who were apparently at peace-there was the kicker-but he had never accomplished it himself.

Anyway, if you do reach that unscalable pinnacle, what about the rest of the world? He almost cried aloud, in anguish; he almost asked, How long before the world is cured of finding patchwork solutions to single problems-solutions that generate problems in their turn? It's bad enough Back There, but here…!

Men assembling in the cold morning light to tear up a road with pick and shovel so it could be re-laid by a machine!

America, of all countries! he mourned silently. Why did they send me to America?

When he was young he had spent three years in the India that had ultimately chosen to preserve its heritage, rather than accept aid conditional upon alliance with one of the great power-blocs. There, many people were sick, most were ill-fed and ill-housed.

And some were happy.

How long before we start looking for a way of life in which problems don't matter?

Turpin was still making would-be helpful suggestions, proposing to invoke the resources of his company, its psychologists, its computers, its enormous data-banks. It seemed he had completely missed the point.

Not that Sheklov felt he understood it properly himself.

Listening, he came to suspect that Turpin was simply uttering polite noises. News of something “out near Pluto”-even if it could distort the totality of human experience, Eastern and Western-had no concrete referents for him. A generation of isolation, half-voluntary, half-enforced, had colored the thinking of his adopted countrymen, of whom. he was so contemptuous; inevitably, though, in order to protect himself among them, he had had to let his own thinking be conditioned by their example.

In which case . . .

As a loyal agent, Sheklov found the conclusion he was being driven to repugnant. Yet he had to face it He was compelled to wonder whether those who had sent him here genuinely believed they were dispatching him on the trail of a clue, or whether they had merely lapsed into the pattern of the old days, when America was the wealthy rival, to be first emulated, then surpassed.

But that attitude was obsolete. The paths of the two blocs had diverged a long way now.

Though, of course, since they were both branches of the same species, the people who lived under the aegis of these supposedly irreconcilable systems coincided in surprising ways. If he were to go into one of those handsome housing developments overlooked by the superway, would he not find, as he would Back There, people who contrived casually to mention their courage in moving to a building that wasn't blast-proof? And kept a year's supply of food in the freezer anyway?

Of course 1 would.

They would take pains to impress him with their loyalty, their right thinking; they would have the proper photographs and flags on display. Small matter if they were afraid of some impersonal, august, omniscient security force, rather than of the cold consensus of their neighbors-the effect was essentially the same. They would strive to be dedicated pillars of their community, set on raising their children to follow in their footsteps, endlessly quarrelling with them when they scoffed or asked unanswerable questions.

But he had seen a man under a tree: thin, wearing only a loincloth, one eye filmed with a cataract, who spent the day in ecstatic enjoyment of the sun's heat on his skin, and at nightfall fumbled in the bowl before him and ate what he found. There was always something in the bowl.

After that he had to be Donald Holtzer again, and Holtzer was not troubled by such thoughts.

.v. Almost within sight of Lakonia, the Banshee caught up with a shower of rain, quite likely the same one that had provided Danty with that puddle where he had found mud for his face. At the first drops the wipers chirred into action and the windows attempted to close. But Danty, lost in thought, was sitting with his elbow on the passenger door, and the automatics uttered a whine of complaint.

Rollins snapped at him. With a murmured apology he moved his arm. The glass socketed home in the spongy seal around the roof, and Rollins breathed an audible sigh of relief.

“You wear lead, hm?” Danty suggested, and gave a pointed scowl at the counter on the dash next to the gun. Its needle was well down in the white sector. By reflex Rollins also glanced at it, and then flushed; indicating the road ahead slick with wet as far as could be seen.

“You want to get soaked. get out and walk!”

He looked and sounded as though he fully expected the counter to zoom into the red any moment.

Danty shrugged. So it wasn't rational to be that afraid of rain; there was Sr-90 and C-14 in everything you ate and drank, and unless you wore lead underwear you were constantly at risk from the long-life gamma-emitters like Cs-137. But, as he reminded himself wryly, Rollins was far from the only person in the world who did irrational things.

Maybe he did wear Koenig's, at that. He wasn't apt to admit it to a stranger, though.

Then the superway rounded the shoulder of a hill, and he caught his breath. Still in bright sunshine, by a freak of the rainstorm's course, there was Lakonia laid out before them.

Symptom of a terrible disease, like the “hectic flush” of tuberculosis, conveying the illusion of vigorous health, or like the frenzied mental brilliance of terminal syphilis? Some authorities regarded it that way. They claimed that Lakonia was an ersatz, a surrogate; this city built around an artificial sea, they said, was a palliative to dull the guilt suffered by those who had poisoned first the Great Lakes, then the rivers, and ultimately the inshore waters of the oceans past the point at which a man could swim in them.

Yet in its way-and seeing it now Danty was the last person who could have denied it-it was a place of mad magnificence, a rival to the Pyramids and Babylon.

Its towers rose, white, purple, green, and gold, to meet the sun: towers like stalagmites, like poplar-trees; towers like stacks of coins, each offset on the one below; towers like spun sugar-candy, glittering, and towers like frozen waterspouts. High delicate bridges linked them here and there, slung on ropes of spun carbon-fibers seeming weak and thin as spider webs yet capable of carrying cars nose to tail in both directions, and the thicker, ivory-colored single rail of the hover line swerved and swooped from one to the next. And all these pinnacles admired their reflections in pure crystal water-moats around the towers' roots, canals planned to a scale beside which Venice paled.

In any case, Venice had collapsed.

Uniting all these waterways, the New Lake: man-made, spanning eight miles shore to shore, which gave Lakonia the first syllable of its name.

It was early yet, and there was no way of telling whether the nearby rain might not drift in that direction, but the bright mirror of water was alive-with swimmers, with sailboats, with powered launches towing water-skiers and man-carrying kites. At least, the nearside of the lake was swarming with them. Some mile, or mile and a half, from the shore, they seemed by tacit consent to turn back, to face again towards the high lovely towers and the artificial beach of white imported sand. It was as though on the farther shore there was something they were afraid to approach. Yet, looking in that direction, an uninstructed stranger would have seen nothing more foreboding than a stand of tall dark trees, force-grown redwoods two hundred feet high, above which curled a faint wreath of smoke.

“You live in Lakonia?” Danty asked as the road slanted down.

“Yes,” Rollins snapped, more of his attention on his driving now than at any time since Danty stopped him.