"They got to steal the stuff if they can't afford to pay off Madison City officers on the quiet. Be straight with yourself, Dallen. Do you really think it's right for Metagov to keep a whole city going… a whole city lying empty except for a population of frigging optical illusions… while we got people sick and hungry on the outside?"

Dallen shook his head, even though Beaumont could not see, impatient with old arguments. "There's no need for anybody to go sick or hungry."

"I know," Beaumont said bitterly. "Let ourselves be rounded up like cattle! Let ourselves be shipped off to the Big O and turned out to pasture… Well, some of us just won't do it, Dallen. We're the Independents."

"Independents who feel entitled to be supported." Dallen was deliberately supercilious. "That's a serious contradiction in terms, young Derek."

"We don't want to be supported. We made a contribution too, but nobody… We just want… We…" Overwhelmed by incoherence, Beaumont paused and his laboured breathing was easily audible through the partition.

"And all I want is that combination," Dallen said. "Your time's running out."

He made his voice hard and certain, consciously striking out against the ambivalence he usually felt when forced to think about Earth's recent past. Cona, as a professional historian, had the sort of mind which could cope with vast areas of complexity, confusion and conflict, whereas he yearned for a dawn-time simplicity which was never forthcoming. In the early years of the migrations, for example, nobody had planned actually to abandon the cities of the home world and let them sink into decay. There had been too big an investment in time. Mankind's very soul lingered in the masonry of the great conurbations, and hundreds of them — from York to New York, Paris to Peking — had been designated as cultural shrines, places to which Earth's children would return from time to time and reaffirm their humanity.