III + 

Spring had come and almost gone when I wandered into the little Maine town which was my destination. It lay out of the way, with forested hills behind it and the sea at its foot. Most of the houses were old, solidly built, almost like parts of the land, and the inhabitants were slow-spoken, steady folk, fishermen and artisans and the like, settled here and at home with the darkling woods and the restless sea and the high windy sky. I walked down a narrow street with a cool salt breeze ruffling my hair and decided that I liked Portsboro. It reminded me of my own home, twenty light-years away on the wide beaches of Kealvigh. + 

I made my way to Nat Hawkins’ store and asked for work like any drifter. But when we were alone in the back room, I told him, “I’m Conrad Haugen. Mike Riley said you’d be looking for me.” + 

He nodded calmly. “I’ve been expecting you. You can work here a few days, sleep at my house, and we’ll run the tests after dark.” + 

He was old for an Earthling, well over sixty, with white hair and lined leathery face. But his blue eyes were as keen and steady, his gnarled hands as strong and sure as those of any young man. He spoke softly and steadily, around the pipe which rarely left his mouth, and there was a serenity in him which I could hardly associate with anarch fanaticism. But the first night he led me into his cellar, and through a well-hidden trapdoor to a room below, and there he had a complete psychological laboratory. + 

I gaped at the gleaming apparatus. “How off Earth⁠—” + 

“It came piece by piece, much of it from Epsilon Eridani itself,” he smiled. “There is, after all, no ban on humans owning such material. But to play safe, we spread the purchases over several years, and made them in the names of many people.” + 

“But you⁠—” + 

“I took a degree in psychiatry once. I can handle this.” + 

He could. He put me through the mill in the next few nights⁠—intelligence tests, psychometry, encephalography, narcosis, psycho-probing, everything his machines and his skill could cover. He did not find out anything we hadn’t meant to be found out. The Service had ways of guarding its agents with counter-blocks. But he got a very thorough picture of Conrad Haugen. + 

In the end he said, still calmly, “This is amazing. You have an I.Q. well over the borderline of genius, an astonishing variety of assorted knowledge about the Empire and about technical subjects, and an implacable hatred of Eridanian rule⁠—based on personal pique and containing self-seeking elements, but no less firm for that. You’re out for yourself, but you’ll stand by your comrades and your cause. We’d never hoped for more recruits of your caliber.” + 

“When do I start?” I asked impatiently. + 

“Easy, easy,” he smiled. “There’s time. We’ve waited fifty years; we can wait a while longer.” He riffled through the dossier. “Actually, the difficulty is where to assign you. A man who knows astrogation, the use of weapons and machines, and the Empire, who is physically strong as a bull, can lead men, and has a dozen other accomplishments, really seems wasted on any single job. I’m not sure, but I think you’ll do best as a roving agent, operating between Main Base and the planets where we have cells, and helping with the work at the base when you’re there.” + 

My heart fairly leaped into my throat. This was more than I had dared hope for! + 

“I think,” said Nat Hawkins, “you’d better just drop out of sight now. Go to Hood Island and stay there till the spaceship comes next time. You can spend the interval profitably, resting and getting a little fattened up; you look half starved. And Barbara can tell you about the Legion.” His leather face smiled itself into a mesh of fine wrinkles. “I think you deserve that, Conrad. And so does Barbara.” + 

Mentally, I shrugged. My stay in New Chicago had pretty well convinced me that all Earthling females were sluts. And what of it? + 

The following night, Hawkins and I rowed out to Hood Island. It lay about a mile offshore, a wooded, rocky piece of land on which a moon-whitened surf boomed and rattled. The place had belonged to the Hood family since the first settlements here, but Barbara was the last of them. + 

Hawkins’ voice came softly to me above the crash of surf, the surge of waves and windy roar of trees as we neared the dock. “She has more reason than most to hate the Eridanians. The Hoods used to be great people around here. They were just about ruined when the redskins first came a-conquering, space bombardment wiped out their holdings, but they made a new start. Then her grandfather and all his brothers were killed in the revolt. Ten years ago, her father was caught while trying to hijack a jetload of guns, and her mother didn’t live long after that. Then her brother was drafted into a road crew and reported killed in an accident. Since then she hasn’t lived for much except the Legion.” + 

