However, the Great Powers showed no symptoms of rationality. Their obsessive competitiveness still governed them; right this moment they were locking horns, two light years away, to Arnie’s relief.

Reading further in the paper, he came across a brief article having to do with a women’s organization in Berne, Switzerland, which had met to declare once more its anxiety about colonization.

COLONIAL SAFETY COMMITTEE ALARMED OVER CONDITIONS

OF MARS LANDING FIELDS

The ladies, in a petition presented to the Colonial Department of the UN, had expressed once more their conviction that the fields on Mars at which ships from Earth landed were too remote from habitation and from the water system. Passengers in some cases had been required to trek over a hundred miles of wasteland, and these included women and children and old people. The Colonial Safety Committee wanted the UN to pass a regulation compelling ships to land at fields within twenty-five miles of a major (named) canal.

Do-gooders, Arnie Kott thought as he read the article. Probably not one of them has ever been off Earth; they just know what somebody wrote home in a letter, some aunt retiring to Mars on a pension, living on free UN land and naturally griping. And of course they also depended on their member in residence on Mars, a certain Mrs. Anne Esterhazy; she circulated a mimeographed newsletter to other public-spirited ladies throughout the settlements. Arnie received and read her newsletter, The Auditor Speaks Back, a title at which he gagged. He gagged, too, at the one- and two-line squibs inserted between longer articles: