een us and the bulk
of the crowd, in a cleared space, two medium tanks, heavily padded with
mats, were ramming and trying to overturn each other, the mob of
spectators crowding as close to them as they dared. The din was
positively deafening, though we were at least two hundred yards from the
center of the crowd.

"Oh, dear, I always dread these things!" Palme was saying.

"Yes, absolutely anything could happen," Thrombley twittered.

"Man, this is a real barbecue!" Hoddy gloated. "Now I really feel at
home!"

"Over this way, Mr. Silk," Palme said, guiding me toward the short end
of the plaza, on our left. "We will see the President and then ..."

He gulped.

"... then we will all go to the barbecue."

In the center of the short end of the plaza, dwarfed by the monster
bulks of steel and concrete and glass around it, stood a little old
building of warm-tinted adobe. I had never seen it before, but somehow
it was familiar-looking. And then I remembered. Although I had never
seen it before, I had seen it pictured many times; pictured under
attack, with gunsmoke spouting from windows and parapets.

I plucked Thrombley's sleeve.

"Isn't that a replica of the Alamo?"

He was shocked. "Oh, dear, Mr. Ambassador, don't let anybody hear you
ask that. That's no replica. It _is_ the Alamo. _The_ Alamo."

I stood there a moment, looking at it. I was remembering, and finally
understanding, what my psycho-history lessons about the "Romantic
Freeze" had meant.

_They had taken this little mission-fort down, brick by adobe brick,
loaded it carefully into a spaceship, brought it here, forty two
light-years away from Terra, and reverently set it up again. Then they
had built a whole world and a whole social philosophy around it_.

It had been the dissatisfied, of course, the discontented, the dreamers,
who had led the vanguard of man's explosion into space following the
discovery of the hyperspace-drive. They had gone from Terra cherishing
dreams of things that had been dumped into the dust bin of history,
carrying with them pictures of ways of life that had passed away, or
that had never really been. Then, in their new life, on new planets,
they had set to work making those dreams and those pictures live.

And, many times, they had come close to succeeding.

These Texans, now: they had left behind the cold fact that it had been
their state's great industrial complex that had made their migration
possible. They ignored