Neshek was the lending of money at interest, once a sin called usury, for which Dante had put men into Hell. And now here was Mike, not a Christian at all, arguing that money itself was a form of slavery. It was, Ruiz-Sanchez discovered upon fingering it mentally once more, a very sore spot.

"In the meantime," Michelis had resumed, "I'll prosecute my own demonstration. What's to be said, now, about this theory of automatic security that you've propounded, Paul? You think that the Lithians can't learn the techniques they would need to be able to understand secret information and pass it on, and so they won't have to be screened. There again, you're wrong, as you'd have known if you'd bothered to study the Lithians even perfunctorily. The Lithians are highly intelligent, and they already have many of the clues they need. I've given them a hand toward pinning down magnetism, and they absorbed the material like magic and put it to work with enormous ingenuity."

"So did I," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "And I've suggested to them a technique for accumulating iron that should prove to be pretty powerful. I had only to suggest it, and they were already halfway down to the bottom of it and traveling fast. They can make the most of the smallest of clues."

"If I were the UN I'd regard both actions as the plainest kind of treason," Cleaver said harshly. "You'd better think again about using that key, Mike, on your own behalf — if it isn't already too late. Isn't it possible that the Snakes found out both items by themselves, and were only being polite to you?"

"Set me no traps," Michelis said. "The tape is on and it stays on, by your own request. If you have any second thoughts, file them in your individual report, but don't try to stampede me into hiding anything under the rug now, Paul. It won't work."

"That," Cleaver said, "is what I get for trying to help."

"If that's what you were trying to do, thanks. I'm not through, however. So far as the practical objective that you want to achieve is concerned, Paul, I think it's just as useless as it is impossible. The fact that we have here a planet that's especially rich in lithium doesn't mean that we're sitting on a bonanza, no matter what price per ton the metal commands back home.

"The fact of the matter is that you can't ship lithium home. Its density is so low that you couldn't send away more than a ton of it per shipload; by the time you got it to Earth, the shipping charges on it would more than outweigh the price you'd get for it on arrival. I should have thought that you'd know there's lots of lithium on Earth's own moon, too — and it isn't economical to fly it back to Earth even over that short a distance, less than a quarter of a million miles. Lithia is three hundred and fourteen trillion miles from Earth; that's what fifty light-years comes to. Not even radium is worth carrying over a gap that great!

"No more would it be economical to ship from Earth to Lithia all the heavy equipment that would be needed to make use of lithium here. There's no iron here for massive magnets. By the time you got your particle-accelerators and mass chromatographs and the rest of your needs to Lithia, you'd have cost the UN so much that no amount of locally available pegmatite could compensate for it. Isn't that so, Agronski?"

"I'm no physicist," Agronski said, frowning slightly. "But just getting the metal out of the ore and storing it would cost a fair sum, that's a cinch. Raw lithium would burn like phosphorus in this atmosphere; you'd have to store it and work it under oil. That's costly no matter how you look at it."

Michelis looked from Cleaver to Agronski and back again.

"Exactly so," he said. "And that's only the beginning. In fact, the whole scheme is just a chimera."

"Have you got a better one, Mike?" Cleaver said, very quietly.

"I hope so. It seems to me that we have a lot to learn from the Lithians, as well as they from us. Their social system works like the most perfect of our physical mechanisms, and it does so without any apparent repression of the individual. It's a thoroughly liberal society in terms of guarantees, yet all the same it never even begins to tip over toward the side of total disorganization, toward the kind of Gandhiism that keeps a people tied to the momma-and-poppa farm and the roving-brigand distribution system. It's in balance, and not in precarious balance either — it's in perfect chemical equilibrium.

"The notion of using Lithia as a fusion-bomb plant is easily the strangest anachronism I've ever encountered — it's as crude as proposing to equip an interstellar ship with galley slaves, oars and all. Right here on Lithia is the real secret, the secret that's going to make bombs of all kinds, and all the rest of the antisocial armament, as useless, unnecessary, obsolete as the iron boot.

"And on top of all of that — no, please, I'm not quite finished, Paul — on top of all that, the Lithians are decades ahead of us in some purely technical matters, just as we're ahead of them in others. You should see what they can do with mixed disciplines — scholia like histochemistry, immunodynamics, biophysics, terataxonomy, osmotic genetics, electrolimnology, and half a hundred more. If you'd been looking, you would have seen.

"We have much more to do, it seems to me, than just to vote to open the planet That's only a passive move. We have to realize that being able to use Lithia is only the beginning. The fact of the matter is that we actively need Lithia. We should say so in our recommendation." Michelis unfolded himself from the window sill and stood up, looking down on all of them, but most especially at Ruiz-Sanchez. The priest smiled at him, but as much in anguish regardless of the way time had of turning any blade. The decision had already cost him many hours of concentrated, agonized doubt. But he believed that it had to be done.

"I disagree with all of you," he said, "except Cleaver. I believe, as he does, that Lithia should be reported triple-E Unfavorable. But I think also that it should be given a special classification: X-One."

Michelis' eyes were glazed with shock. Even Cleaver seemed unable to credit what he had heard.

"X-One — but that's a quarantine label," Michelis said huskily.

"As a matter of fact — "

"Yes, Mike, that's right," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "I vote to seal Lithia off from all contact with the human race. Not only now, or for the next century — but forever."

Forever.

The word did not produce the consternation that he had been dreading — or, perhaps, hoping for, somewhere in the back of his mind. Evidently they were all too tired for that. They took his announcement with a kind of stunned emptiness, as though it were so far out of the expected order of events as to be quite meaningless.

It was hard to say whether Cleaver or Michelis was the more overwhelmed. All that could be seen for certain was that Agronski recovered first, and was now ostentatiously reaming out his ears, as if in signal that he would be ready to listen again when Ruiz-Sanchez changed his mind.

"Well," Cleaver began. And then again, shaking his head amazedly, like an old man: "Well…"

"Tell us why, Ramon," Michelis said, clenching and unclenching his fists. His voice was quite flat, but Ruiz-Sanchez thought he could feel the pain under it.

"Of course. But I warn you, I'm going to be very roundabout What I have to say seems to me to be of the utmost importance. I don't want to see it rejected out of hand as just the product of my peculiar training and prejudices — interesting perhaps as a study in aberration, but not germane to the problem. The evidence for my view of Lithia is overwhelming. It overwhelmed me quite against my natural hopes and inclinations. I want you to hear that evidence." The preamble, with its dry scholiast's tone and its buried suggestion, did its work well.