t the floor. "We're an Earth colony," he said softly. "I
know that. I was born in New York. I lived there for many years. But
Earth isn't my home any more. This is." He looked at Pete. "I built it,
and so did you. All of us built it, even when things were getting stormy
back home. Maybe that's why we came, maybe somehow we saw the
handwriting on the wall."

"But when did it happen?" Mel burst out suddenly. "How could _anything_
so big happen so fast?"

"Speed was the secret," Pete said gloomily. "It was quick, it was well
organized, and the government was unstable. We're just caught in the
edge of it. Pity the ones living there, now. But the new government
considers the colonies as areas for exploitation instead of
development."

"Well, they can't do it," Mario cried. "This is _our_ land, _our_ home.
Nobody can tell us what to grow in our fields."

Pete's fist slammed down on the desk. "Well, how are you going to stop
them? The law of the land is sitting out there in that ship. Tomorrow
morning he's coming back here to install his fat little friend as
governor. He has guns and soldiers on that ship to back him up. What are
you going to do about it?"

"Fight it," Mario said.

"How?"

Jack Mario looked around the room. "There are only a dozen men on that
ship," he said softly. "We've got seventy-four. When Varga comes back to
the village tomorrow, we tell him to take his friend back to the ship
and shove off. We give him five minutes to get turned around, and if he
doesn't, we start shooting."

"Just one little thing," said Pete quietly. "What about the supplies?
Even if we fought them off and won, what about the food, the clothing,
the replacement parts for the machines?"

"We don't need machinery to farm this land," said Mario eagerly.
"There's food here, food we can live on; the Dusties showed us that the
first winter. And we can farm the land for our own use and let the
machinery rust. There's nothing they can bring us from Earth that we
can't do without."

"We couldn't get away with it!" Mel Dorfman shook his head bitterly.
"You're asking us to cut ourselves off from Earth completely. But they'd
never let us. They'd send ships to bomb us out."

"We could hide, and rebuild after they had finished."

Pete Farnam sighed. "They'd never leave us alone, Jack. Didn't you see
that captain? His kind of mind can't stand opposition. We'd just be a
thorn in the side of the new Earth Government. They don't want _a