walled in dull metal.

The room was large, metal-vaulted, brittle. Mesh grid screens surrounded him at a distance, and the useless revolver hung cold and damp in his hands. Three men and three women sat behind a half-moon of bright silver suspended from the high ceiling by shimmering strands of silver, like very fine wire.

As architecture, the things he had seen were the final stage in constructivism. An elimination of the sense of weight and solidity of traditional forms. Everywhere were space constructions of metal sheets, glass, plastic, beams of angular light, some vaguely related to human figures, largely as abstracts of geometrical shapes, technological forms.

Environment and people were each a balanced projection of the other. The general effect was one of machine-like precision, brittle coldness in which man and machine had reached emotionless synthesis.

One of the men said, "Rhone, will you question this?"

The woman's voice was musical, but without warmth, like a nicely constructed music-box. "What is your name?"

He did not answer.

"You should answer, soldier. Voluntarily. I can assure you that we have ways to force your mind to give up all of its secrets."

She waited. He did not answer.

"Your actions have been peculiar, soldier. We are interested."

Danton thought fast. They had spaceships. Three of them he had seen, the three they no longer had, thanks to Keith. If he admitted being from Earth it would certainly incite immediate reprisal, and Seers wasn't ready. He wouldn't be ready for a long time. He would never be ready to receive an attack from Mars. His idea was to send a secret force to attack Mars, so that the New World populace would never know about it.

A well-planned series of lies, elaborate, complex, provoking. Find out facts. Try to postpone or avert any immediate attack on Earth. Reduce things to as individual a level as possible. He had one advantage: from his observations to this point, the Oligarch culture seemed not to have changed its basic pattern. Evolution had merely moved that pattern forward a hundred years, solidified its static essence. Cold efficiency, egomania, class superiority—the system supported by scientific method and a fanatical, one-track dogma based on paranoia.

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