Hazleton was waiting for him in the mayor's office, drumming slim fingers upon the desk top. The current city manager was an excessively tall, slender, disjointed sort of man.

Something in the way his limbs were distributed over Amalfi's chair made him also look lazy. If taking devious pains was a sign of laziness, Amalfi was quite willing to call Hazleton the laziest man in the city.

Whether he was lazier than anybody outside the city didn't matter. Nothing that went on outside the city was of real importance any more.

Hazleton said, "Well?"

"Well enough." Amalfi grunted. "It's a nice yellow dwarf star, with all the fixings."

"Sure," Hazleton said with a wry smile. "I don't see why you insist on taking a personal look at every star we go by. There are screens right here in the office, and the City Fathers have all the data. We knew even before we could see this sun what it was like."

"I like a personal look," said Amalfi. "I haven't been mayor here for five hundred years for nothing. I can't really tell about a sun until I see it with my own eyes. Then I know. Images don't mean a thing—no feel to "em."

"Nonsense," Hazleton said, without malice. "And what does your feelership say about this one?"

"It's a good sun; I like it. We'll land."

"All right, suppose I tell you what's going on out there?"

"I know, I know," Amalfi said. His heavy voice took on a finicky, nervous tone, his own exaggerated version of the mechanical speech of the City Fathers. '"THE POLITICAL

SIT-UATION IS VER-Y DISTURBING.' It's the food situation that I'm worried about."

"Oh? Is it so bad, then?"

"It's not bad yet. It will be, unless we land. There's been another mutation in the Chlorella tanks; must have started when we passed through that radiation field near Sigma Draconis. We're getting a yield of about twenty-two hundred kilograms per acre in terms of fats."

"That's not bad."

"Not bad, but it's dropping steadily, and the rate of decrease is accelerating. If it's not arrested, we won't have

any algae crops at all in a year or so. And there's not enough crude-oil reserve to tide us over to the next nearest star. We'd hit there eating each other."

Hazleton shrugged. "That's a big if, boss," he said. "We've never had a mutation we couldn't get under control before. And it's very nasty on those two planets."

"So they're having a war. We've been through that kind of situation before. We don't have to take sides. We land on the planet best suited——"