He had not much farther to go. The Director of the latitudinal air lines listened to his persuasion with the ‘friendly helpfulness that was typical of the Great Circle Era. Darr Veter flew across the ocean and arrived on the western section of the Spiral Way south of the seventeenth branch, at the dead end of which he transferred to a hydroplane to continue his journey.

High mountains came right down to the sea. The gentler slops at the foot were terraced with white stone to hold the soil and were planted with rows of southern pines and Widdringtonia in alternate avenues of bronze and bluish-green needles. High up the bare rocks, there were clefts to be seen in which waterfalls sent up clouds of water dust. Buildings painted bright orange or yellow with bluish-grey roofs stretched at intervals along the terraces.

Jutting out into sea there was an artificial sand-bank at the end of which stood a wave-washed tower. It stood at the edge of the continental shelf which in those parts ended in a submarine cliff a good thousand metres deep. From the tower an extremely thick concrete pipe, strong enough to withstand the pressure in the depths of the ocean, led down vertically. At the bottom the pipe rested on the summit of a submarine mountain that consisted almost entirely of pure rutile or titanium dioxide. The processing of the ore was done under the water, inside the mountain. All that reached the surface was slabs of pure titanium and waste products that spread far into sea, turning the water a muddy yellow. The hydroplane tossed on the yellow waves in front of the landing stage on the southern side of the tower, and Darr Veter waited his opportunity to jump on to the spray-soaked platform. He went upstairs to the railed gallery where several people, not on duty, gathered to welcome the newcomer. Darr’ Veter had imagined the mine to be in complete isolation but the people who met him were not at all the anchorites his own mood had led him to expect. The faces that greeted him were happy even if they were somewhat tired from their exacting work. There five men and three women — so women worked there, too!

Before ten days had passed Darr Veter had settled down to his new job.

The mine had its own power plant — in the depths of the abandoned workings on the mainland there was an old nuclear power station type E, or type 2, as it used to be called, which did not have a harmful fall-out and was, therefore, useful for local stations.

A most involved complex of machines was housed in the stone belly of the submarine mountain and moved forward as it bit into the friable reddish-brown mineral. The most difficult work was at the bottom of the installation where the ore was automatically extracted and crushed. The machine received signals from the central control post in the upper storey where all the data on the work of the cutting and crushing apparatus, on the changing hardness and viscosity of the extracted rock as well as information from the flotation tables were accumulated. Depending on the changing metal content in the ore, the crushing and washing arrangements were accelerated or decelerated. The work had to be done by mechanics as the entire control could not be passed over to cybernetic machines owing to the small area protected from the sea.

Darr Veter was given the job of mechanic, testing and setting the lower assembly. He spent his daily tours of duty in semi-dark rooms, packed with indicator dials, where the pump of the air conditioning system could scarcely cope with the overwhelming heat made worse by the increased pressure due to the inevitable leakage of compressed air.

After work Darr Veter and his young assistant would make their way to the top, stand for a long time on the balcony breathing in the fresh air, then take a bath, eat and go each to his own room in one of the houses at the pithead. Darr Veter had tried to renew his study of the new cochlear branch of mathematics but, as time went on, he began to fall asleep more and more quickly, waking up only in time for work. As the months passed he began to feel better. He seemed to have forgotten his former contact with the Cosmos. Like all other workers at the titanium mines he got pleasure out of seeing off the rafts that transported the ingots of titanium. Since the polar ice-caps had been reduced, storms all over the planet had decreased in violence so that many cargoes could be transported on sea-going rafts, either pulled by tugs or self-propelled. The staff of the mines changed but Darr Veter, with two other mining enthusiasts, stayed for another term.

Nothing goes on for ever in this changing world and in the mine the ore crushing and washing assembly had to atop work for an overhaul. It was then that Darr Veter made his first visit to the mine chamber beyond the tunnelling shield where he had to wear a special suit to protect him from the heat and pressure and from sudden streams of poisonous gas that burst out of cracks in the rocks. The brilliantly illuminated brown rutile walls gleamed with a special diamond-like lustre of their own and gave off flashing red lights like the infuriated glower of eyes hidden in the mineral. It was exceptionally quiet in the chamber. The hydro-electric spark rock-drill and the huge discs radiating ultra-short waves stood motionless for the first time in many months. Geophysicists who had only just arrived, were busy under the shields setting up their instruments, so as to take advantage of the stoppage to check the contours of the mineral deposit.

On the surface it was autumn, a period of calm, hot days in the south. Darr Veter went up into the mountains and felt very strongly the loneliness of those masses of stone that had stood poised between sea and sky for thousands of years. The dry grass rustled and from down below came the faint sounds of the surf beating against the shore. His tired body asked for rest but his brain grasped hungrily at impressions of the world that came fresh to him after long, arduous labour underground.

The former Director of the Outer Stations, breathing deeply the odour of heated rocks and desert grasses, recalled the little island in a distant sea where the golden horse had been hidden. And he had faith in his intuitive feeling that there was much that was good still ahead of him, and that the better and stronger he himself was the more of the good there would be.

Sow a character and reap your fate… was the way the old saw went. Yes, he thought to himself, man’s greatest fight is against egoism. This is a fight that cannot be fought by sentimental rules and pretty but helpless morals but by the dialectic realization that egoism is not the outcome of some forces of evil but is a natural instinct of primitive man that played an important role in his life as a savage and had been his means of self-preservation. This is why strong, outstanding individuals often have egoism highly developed and find it difficult to combat. The victory over egoism is, however, essential, probably the most important thing in modern society. This accounts for the time and effort that are expended on the upbringing of young people and the care with which the structure of every person’s heredity is studied. In the great mixture of races and peoples that forms the single family of our planet today, the most unexpected traits of character belonging to distant ancestors suddenly emerge out of the depths of heredity. There are the most amazing deviations of a psychology acquired at the time of the great calamities in the Era of Disunity, when engineers were not careful enough in their use of nuclear energy and did great hereditary harm to many people. There was a time when genealogies were drawn up for predatory conquerors who called themselves noble and high born; this was done to enable them to place themselves and their families above all others. Today we understand the great importance of genealogy in life — in the selection of a profession, for medical treatment, etc. Darr Veter had formerly possessed a long genealogy, but today such things are no longer necessary. The study of ancestors has been replaced by the direct analysis of the structure of heredity mechanisms which is much more important in view of greater longevity. Ever since the Era of Common Labour people have been living to the age of 170 and now it is clear that even 300 is not the limit….