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they know where it lies. Consequently–”
    Bassett threw himself back in his chair again and gave Lecoq a belligerent and authoritative stare. “Consequently, we will investigate, with all the resources at our disposal. And this time we’ll frame our questions differently. What do you know about Ymir, Lecoq?”
    The suddenness with which he threw out the question took Lecoq by surprise. Now he hunted for his voice as if, in the unaccustomedly long period of listening, he had momentarily mislaid it.
    “Why, I know quite a lot about all the colonies. Ymir is by far the coldest, most miserable and generally unlikely world which men have ever attempted to make their home. The equatorial regions are habitable; the population is around eight or ten million, and everyone is half-frozen and half-starved. But they claim to like it.”
    “No!” exploded Bassett. “That’s a dangerous way of putting it. They don’t like it; they endure it more or less gladly, and there’s a whole universe of difference. I’ve been reading up on Ymir’s history–just before I called you up, as a matter of fact. I still have the spool in, in fact.”
    He glanced down at the controls on the side of his desk, moved one of the switches, and shaded the windows so that the office was in half-darkness. Lecoq swung his chair around to face the same wall as Bassett, and on which, as the projector warmed up to speed, a flickering series of words and pictures appeared. Bassett was running the spool back to its beginning.
    “This is an official account from the Ymiran Embassy,” he said. “I had someone call on them and pick it up this morning. Apparently they supply these to anyone who asks for one, by way of publicity.”
    “I shouldn’t have thought they had much to boast about on their icebox of a planet,” Lecoq said sarcastically.
    “Oh, it isn’t boasting. It’s probably a sort of inverted pride; they’re displaying their toughness, self-righteousness and endurance. Look at that, now.” He stopped the projector on a wide-angle shot of Ymir’s capital city, Festerburg; its square, ugly buildings poked up between walls of ice, and coarse black smoke swirled about each rooftop, as if trying to blend it back into the bleak landscape. They burned coal and oil, laid down in an earlier interglacial period, obtained by arduous hand mining and drilling.
    “Know where that is?” Bassett demanded.
    “That’s the capital,” Lecoq snapped. “Festerburg.”
    “Right. Know why they call it Festerburg? It’s from the first line of one of their religious songs, Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott. I could think of better reasons for choosing the name, but that’s the official reason as given here.”
    He snapped rapidly through a series of shots of the founding fathers of Ymir, all without exception angry-faced, intolerant-looking men and women. He stopped at a faded view of the original landing.
    Among the glaciers and the snowdrifts, the peaked-faced children stood shivering while their parents held a ceremony around the ruins of the ships which had brought them. They were determined to cut every link that bound them to sinful, worldly, unspiritual Earth.
    “Only they couldn’t, of course,” said Bassett. “They now refer to the fact under the excuse of wishing to go back and persuade us lush-living Earthers that we should deny the flesh as the Ymirans do. In fact, of course, they bit off more than they could chew. They intended to be self-sufficient and go ahead and mortify themselves in isolation; they managed to starve a few thousand children to death, and then they reopened limited contact with Earth, for seeds, ultrahardy meat animals, and so on. Well, that’s been the way things have remained. The Ymirans maintain that it is hateful to them to spend a tour here at their embassy around the corner; they say they are nauseated by the luxury and fleshpots of Rio. In actual fact, I gather they line up for the jobs that fall vacant, and a