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And to do this, one had to go to Earth; as in the days of the Caesars, there was no alternative. Those who believed otherwise-or pretended to-risked being tagged with the dreaded word “colonial.”

It might have been different if the velocity of light were infinite; but it was a mere billion kilometers an hour-and therefore, real-time conversation would be forever impossible between Earth and anyone beyond the orbit of the Moon. The global electronic village which had existed for centuries on the mother world could never be extended into space; the political and psychological effects of this were enormous, and still not fully understood.

For generations, earth-dwellers had been accustomed to being in each other’s presence at the touch of a button. The communications satellites had made possible, and then inevitable, the creation of the World State in all but name. And despite many earlier fears, it was a state still controlled by men, not by machines.

There were perhaps a thousand key individuals, and ten thousand important ones-and they talked to each other incessantly from Pole to

Pole. The decisions needed to run a world sometimes had to be made in minutes, and for this the instantaneous feedback of face-to-face conversation was essential. Across a reaction of a light-second, that was easy to arrange, and for three hundred years men had taken it for granted that distance could no longer bar them from each other.

But with the establishment of the first Mars Base, this. intimacy had ended. Earth could talk to Mars-but its words would always take at least three minutes to get there, and the reply would take just as long.

Conversation was thus impossible, and all business had to be done by Telex or its equivalent.

In theory, this should have been good enough, and usually it was. But there were disastrous exceptions costly and sometimes fatal interplanetary misunderstandings resulting from the fact that the two men at the opposite ends of the circuit did not really know each other, or comprehend each other’s ways of thought, because they had never been in personal contact.

And personal contact was essential at the highest levels of statesmanship and administration. Diplomats had known this for several thousand years, with their apparatus of missions and envoys and official visits. Only after that contact, with its inevitable character evaluation, had been made, and the subtle links of mutual understanding and common interest established, could one do business by long-distance communications with any degree of confidence.

Malcolm Makenzie could never have achieved his own rise on Titan without the friendships made when he had returned to Earth. Once he had thought it strange that a personal tragedy should have led him to power and responsibility beyond all the dreams of his youth; but unlike Ellen, he had buried his dead past and it had ceased to haunt him long ago.

When Colin had repeated the pattern, forty years later, and had returned to

Titan with the infant Duncan, the position of the clan had been immensely strengthened. To most of the human race, Saturn’s largest moon was now virtually identified with the Makenzies. No one could hope to challenge them if he could not match the network of personal

contacts they had established not only on Earth, but everywhere else that mattered.

It was through this network, rather than official channels, that the

Makenzies, as even their opponents grudgingly admitted, Got Things Done.

And now a fourth generation was being prepared to consolidate the dynasty.

Everyone knew that this would happen eventually, but no one had expected it so soon.

Not even the Makenzies. And especially not the Helmers.

BY THE BONNY, BONNY BANKS

OF LOCH HELL BREW

in the past, Duncan had always cycled to Grandmother Ellen’s home, or taken an electric cart whenever he had to deliver some household necessity. This time, however, he walked the two-kilometer tunnel from the city, carrying fifty kilos of carefully distributed mass-which, however, only gave him ten kilos of extra weight. Had he known that such characters had once existed, he might have felt a strong affinity with old-time smugglers, wearing a stylish waistcoat of gold bars.

Colin had presented him with the complex harness of webbing and pouches, with a heartfelt “Thank God r1l never have to use it again! I knew I had it around somewhere, but it took a couple of days to find. It’s only too true that the Makenzies never throw anything away.”

Duncan found that it needed both hands to lift the harness off the table; when he unzipped one of the many small pouches, he found that it contained a pencil-sized rod of dull metal, astonishingly massive.

“What is it?” he asked. “It feels heavier than gold.” “It is.

Tungsten superalloy, if I remember. The 24 total mass is seventy kilos, but don’t start wearing it all at once. I began at forty, and added a couple of kilos a day. The important thing is to keep the distribution uniform, and to avoid chafing.”