silly," he said. "If you have no weapons, it must have occurred to you that you cannot effectively forbid me mine."

"You cannot stand alone against three hundred."

"Of course I can," Turpan said. "You know quite well that if you try to overpower me, scores of you will die. What would happen to your vaunted sexual balance then? No indeed, I think you will admit to the only practical solution, which is that I take over the government of the island."

The officiousness and the élan seemed to go out of the Planner at once, like the air out of a pricked balloon. He was suddenly an old young man. Stephen saw, with a sinking feeling, that the audacity of Turpan had triumphed again.

"You have the advantage of me at the moment," the Planner said. "I relinquish my authority to you in order to avoid bloodshed. Henceforth you will be our Planner. Time will judge my action—and yours."

"Not your Planner," Turpan said. "Your dictator."

There could be but one end to it, of course. One of the first official actions of Dictator Turpan, from the eminence of his lofty, translucent tent with its red and yellow flag on top, was to decree a social festival, to which the other two settlements were invited for eating, drinking and fraternization unrestrained. How unrestrained no one (unless Turpan) could have predicted until late that evening, when the aspect of it began to be Bacchanalian, with the mores and the inhibitions of these intellectuals stripped off, one by one, like the garments of civilization.

Stephen was shocked. Secretly he had approved, at least, of the ideals of these rebels. But what hope could there be if they could so easily fall under the domination of Turpan?

Still, there was something insidiously compelling about the man.

As for Stephen, he had been allotted his position in this new life, and he was not flattered.

"You shall be my body servant," Turpan had said. "I can more nearly trust you than anyone else, since your life, as well as mine, hangs in the balance of my ascendance."

"I would betray you at the earliest opportunity."

Turpan laughed. "I am sure that you would. But you value your life, and you will be careful. Here with me you are safer from intrigue. Later I shall find 

 Prev. P 8/15 next