ever allowed his serfs to starve, for that would not be
economically sound. And each Baron had been the dispenser of Justice;
he had been Law in his land. Without him, there would have been
anarchy among the ignorant peasants, since they were certainly not fit
to govern themselves a thousand years ago.

Were they any better fit today? Tarnhorst wondered. For a full
millennium, men had been trying, by mass education and by mass
information, to bring the peasants up to the level of the nobles. Had
that plan succeeded? Or had the intelligent ones simply been forced to
conform to the actions of the masses? Had the nobles made peasants of
themselves instead?

Edway Tarnhorst didn't honestly know. All he knew was that he saw a
new spark of human life, a spark of intelligence, a spark of ability,
out in the Belt. He didn't dare tell anyone--he hardly dared admit it
to himself--but he thought those people were better somehow than the
common clods of Earth. Those people didn't think that just because a
man could slop color all over an otherwise innocent sheet of canvas,
making outre and garish patterns, that that made him an artist. They
didn't think that just because a man could write nonsense and use
erratic typography, that that made him a poet. They had other beliefs,
too, that Edway Tarnhorst saw only dimly, but he saw them well enough
to know that they were better beliefs than the obviously stupid belief
that every human being had as much right to respect and dignity as
every other, that a man had a _right_ to be respected, that he
_deserved_ it. Out there, they thought that a man had a right only to
what he earned.

But Edway Tarnhorst was as much a product of his own society as Sam
Fergus. He could only behave as he had been taught. Only on
occasion--on very special occasion--could his native intelligence
override the "common sense" that he had been taught. Only when an
emergency arose. But when one did, Edway Tarnhorst, in spite of his
environmental upbringing, was equal to the occasion.

Actually, his own mind was never really clear on the subject. He did
the best he could with the confusion he had to work with.

"Now we've got to be careful, Sam," he said. "Very careful. We don't
want a war with the Belt Cities."

Sam Fergus snorted. "They wouldn't dare. We got 'em outnumbered a
thousand to one."

"Not if they drop a rock on us," Tarnhorst said quietly.

"They wouldn't dare," Fergus repeated.

But both of