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few years ago one of their staff, a man called Jaroslav Dubin, actually fell, and started to mix with Earthmen as if we were perfectly acceptable. They had to ship him home quickly before he infected any of his colleagues. You won’t find that mentioned in the official brochures, by the way.
    “Their pose of denying themselves even the comfort of a tolerable climate because comfort of any kind is sinful is, as you may expect, beginning to slip. The elders, who are too set in their ways ever to change, would dearly like to cut all ties with Earth again and return to the original aims of the colonizers. Only they can’t–not that we’d worry much if they did, mark you.
    “However, as long as there is contact between the two planets, the younger generation on Ymir wonders, in spite of all, whether their revered ancestors were such righteous vessels of divine inspiration, or whether they were just a bunch of masochistic old fanatics bent on wrecking their descendants’ future. Consequently, they detest us–for our sinfulness, they say, but more likely because they are profoundly, horribly, unsupportably jealous.
    “To suggest to them that they should receive new immigrants from Earth is just as ridiculous as to think we’d ever find an Earthborn wanting to go there. This brings me back to my earlier point: we aren’t asking the right questions.”
    “If this character with the matter transmitter isn’t just feeding you a line because you were too close to a real solution on Boreas and he wanted to draw you off,” said Lecoq brilliantly.
    Bassett nodded. “I thought of that. That’s why we’re going to take Ymir and turn it upside down and shake it until the key factor falls out. If it’s there. Right, Lecoq–you know what I want done. Get out and start doing it.”

CHAPTER VI

    Enni Zatok lived in a city. Everyone on Ymir lived in a city, of which there were five on the entire planet. The reason was simple: communal heating made the most of their exiguous resources of coal and oil, and in any case the mere presence of a concentrated mass of human bodies raised the temperature another valuable degree.
    There were about ten million people on Ymir. The total had taken three centuries to reach that figure, for many children died young, and many adults, owing to poor nutrition and the adverse effects of the climate, were able to father only small families.
    But Enni Zatok had seen pictures of people who went about in the open air with nothing on at all, under a sky as blue as her own eyes and a sun much more golden than her hair. She had compared their freedom of movement with her own, which was encumbered by layer on layer of protective clothing. She had drawn a conclusion. These people in the pictures bathed in a sea which glittered and glistened, and was so unlike the livid yellow-gray equatorial ocean hammering at the rocks of Ymir that Enni could not really convince herself that both were liquid water. She had drawn a conclusion from that too.
    She had seen the pictures in a magazine from Earth, which belonged to Jaroslav Dubin. In fact, she had seen many books and magazines from Earth, and they all belonged to Jaroslav. But it was the pictures in the very first one which lived most vividly in her memory.
    Jaroslav Dubin was not exactly famous on Ymir–rather, he was notorious, in a way that no one else had ever been. Because adults and prissy children always changed the subject when his name came up, his notoriety had grown and increased. Sometimes parents unwisely told their children of his awful fate as a cautionary tale–the story of the man who had sold his chance of salvation for the fleshpots of Earth–and consequently there were always boys and girls to snigger over what they knew about him.
    One day a boy in her class at school confided that he had actually met the outcast Jaroslav, and that this miserable sinner was really the happiest, friendliest, most likable person on the planet. When Enni