“It was concentrated happiness distilled out of the little supply distributed to billions of ordinary folk who lived on the Surface.”

“Yes, you are right. Yes, it had to be. But it might have been so different, Fulton. You know,” he seated himself on the hard rock, crossed his arms upon his knees and cradled his chin in them, “I think, sometimes, of how it must have been in the old days, when there were nations and wars upon the Earth. I think of how much a miracle it must have seemed to the peoples when the United Nations first became a real world government, and what Atlantis must have meant to them.

“It was a capital city that governed Earth but was not of it. It was a black disc in the air, capable of appearing anywhere on Earth at any height; belonging to no one nation, but to all the planet; the product of no one nation’s ingenuity but the first great achievement of all the race – and then, what it became!”

Fulton said, “Shall we go? We’ll want to get back to the ship before dark.”

Plat went on, “In a way. I suppose it was inevitable. The human race never did invent an institution that didn’t end as a cancer. Probably in prehistoric times, the medicine man who began as the repository of tribal wisdom ended as the last bar to tribal advance. In ancient Rome, the citizen army -”

Fulton was letting him speak – patiently. It was a queer echo of the past. And there had been other eyes upon him in those days, patiently waiting, while he talked.

“- the citizen army that defended the Romans against all comers from Veii to Carthage, became the professional Praetorian Guard that sold the Imperium and levied tribute on all the Empire. The Turks developed the Janissaries as their invincible advance guard against Europe and the Sultan ended as a slave of his Janissary slaves. The barons of medieval Europe protected the serfs against the Northmen and the Magyars, then remained six hundred years longer as a parasite aristocracy that contributed nothing.”