“So I can’t devote myself to this matter any further; I’m relying on you to dig into it. For example, I have been traveling east where we got that melon experiment in progress, and it seems like we’re about to be entirely successful in inducing the New England type of melon into growing here in this environment. I know you all have been wondering about that, because everybody likes a good slice of cantaloupe in the morning for his breakfast, if it’s at all possible.”

“That’s true, Arnie,” the boys agreed.

“But,” Arnie said, “I got more on my mind than melons. We had one of those UN boys visiting us the other day protesting our regulations concerning the niggers. Or maybe I shouldn’t say that; maybe I should talk like the UN boys and say ‘indigenous population remnants,’ or just Bleekmen. What he had reference to was our licensing the mines owned by our settlement to use Bleekmen at below scale, I mean, below the minimum wage--because even those fairies at the UN don’t seriously propose we pay scale to Bleekmen figgers. However, we have this problem that .we can’t pay any minimum wage to the Bleekmen niggers because their work is so inconsistent that we’d go broke, and we have to use them in mining operations because they’re the only ones who can breathe down there, and we can’t get oxygen equipment in quantity transported over here at any price less than outrageous. Somebody’s making a lot of money back Home on those oxygen tanks and compressors and all that. It’s a racket, and we’re not going to get gouged, I can tell you.”

Everybody nodded somberly.

“Now, we can’t allow the UN bureaucrats to dictate to us how we’ll run our settlement,” Arnie said. “We set up operations here before the UN was anything here but a flag planted in the sand; we had houses built before they had a pot to piss in anywhere on Mars, including all that disputed area in the south between the U.S. and France.”