With a sigh, Newton answered, "Right now, friend, I believe I'm going to wait and see what happens next. A lot of the time, you only make things worse when you move too fast."

"How could things get any worse than they are?" the man inquired.

"I don't know, and I don't want to find out by experiment, either," Newton said. "One thing I'm sure of: the distance between bad and worse is a lot bigger than the difference between good and better."

"Huh," said the man in the plug hat. "How about the difference between bad and good? Isn't that what we're talking about here?"

"I don't know. Is it?" the Consul answered. "What is good, and how would you make what you don't think good better?"

"You're trying to confuse things." The man strode off in disgust. Asking questions like that hadn't done Socrates much good, either.

If Leland Newton's foes got sick enough of him, they wouldn't trump up charges against him and make him drink hemlock. They were much more likely to ignore him, to do what they wanted despite justice and Atlantean legality. The Consul opened the paper to see what was on the inside pages. One of the first things that caught his eye was a gunsmith's advertisement. That made him pause for a moment. Back in Socrates' day, no one had carried an eight-shooter. Assassination was easier now than it had been then.

Newton shook his head, annoyed at himself. If you let the hobgoblins of modern life get to you, what could you do but spend your time hiding under the bed and quivering? The hobgoblins were there. They weren't going to go away. You just had to keep on as if they weren't.

And sometimes they even worked for you. When Newton went to his office in the Senate House, his secretary handed him a sheaf of telegrams and letters. "What are these, Isaac?" he asked.

Isaac Ricardo paused a moment, organizing his thoughts. He was at least as clever and capable as his principal. Newton often though he might make at least as good a Consul, too, if not for the impediment of his religion. Consul's secretary was as high as a Jew was likely to rise in Atlantis.

"Some of them are from the southern states, calling you a hound and a swine and a snake in the ferns," Ricardo said. "More come from the north, telling you what a stout fellow you are. After you get through those lots, the rest are the usual sort that want something from you."

"Nothing much out of the ordinary, then," Newton said. His mail had divided into those three categories even before this slave insurrection broke out. From what Jeremiah Stafford said, so had the other Consul's. The only difference was that people from north of the Stour swore at Stafford, while those from his own side of the river praised him to the skies. Newton presumed the people who wanted something from Stafford could come from anywhere.

"Not too much out of the ordinary." Ricardo was also relentlessly precise. "The tone of the political letters-not the begging ones and the scheming ones-seems much more impassioned than it did since the latest unpleasantness commenced."

"Can't say I'm surprised. Well, I'll have a look at them." Consul Newton shook his head ever so slightly as he went into his inner office. On second thought, his secretary, no matter how clever, no matter how capable, probably didn't have what it took to try to lead the United States of Atlantis. The latest unpleasantness? Isaac Ricardo would have to become more impassioned himself if he aspired to be a political man.

Newton snorted. So far as he knew, Ricardo harbored no such aspirations. Odds were his secretary was too sensible for it. There were times-more and more of them lately, too-when Leland Newton wished he'd been sensible enough to stay away from politics himself.

He went through the stack of correspondence from the slaveholding states first. He already knew what the people who agreed with him thought: the same as he did. The people who disagreed did so in different ways.

Some of them quoted Scripture to prove he was an idiot. Others simply loaded up their pens with grapeshot and scrap metal and commenced firing. No printer would have dared put several of the day's letters into type, not unless he wanted to spend time behind bars for obscenity. A few of the missives seemed drooled onto the page. Ricardo's impassioned didn't begin to cover it, either.

One of the less incandescent letters read, White men are superior. Black men and copperskinned men are inferior. This being so, white men have the natural right to rule over the other races. Any lover of truth can see as much. The author, one Zebulon James, appended A true Christian gentleman to his signature.

"Well, Mr. James, any lover of truth can see you're assuming what you wish to prove," Newton murmured. But if he wrote that back to the true Christian gentleman, would said gentleman understand it? The odds seemed depressingly slim.

A wicked grin spread across the Consul's face. He inked a pen. Dear Mr. James, he wrote, I am in receipt of yours of the seventeenth ultimo, for which I thank you. Before I can act on it, I find that I require more information. Would you be good enough to tell me whether you yourself are a white man, a black man, or a copperskinned man? In any of those cases, I fear your opinion may be imperfectly objective. If perhaps you are a yellow man or a green man, you may have a more dispassionate view of the situation. Do let me know. Kind regards, Leland Newton, Consul, United States of Atlantis.

If that didn't infuriate Zebulon James, the man was even denser than Newton gave him credit for. The Consul supposed Mr. James could be, but it wouldn't be easy.

Newton also supposed his secretary would disapprove of sending out a letter like that. Well, too bad. If you couldn't have a little fun with your work every now and again, what point to doing it?

"Here is the latest outrage perpetrated by the colored insurrectionists," Jeremiah Stafford growled in the Senate chamber. "They derailed a train bringing volunteers from Nouveau Redon to the state of New Marseille, then set the overturned cars on fire. Many white men were killed, many others badly burnt or otherwise injured. How much longer must this vileness persist before the national government is permitted to take arms against it?" He aimed the question at his fellow Consul.

Senators from the south cheered him. Senators from the north for the most part sat impassive, though several of them looked troubled. Plenty of men who disapproved of slavery remained convinced that white men were better than their copperskinned and black brethren.

If Consul Newton was one of those men, however, he concealed it very well. "May I ask my distinguished colleague a question?" he said mildly.

"How can I refuse you, when we both know you're going to do it regardless?" Stafford returned.

"How right you are," Newton said. "My question is this: what do you suppose those white volunteers would have visited upon the colored insurrectionists had they reached New Marseille?"

"What they deserved, by God!" Consul Stafford exclaimed.

"Why does it matter so much to you that these men have white skins and those men have darker ones?" Newton asked. "Are they not all men, regardless?"

By the angry rumble rolling up from the Conscript Fathers, Consult Stafford knew a great many of them did not believe a man was a man regardless of the color of his skin. Stafford didn't believe it, either. "White men made the United States of Atlantis," he said proudly. "Niggers didn't, nor did mudfaces. In the wild, they're all savages. And I will tell you something else, sir, since you seem to have forgotten it: white men's ideas made the United States of Atlantis, too. Thanks to the Greeks and Romans, we are a republic, and a republic of laws rather than men. No feathered chieftain rules us, his every utterance the same as the word of God."