“I see—” he murmured. Then, lifting his face to his uncle, “Galt’ll need help. Get me some figures on available strength, will you Ian?”

Ian nodded and went out, as coldly and martially as he had entered.

Left alone, Donal did not break open the signal tape immediately. He could not now remember what he had been musing about when Ian entered, but the sight of his uncle had initiated a new train of thought. Ian seemed well, these days — or at least as well as could be expected. It did not matter that he lived a solitary life, had little to do with the other commanders of his own rank, and refused to go home to the Dorsai, even for a trip to see his family. He devoted himself to his duties of training field troops — and did it well. Aside from that, he went his own way.

The Maran psychiatrists had explained to Donal that no more than this could be expected of Ian. Gently, they had explained it. A normal mind, gone sick, they could cure. The unfortunate thing was that — at least in so far as his attachment to his twin had been — Ian was not normal. Nothing in this universe could replace the part of him that had died with Kensie — had, indeed, been Kensie — for the peculiar psychological make-up of the twins had made them two halves of a whole.

“Your uncle continued to live,” the psychiatrists had explained to Donal, “because of an unconscious desire to punish himself for letting his brother die. He is, in fact, seeking death — but it must be a peculiar sort of death which will include the destruction of all that matters to him. ‘If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off.’ To his unconscious, the Ian-Kensie gestalt holds the Ian part of it to blame for what happened and is hunting a punishment to fit the crime. That is why he continues to practice the — for him — morbid abnormality of staying alive. The normal thing for such a personality would be to die, or get himself killed.

“And that is why,” they had concluded, “he refuses to see or have anything to do with his wife or children. His unconscious recognizes the danger of pulling them down to destruction with him. We would advise against his being urged to visit them against his will.”

Donal sighed. Thinking about it now, it seemed to him strange that the people who had come to group around him had none of them come — really — because of the fame he had won or the positions he could offer them. There was Ian, who had come because the family had sent him. Lee, who had found the supply of that which his own faulty personality lacked — and would have followed if Donal had been Protector of nothing, instead of being Protector of Procyon. There was Lludrow, Donal’s now assistant Chief of Staff, who had come to him not under his own free will, but under the prodding of his wife. For Lludrow had ended up marrying Elvine Rhy, Galt’s niece, who had not let even marriage impose a barrier to her interest in Donal. There was Geneve bar-Colmain, who was on Donal’s staff because Donal had been kind; and because he had no place else to go that was worthy of his abilities. And, lastly, there was Galt, himself, whose friendship was not a military matter, but the rather wistful affection of a man who had never had a son, and saw its image in Donal — though it was not really fair to count Galt, who was apart, as still Marshal of Freiland.

And — in contradistinction to all the rest — there was Mor, the one Donal would have most liked to have at his side; but whose pride had driven him to place himself as far from his successful younger brother as possible. Mor had finally taken service with Venus, where in the open market that flourished on that technological planet, he had had his contract sold to Ceta; and now found himself in the pay of Donal’s enemy, which would put them on opposite sides if conflict finally came.

Donal shook himself abruptly. These fits of depression that took him lately were becoming more frequent — possibly as a result of the long hours of work he found himself putting in. Brusquely, he broke open the signal from Galt.

Donal:

The news about New Earth will have reached you by this time. The coup d’etat that put the Kyerly government in control of the planet was engineered with troops furnished by Ceta. I have never ceased to be grateful to you for your advice against leasing out units to William. But the pattern here is a bad one. We will be facing the same sort of internal attack here through the local proponents of an open exchange for the buying and selling of contracts. One by one, the worlds are failing into the hands of manipulators, not the least of which is William himself. Please furnish us with as many field units as you can conveniently spare.

There is to be a General Planetary Discussion, meeting on Venus to discuss recognition of the new government on New Earth. They would be wise not to invite you; so come anyway. I, myself, must be there; and I need you, even if no other reason impels you to come.

Hendrik Galt, Marshal, Freiland.

Donal nodded to himself. But he did not spring immediately into action. Where Galt was reacting against the shock of a sudden discovery, Donal, in the situation on New Earth, recognized only the revelation of something he had been expecting for a long time.

The sixteen inhabited worlds of the eight stellar systems from Sol to Altair survived within a complex of traded skills. The truth of the matter was that present day civilization had progressed too far for each planet to maintain its own training systems and keep up with progress in the many necessary fields. Why support a thousand mediocre school systems when it was possible to have fifty superb ones and trade the graduates for the skilled people you needed in other areas of learning? The overhead of such systems was tremendous, the number of top men in each field necessarily limited; moreover, progress was more effective if all the workers in one area of knowledge were kept closely in touch with each other.

The system seemed highly practical. Donal was one of the few men of his time to see the trouble inherent in it.

The joker to such an arrangement comes built in to the question — how much is a skilled worker an individual in his own right, and how much is he a piece of property belonging to whoever at the moment owns his contract? If he is too much an individual, barter between worlds breaks down to a series of individual negotiations; and society nowadays could not exist except on the basis of community needs. If he is too much a piece of property, then the field is opened for the manipulators — the buyers and sellers of flesh, those who would corner the manpower market and treat humanity like cattle for their own gain.

Among the worlds between the stars, this question still hung in argument. “Tight” societies, like the technological worlds of the so-called Venus group — Venus herself, Newton and Cassida — and the fanatic worlds of Harmony and Association, and Coby, which was ruled by what amounted to a criminal secret society — had always favored the piece of property view more strongly than the individual one. “Loose” societies, like the republican worlds of Old Earth, and Mars, the Exotics — Mara and Kultis — and the violently individualistic society of the Dorsai, held to the individual side of the question. In between were the middling worlds — the ones with strong central governments like Freiland and New Earth, the merchandising world of Ceta, the democratic theocracy of St. Marie, and the pioneer, underpopulated fisher-planet of Dunnin’s World, ruled by the co-operative society known as the Corbel.

Among the “tight” societies, the contract exchange mart had been in existence for many years. On these worlds, unless your contract was written with a specific forbidding clause, you might find yourself sold on no notice at all to a very different employer — possibly on a completely different world. The advantages of such a mart were obvious to an autocratic government, since the government itself was in a position to control the market through its own vast needs and resources, which no individual could hope to match. On a “loose” world, where the government was hampered by its own built in system of checks from taking advantage of opposing individual employers, the field was open for the sharp practices not only of individuals, but of other governments.