“I don’t blame her,” I said. My voice was a little tight, for indeed I didn’t. But somebody has to suffer; civilization has a heavy price. I couldn’t help adding, “But the Empire’s lately begun paying pensions to cases like that.” + 

“I know. She draws hers, too, and uses it for the Legion.” + 

That, of course, was the reason for the pensions. + 

The boat bumped against the dock. Hawkins threw the painter up to the man who suddenly emerged from the shadow. I saw the cold silver moonlight gleam off the rifle in his hand. “You know me, Eb,” said Hawkins. “This here’s Con Haugen. I slipped you the word about him.” + 

“Glad to know you, Con.” Eb’s horny palm clasped mine. I liked his looks, as I did those of most of the higher-up Legionnaires. They were altogether different from the low-caste barbarians who were all the rebels I’d seen before. They had a great load of ignorance to drag with them. + 

We went up a garden path to a rambling stone house. Inside, it was long and low and filled with the memoirs of more gracious days, art and fine furniture, books lining the walls, a fire crackling ruddily in the living room. + 

“Barbara Hood⁠—Conrad Haugen.” + 

Almost, I gaped at her. I had expected some gaunt, dowdy fanatic, a little mad perhaps. But she was⁠—well, she was tall and supple and clad in a long dark-blue evening gown that shimmered against her white skin. She was not conventionally pretty, her face was too strong for all of its fine lines, but she had huge blue eyes and a wide soft mouth and a stubborn chin. The light glowed gold on the hair that tumbled to her shoulders. + 

I blurted something out and she smiled, with a curious little twist that somehow caught in me, and said merely, “Hello, Conrad.” + 

“Glad to be here,” I mumbled. + 

“The spaceship should arrive in a month or so,” she went on. “I’ll teach you as much as I can in that time. And you’d better get your own special knowledge onto a record wire, just in case. I understand you’ve been in the Vegan System, for instance, which nobody else in the Legion knows very much about.” + 

Her tone was cool and businesslike, but with an underlying warmth. It was like the sea wind which blew over the islands, and as reviving. I recovered myself and helped mix some drinks. The rest of the evening passed very pleasantly. + 

Later a servant showed me to my room, a big one overlooking the water. I lay for a while listening to the waves, thinking drowsily how rebellion, when its motives were honest, drew in the best natives of any world, and presently I fell asleep. + 

The month passed all too quickly and agreeably. I learned things which Intelligence had spent the last three years trying to find out, and dared not attempt to transmit the information. That was maddening, though I knew there was time. But otherwise⁠— + 

I puttered about the place. There were only three servants, old family retainers who had also joined the anarchs. They had little modern machinery, and of course Earthlings weren’t allowed robots, so there was need for an extra man or two. I cut wood and repaired the roof and painted the boathouse, spaded the garden and cleared out brush and set up a new picket fence. It was good to use my hands and muscles again. + 

And then Barbara was around to help with most of what I did. In jeans and jersey, the sun ablaze on her hair, laughing at my clumsy jokes or frowning over some tough bit of work, she was another being than the cool, lovely woman who talked books and music and history with me in the evenings, or the crisp bitter anarch who spat facts and figures at me like an angry machine. And yet they were all her. I remembered Ydis, who was dead, and the old pain stirred again. But Barbara was alive. + 

She was more alive to me than most of Valgolia. + 

I make no apologies for my feelings. I had been away from anything resembling home for some two years now. But I was careful to remain merely friendly with Barbara. + 

She didn’t know a great deal about the rebel movement⁠—no one agent on Earth did⁠—but her knowledge was still considerable. There was a fortified base somewhere out in space, built up over a period of four years with the help of certain unnamed elements or planets outside the Empire. I suspected several rival states of that! + 

Weapons of all kinds were manufactured there in quantities sufficient to arm the million or so rebels of the “regular” force, the twenty million or so in the Solar System and elsewhere who held secret drills and conducted terrorist activities, and the many millions more who were expected to rise spontaneously when the rebel fleet struck. + 

There was close coordination and a central command at Main Base for the undergrounds of all dissatisfied planets⁠—a new and formidable feature which had not been present in the earlier uprisings. There were rumors of a new and terrible weapon being developed. + 

