not to start arguments and rows. Another question.
    “Where are the cases going that they’re filling now?”
    “Noshri, I think,” Mr. Bamberley said. “The postwar aid program, you know. But I’ll make sure.”
    He shouted to a black woman who was stenciling destination names on empty cartons. She tilted the one she’d just finished so it could be read from the gallery.
    “Not to Africa!” Mr. Bamberley sounded surprised. “Then someone must have put in a lot of overtime—I’ll find out who and make some commendations. They’ve already started on the new contract with Globe Relief.”
    “Which one is that?”
    “Oh, for some village in Honduras where the coffee crop failed.”

    SPACE FOR THIS INSERTION IS DONATED BY THE PUBLISHERS AS A SERVICE TO THE COMMUNITY
    Where a child cries—or is too weak to cry ... Where a mother mourns—for one who will not weep again ...
    Where plague and famine and the scourge of war have proved too much for struggling human beings ...
    WE BRING HOPE
    But we can’t do it without your help. Think of us now. Remember us in your will. Give generously to the world’s largest relief organization: GLOBE RELIEF.°

    °All donations wholly tax-deductible.

    HOUSE TO HOUSE
    Gilt-tooled on yard-square panels of green leather—imitation, of course—the zodiacal signs looked down from the walls of the executive lunch-room. The air was full of the chatter of voices and the clink of ice-cubes. Waiting to be attacked when the president of the company joined them (he had promised to show at one sharp) was a table laden with expensive food: hard-boiled eggs, shells intact so that it could be seen they were brown, free-range, rich in carotene; lettuces whose outer leaves had been rasped by slugs; apples and pears wearing their maggot-marks like dueling scars, in this case presumably genuine ones though it had been known for fruit growers to fake them with red-hot wires in areas where insects were no longer found; whole hams, very