His neighbors forced the botanist down and, dismayed by the lack of support, Ted shook off the compelling hands and crossed his arms defiantly on his chest. Tarvi Andiyar and Fulmar Stone moved to stand nearby. Sallah watched apprehensively, although she knew full well the strength belied by Tarvi’s lean frame.

Sean nudged Sorka. “They’ll shut him up, and then we can get to the meat of all this talking,” he said. “I hate meetings like this—people sounding off just to make a noise and act big when they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Raising a hand to be recognized, Rudi Shwartz again got to his feet. “If, as you’ve suggested, Cabot, the larger stakes could remain self-governing, how would a central government be organized? Would the large stakes be at all responsible to it?”

“It’s more a matter of the fair allocation of food, materials, and shelter, Rudi,” Joel Lilienkamp said, rising, “rather than—”

“You mean, we don’t have enough food?” an anxious voice broke in.

“For now, we do, but if this Threadstuff is planetwide … we all see what it did to Landing’s fields,” Joel went on, motioning to the dark, ravaged area, “and if it keeps coming back, well—” A woman made a protest of dismay that was clearly audible. “Well,” he went on, hitching up his trousers, “everyone deserves a fair share of what we’ve got. I see nothing wrong with going back to hydroponics for a while. We did just fine for fifteen years on shipboard, didn’t we? I’ll take any odds we can do it again.”

His jovial challenge met with mixed reactions, some cheering, others clearly apprehensive.

“Remember, too, folks, that Thread doesn’t affect the sea,” Jim Tillek said, his cheerfulness unforced. “We can live, and live well, from the sea alone.”

“Most early civilizations lived almost entirely from the sea,” Mairi Hanrahan cried in a ringing, challenging tone. “Joel’s right—we can use alternate methods of growing. And, as long as we can harvest the sea for fresh protein, we’ll be just fine. I think we all ought to buck up, instead of collapsing under the first little snag.” She stared significantly at Ted Tubberman.

“Little snag?” he roared. He would have shoved through the crowd to get to Mairi if he had not been restrained. Tarvi and Fulmar moved in closer to him.

“Hardly a little snag,” Mar Dook said quickly, raising his voice over the ripple of mixed remonstrance and support. “And certainly tragic for many of us. But let’s not fight among ourselves. It’s equally useless for us to bitch that the EEC team did not do a thorough inspection of this planet and grossly misled us. But this world has already proved that it can survive such an incursion and regenerate. Are we humans any less resilient with the resources we have at hand?” He tapped his forehead significantly.