"What you say," said Vickers, "may be true so far as 'the people' are concerned, but how about the _person_, the individual? How about the little fellow who gets socked in the teeth?"

"Asa Andrews was here this morning," Flanders told him. "He said you'd been at his place and had disappeared and he was worried about what might have happened to you. But that is beside the point. What I want to ask you is, would you say that Asa Andrews was a happy man?"

"I've never seen anybody happier."

"And yet," said Flanders, "we interfered with him. We took away his job — the job he had to have to feed his family and clothe them and keep a roof above their heads. He searched for jobs and could find none. When he finally came for help, we knew that we were the ones who cost him his job, who forced him finally to be evicted, to stand in the street and not know where his family would lay their heads that night. We did all this and yet, in the end, he is a happy man. There are thousands of others throughout this earth who have thus been interfered with and now are happy people. Happy, I must contend, because of our interference."

"You can't claim," Vickers contended, "that there is no price for this happiness. I don't mean the loss of job, time bread of charity — but what comes afterwards. You are settling them here on this earth in what you are pleased to call a pastoral-feudal stage, but the fancy name you call it can't take away the fact that in being settled here they have lost many of the material advantages of human civilization."

"We have taken from them," Flanders said, "little more than the knife with which they'll cut their own or their neighbor's throat. Whatever else we've taken from them will in time be given back, in full measure and with fantastic interest. For it is our hope, Mr. Vickers, that in time to come they all will be like us, that in time the entire race may have everything we have.

"We are not freaks, you understand, but human beings, the next step in evolution. We're just a day or two ahead, a step or two ahead of all the rest of them. To survive, Man had to change, had to mutate, had to become something more than what he was. We are only the first forerunners of that mutation of survival. And because we are the first, we must fight a delaying action. We must fight for the time that it will take for the rest of them to catch up with us. In us you see not one little group of privileged persons, but all of humanity."

"Humanity," said Vickers, sourly, "seems to be taking a dim view of your delaying fight to save them. Up on that world of ours they're smashing gadget shops and hunting down the mutants and hanging them from lamp posts."

"That's where you come in," Flanders pointed out. Vickers nodded. "You want me to stop Crawford."

"You told me you could."

"I had a hunch," said Vickers.

"Your hunches, my friend, are more likely to be right than seasoned reasoning."

"I will need some help," said Vickers.

"Anything you say."

"I want some of your pioneers — men like Asa Andrews, sent back to do some missionary work."

"But we can't do that," protested Flanders.

"They're in this fight, too," said Vickers. "They can't expect to sit and not lift a finger."

"Missionary work? You want them to go back to tell about these other worlds?"

"That is exactly what I want."

"But no one would believe them. With the feeling running as it is on earth they would be mobbed and lynched."

Vickers shook his head. "There is one group that would believe them — the Pretentionists. Don't you see, the Pretentionists are fleeing from reality. They pretend to go back and live in the London of Pepys' day, and to many other eras of the past, but even there they find certain restraining influences, certain encroachments upon their own free will and their security. But here there is complete freedom and security. Here they could go back to the simplicity, the uncomplicated living that they are yearning for. No matter how fantastic it might sound, the Pretentionists would embrace it."

"You're sure of this?" asked Flanders. "Positive."

"But that's not all. There is something else?"

"There is one thing more," said Vickers. "If there were a sudden demand on the carbohydrates, could you meet it?"

"I think we could. We could reconvert our factories. The gadget business is shot now and so is the carbohydrates business. To dispense carbohydrates we'd have to set up a sort of black market system. If we went out in the open, Crawford and his crew would break it up."

"At first, perhaps," agreed Vickers. "But not for very long. Not when tens of thousands of people would be ready to fight him to get their carbohydrates."

"When the carbohydrates are needed," Flanders said, "they'll be there."

"The Pretentionists will believe," said Vickers. "They are ripe for belief, for any kind of fantastic belief. To them it will be an imaginative crusade. Against a normal population, we might have no chance, but we have a great segment of escapists who have been driven to escape by the sickness of the world. All they need is a spark, a word — some sort of promise that there is a chance of real escape as against the mental escape they have been driven to. There will be many who will want to come to this second world. How fast can you bring them through?"

"As fast as they come," said Flanders.

"I can count on that?"

"You can count on that." Flanders shook his head. "I don't know what you're planning. I hope your hunch is right."

"You said it was," Vickers declared.

"You know what you're going up against? You know what Crawford's planning?"

"I think he's planning war, He said it was a secret weapon, but I'm convinced it's war."

"But war…"

"Let's look at war," said Vickers, "just a little differently than it ever has been looked at, just a little differently than the historians see it. Let's see it as a business. Because war, in certain aspects, is just that. When a country goes to war, it means that labor and industry and resources are mobilized and controlled by governments. The businessman plays as important a part as does the military man. The banker and the industrialist is as much in the saddle as the general.

"Now let's go one step further and imagine a war fought on strictly business lines — for the strictly business purpose of obtaining and retaining control in those very areas where we are threatening. War would mean that the system of supply and demand would be suspended and that certain civilian items would cease to be manufactured and that the governments could crack down on anyone who would attempt to sell them…"

"Like cars, perhaps," said Flanders, "and lighters and even razor blades."

"Exactly," Vickers told him. "That way they could gain the time, for they need time as badly as we do. On military pretext, they'd seize complete control of the world economy."

"What you're saying," Flanders said, "is that they plan to start war by agreement."

"I'm convinced that's it," said Vickers. "They'd hold it to a minimum. Perhaps one bomb on New York in return for a bomb on Moscow and another on Chicago for one on Leningrad. You get the idea — a restricted war, a gentleman's agreement. Just enough fighting to convince everyone that it was real.

"But phoney as it might be, a lot of people would die and there'd always be the danger that someone would get sore — and instead of one bomb on Moscow it might be two, or the other way around, or an admiral might get just a bit too enthusiastic and a bit too accurate and sink a ship that wasn't in the deal or a general might —»

"It's fantastic," Flanders said.

"You forget that they are very desperate men. You forget that they are fighting, every one of them, Russian and American, French and Pole and Czech, for the kind of life that Man has built upon the Earth. To them we must appear to be the most vicious enemy mankind's ever faced. To them we are the ogre and the goblin out of the nursery tale. They are frightened stiff."