'Thanks,' said Maynard, absently.
Luiz Moreno, ex-Ambassador to Aurora, had been glad to return to Earth. He was away from the artificial landscapes that seemed to have no life of their own, but to exist only by virtue of the strong will of their possessors. Away from the too-beautiful men and women and from their ubiquitous, brooding robots.
He was back to the hum of life and the shuffle of feet; the brushing of shoulders and the feeling of breath in the face.
Not that he was able to enjoy these sensations entirely. The first days had been spent in lively conferences with the heads of Earth's government.
In fact, it was not till nearly a week had passed, that an hour came in which he could consider himself truly relaxed.
He was in the rarest of all appurtenances of Terrestrial Luxury - a roof garden. With him was Gustav Stein, the quite obscure physiologist, who was, nevertheless, one of the prime movers of the Plan, known to rumor as the Pacific Project.
'The confirmatory tests,' said Moreno, with an almost dreadful satisfaction, 'all check so far, do they not?'
'So far. Only so far. We have miles to go."
'Yet they will continue to go well. To one who has lived on Aurora for nearly a year, as I have, there can be no doubt but that we're on the right track.'
'Um-m-m, Nevertheless, I will go only by the laboratory reports.'
'And quite rightly.' His little body was almost stiff with gloating. 'Some day, it will be different. Stein, you have not met these men, these Outer Worlders. You may have come across the tourists, perhaps, in their special hotels, or riding through the streets in inclosed cars, equipped with the purest of private, air-conditioned atmospheres for their well-bred nostrils; observing the sights through a movable periscope and shuddering away from the touch of an Earthman.
'But you have not met them on their own world, secure in then' own sickly, rotting greatness. Go, Stein, and be despised a while. Go, and find how well you can compete with their own trained lawns as something to be gently trod upon.
'And yet, when I pulled the proper cords, Ion Moreanu fell - Ion Moreanu, the only man among them with the capacity to understand the workings of another's mind. It is the crisis that we have passed now. We front a smooth path now.'
Satisfaction! Satisfaction!
'As for Keiliri,' he said suddenly, more to himself than to Stein, 'he can be turned loose now. There's little he can say, hereafter, that can endanger anything. In fact, I have an idea. The interplanetary Conference opens on Hesperus within the month. He can be sent to report the meeting. It will be an earnest of our friendliness - and keep him away for the summer. I think it can be arranged.'
It was.
Of all the Outer Worlds, Hesperus was the smallest, the latest settled, the furthest from Earth. Hence the name. In a physical sense, it was not best suited to a great diplomatic gathering, since its facilities were small. For instance, the available community-wave network could not possibly be stretched to cover all the delegates, secretarial staff, and administrators necessary in a convocation of fifty planets. So meetings in person were arranged in buildings impressed for the purpose.
Yet there was a symbolism in the choice of meeting place that escaped practically nobody. Hesperus, of all the Worlds, was furthest removed from Earth. But the spatial distance -one hundred parsecs or more - was the least of it. The important point was that Hesperus had been colonized not by Earthmen, but by men from the Outer World of Faunus.
It was therefore of the second generation, and so it had no 'Mother Earth.' Earth to it was but a vague grandmother, lost in the stars.
As is usual in all such gatherings, little work is actually done on the session floors. That space is reserved for the official soundings of whatever is primarily intended for home ears. The actual swapping and horse-trading takes place in the lobbies and at the lunch-tables and many of irresolvable conflict has softened over the soup and vanished over the nuts.
And yet particular difficulties were present in this particular case. Not in all worlds was the community-wave as paramount and all-pervading as it was on Aurora, but it was prominent in all. It was, therefore, with a certain sense of outrage and loss that the tall, dignified men found it necessary to approach one another in the flesh, without the comforting privacy of the invisible wall between, without the warm knowledge of the breakswitch at their fingertips.
They faced one another in uneasy semi-embarrassment and tried not to watch one another eat; tried not to shrink at the unmeant touch. Even robot service was rationed.
