Much more important, out here where the shrunken sun blazed in eternal night, and your own survival depended on your neighbors'. They couldn't afford feuds on Maxima; they all had a constant, common enemy—the ever-present void. Sitting down for a drink wasn't just a celebration—it was a declaration of apology and forgiveness, a healing of wounds, and an unspoken pledge of mutual support.

He felt honored to be included, though it had become part of the pattern. From the first, he'd been invited to join in every gathering that happened. If they needed each other here, it made them all the more willing to accept the newcomer into the fold. Dar wondered if they would be so open in a hundred years, when (if!) the colony was firmly established and thriving.

"We will grow," Bolwheel maintained. He was a red-haired, jowly man of middle age, who looked fat but wasn't. "We grow already."

Neils Woltham nodded. "We all tend to have large families, somehow."

"That is half the reason we are here." Msimangu punched up another tankard. "For the room to have families."

David Mulhearn, pale and red-haired but graying, nodded. "All is rationed, on Terra—food, land, houses, what you will. Rationed, or so dear that it might as well be."

"I wouldn't call the prices low here," Jory Kimish said. He was almost as young as Dar, and newly come from Earth. "You blokes seem to have put in a good deal of time and labor. Can't rate that too low, you know."

"We do not," Msimangu assured him. "But even if you compute the cost of our houses so, young man, you will find them much less expensive than their equivalents on Terra."

"True," Bolwheel said, "but this isn't exactly the choicest location, you know."

"And what is wrong with it?" Msimangu rounded on him. "You can have as much land as you can fence, here!"

"Aye, but naught will grow on't," Mulhearn pointed out. "Yet I cannot fault the neighborhood—for nowhere else have I found neighbors of my own mindset and code."

"Nor I," Msimangu agreed, "nor I. I could not ask for more congenial company."

"When we get it," Dar pointed out. "Of course, it's worth waiting for."

"Surely there's no dearth of folk who wish to join us," Mulhearn pointed out.

Bolwheel answered with a knowing smile. "Where else can they find a reputation for their product, David? Only fifty years, and already our computers and robots are known as the best in Terran space!"

"Of course, it helps that Terran space has been reduced a bit by the DDT," Dar pointed out. .

"Only officially, young d'Armand. None seek to bar us from trading with other PEST planets—and the outermost of those, trade with the frontier. No, our robots are known wherever men use automatons."

"Well, surely it's your reputation that I came to join," Jory Kimish said, "though I'd stay for the company alone. But why is the Maximan product so much the best? You'd think Terra would have it all!"

"All but the brains," Bolwheel answered. "For don't you see, the brightest of the computerfolk saw the collapse of the DDT coming, and came out here early. The second brightest stayed till the civil war, then escaped to avoid being shot by the storm troopers, or by the loyalists; and the third brightest waited till PEST had taken all the planet, then escaped just before PEST banned emigration."

Msimangu nodded. "First, second, third—most of the best came to us."

"Nay, not all, though," Mulhearn cautioned. "There are brains on Terra still, and not all of them were made on Maxima."

"True," Msimangu agreed, "though they lose steadily of what's left, by deportation. And some of those come here."

Dar stared. "You mean PEST is deliberately trying to get rid of its bright ones?"

"Only those who show some sign of making trouble, young d'Armand—which means only half of the brightest."

"And the other half?"

"They work their way into government, join the LORDS party, and start the long, savage climb," Bolwheel assured him.

Dar frowned. "So they can't design a decent robot?"

"Decent, yes. But if it's more than 'decent,' they are marked as dangerous; they might take their bosses' jobs. No, a smart young man on Terra will be sure to hide his mind."

Dar shuddered. "No wonder they come to Maxima! Who would want to work in that kind of environment?"

"Not me," Kimish assured him, "so I made just enough trouble to be deported, but not enough for them to care where." He leaned back with a sigh. "Can you know how intoxicating the spirit of freedom is, here? Where your neighbors challenge you to dream up some idea nobody ever thought of before? Where they make you feel ashamed, if you don't come up with anything new?"

"Yes." Dar had a few memories of PEST's Terra, himself. "It makes all the toil and loneliness worthwhile."

He caught looks of sympathy, quickly veiled; their wives stayed home to keep them company.

Quick change of topic needed, and Bolwheel supplied it. "I think perhaps that is why PEST leaves us alone, and does not seek to impose its rules here."

Kimish frowned. "I was wondering about that. One squadron of destroyers, and we'd be slaves."

"But they need us, they need us," Msimangu assured him. "They need someone, away from Terra, to invent better computers for them, for they must have machines to do the work, if they are to give the people the leisure they have promised. And they dare not have such innovation being developed on any of their planets—it could set people to thinking, and questioning their orders."

A rumbling chorus of agreement went around the table, men nodding their heads in concurrence, and Dar nodded along with the rest of them, even though, privately, he thought it might also have something to do with PEST thinking Maxima was too small to be worth swatting. Realistically, he knew that the asteroid would die if its customers stopped buying, which meant the Terran government could destroy them any time it wanted to. And if PEST's bureaucrats could destroy the Maximans, surely they could also control them, easily and totally, as much as they wished—or so they thought, so they reasoned.

They were wrong, of course. They could kill Maxima, they could conquer it—but if they didn't conquer, they couldn't control. As long as they left the asteroid free, Maximans could do whatever they wished.

But Maxima wasn't about to let PEST know that. Sure, it might be fun to send the Terran bureaucrats a list of all the things Maximans did, that were forbidden on Terra—but it would also be very foolish. A bureaucrat defines himself by the amount of power he has; PEST's logical response would be conquest.

Which in itself was pretty silly, when all they would have to do would be to send back a list of all the things Terrans could do, that Maximans couldn't—mostly hedonistic pastimes. The younger Maximans would start eating their hearts out.

Or maybe not. Dar's neighbors were a pretty unworldly bunch, if you excluded making money and building grandiose houses.

Houses they were definitely big on, though. "I passed your estate on the way in, young d'Armand," Msimangu was saying, "I saw your home. I confess I thought it the height of ugliness last year, but now I begin to see its form emerge. It will be beautiful, when it is done."

"Why, thank you," Dar said, frankly floored by the compliment. In fact, he was so pleased that he forgot to mention who had designed it.

The factory was running just fine. Dar wandered up one aisle and down the other, feeling increasingly useless as he went along. He couldn't even dump the waste bins any more—since Lona had started leaving Fess home, Dar had assigned him that little chore. After all, he couldn't have the poor robot sitting around with nothing to do.

It was hard to believe these machines were of the same genus as Fess. Technically, they were robots, though with nowhere near the capacity of a general purpose model such as Fess. They were operated by much smaller computers, specialized for a very limited number of tasks. Dar hesitated to call them "robots" at all—they were really just automated machine tools. Robots were originally supposed to be artificial people, but these machines couldn't mimic human thought patterns in the slightest way.