In any case, the plan was to assault Epsilon Eridani itself simultaneously with the uprisings in the colonies, so that the Imperial fleet would be recalled to defend the mother world. The anarchs hoped to blast Valgolia to ruin in a few swift blows, and expected that the Empire’s jealous neighbors would sweep in to complete the wreckage. + 

This gentle girl spoke of the smashing of worlds, the blasting of helpless humans, and the destruction of a culture as if it were a matter of insect extermination. + 

“Have you ever thought,” I asked casually once, “that the Juranians and the Slighs and our other hypothetical allies may not respect the integrity of Sol any more than the Eridanians do?” + 

“We can handle them,” she answered confidently. “Oh, it won’t be easy, that time of transition. But we’ll be free.” + 

“And what then?” I went on. “I don’t want to be defeatist, Barbara, but you know as well as I do that the Eridanians didn’t conquer all mankind at a single swoop. When they invented the interstellar engine and arrived here, man was tearing the Solar System apart in a war between super-nations that was rapidly reducing him to barbarism. The redskins traded for a while, sold arms, some of their adventurers took sides in the conflict, the government stepped in to protect Eridanian citizens and investments⁠—the side which the Eridanians helped won the war, then found its allies were running things and tried to revolt against the protectorate⁠—and without really meaning to, the strangers were conquering and ruling Earth. + 

“But the different factions of man still hate each other’s guts. There are still capitalists and communists, blacks, whites and Browns, Hindus and Muslims, Germans and Frenchmen, city people and country people⁠—a million petty divisions. There’ll be civil war as soon as the Eridanians are gone.” + 

“Some, perhaps,” she agreed. “But I think it can be handled. If we have to have civil wars, well, let’s get them over with and live as free men.” + 

Personally, I could see nothing in the sort of military dictatorship that would inevitably arise which was preferable to an alien, firm, but just rule that insured stability and a reasonable degree of individual liberty. + 

But I didn’t say that aloud. + 

Another time we talked of the de-industrialization of Earth. Barbara was, of course, venomous about it. “We were rich once,” she said. “All Earth was. We have one of the richest planets in the Galaxy. But because their own world is poor, the redskins have to take the natural resources of their conquests. Earth is a granary and a lumberyard for Valgolia, and the iron of Mars and the petrolite of Venus go back to their industry. What few factories they allow us, they take their fat percentage of the product.” + 

“Certainly they’ve made us economically dependent,” I said, “and their standard of living is undoubtedly higher than ours. But ours has, on the whole, gone up since the conquest. We eat better, we’re healthier, we aren’t burdened with the cost of past and present and future wars. Our natural resources aren’t being squandered. The forests and watersheds and farmlands we ruined are coming back under Eridanian supervision.” + 

She gave me an odd look. “I thought you didn’t like the Empire.” + 

“I don’t,” I growled. “I don’t want to be held back just because I’m white-skinned. But I’ve known enough reddies personally so that I try to be fair.” + 

“It’s all right with me,” she said. “I can see your point, intellectually, though I can’t really feel it. But not many of the people will out at Main Base.” + 

“Free men,” I muttered sardonically. + 

We went fishing, and swam in the tumbling surf, and stretched lazily on the beach with the sun pouring over us. Or we might go tramping off into the woods on a picnic, to run laughing back when a sudden rain rushed out of the sky, and afterward sit with beer and cheese sandwiches listening to a wire of Beethoven or Mozart or Tchaikovsky⁠—the old Earthlings could write music, if they did nothing else!⁠—and to the rain shouting on the roof. We might have a little highly illegal target practice, or a game of chess, or long conversations which wandered off every which way. I began to have a sneaking hope that the spaceship would be delayed. + 

We went out one day in Barbara’s little catboat. The waves danced around us, chuckling against the hull, glittering with sunlight, and the sail was like a snow mountain against the sky. For a while we chatted dreamily, ate our lunch, threw the scraps to the hovering gulls. Then Barbara fell silent. + 

“What’s the matter?” I asked. + 

“Oh, nothing. Touch of Weltschmerz, maybe.” She smiled at me. “You know, Con, you don’t really belong in the Legion.” + 

“How so?” I raised my eyebrows. + 

“You⁠—well, you’re so darned honest, so really decent under that carefully rough surface, so⁠—reasonable. You’ll never make a good fanatic.” + 

Honest! I looked away from her. The bright day seemed suddenly to darken. + 