Ernest Keilin, the only accredited video-representative from Earth, was aware of some of these matters only in the vague way they are described here. A more precise insight he could not have. Nor could anyone brought up in a society where human beings exist only in the plural, and where a house need only be deserted to be feared.
So it was that certain of the most subtle tensions escaped him at the formal dinner party given by the Hesperian government during the third week of the conference. Other tensions, however, did not pass him by.
The gathering after the dinner naturally fell apart into little groups. Keilin joined the one that contained Franklin May-nard of Aurora. As the delegate of the largest of the Worlds, he was naturally the most newsworthy.
Maynard was speaking casually between sips at the tawny Hesperian cocktail in his hand. If his flesh crawled slightly at the closeness of the others, he masked the feeling masterfully.
'Earth,' he said, 'is, in essence, helpless against us if we avoid unpredictable military adventures. Economic unity is actually a necessity, if we intend to avoid such adventures. Let Earth realize to how great an extent her economy depends upon us, on the things that we alone can supply her, and there will be no more talk of living space. And if we are united, Earth would never dare attack. She will exchange her barren longings for atomic motors - or not, as she pleases.'
And he turned to regard Keilin with a certain hauteur as the other found himself stung to comment:
'But your manufactured goods, councilor - I mean those you ship to Earth - they are not given us. They are exchanged for agricultural products.'
Maynard smiled silkily. 'Yes, I believe the delegate from Tethys has mentioned that fact at length. There is a delusion prevalent among some of us that only Terrestrial seeds grow properly -'
He was interrupted calmly by another, who said: 'Now, I am not from Tethys, but what you mention is not a delusion. I grow rye on Rhea, and I have never yet been able to duplicate Terrestrial bread. It just hasn't got the same taste.' He addressed the audience in general, 'In fact, I imported half a dozen Terrestrians five years back on agricultural laborer visas so they could oversee the robots. Now, they can do wonders with the land, you know. Where they spit, corn grows fifteen feet high. Well, that helped a little. And using Terrestrian seed helped. But even if you grow Terrestrian grain, its seed won't hold the next year.'
'Has your soil been tested by your government's agricultural department?' asked Maynard.
The Rhean grew haughty in his turn: 'No better soil in the sector. And the rye is top-grade. I even sent a hundredweight down to Earth for nutritional clearance, and it came back with full marks.' He rubbed one side of his chin, thoughtfully: 'It's flavor I'm talking about. Doesn't seem to have the right -'
Maynard made an effort to dismiss him: 'Flavor is dispensable temporarily. They'll be coming to us on our terms, these little-men-hordes of Earth, when they feel the pinch. We give up only this mysterious flavor, but they will have to give up atom-powered engines, farm machinery, and ground cars. It wouldn't be a bad idea, in fact, to attempt to get along without the Terrestrian flavors you are so concerned about. Let us appreciate the flavor of our home-grown products instead -which could stand comparison if we gave it a chance.'
'That so?' the Rhean smiled. 'I notice you're smoking Earth-grown tobacco.'
'A habit I can break if I have to.'
'Probably by giving up smoking. I wouldn't use Outer World tobacco for anything but killing mosquitoes.'
He laughed a trifle too boisterously, and left the group. Maynard stared after him, a little pinch-nosed.
To Keilin, the little byplay over rye and tobacco brought a certain satisfaction. He regarded such personalities as the tiny reflection of certain Galactopolitical realities. Tethys and Rhea were the largest planets in the Galactic south, as Aurora was the largest in the Galactic north. All three planets were identically racist, identically exclusivist. Their views on Earth were similar and completely compatible. Ordinarily, one would think that there was no room to quarrel.
But Aurora was the oldest of the Outer Worlds, the most advanced, the strongest militarily - and, therefore, aspired to a sort of moral leadership of all the Worlds. That was sufficient in itself to arouse opposition, and Rhea and Tethys served as focal points for those who did not recognize Auroran leadership.