"It was bound to happen sooner or later," Amalfi said as gently as possible. "Earth is incorporating the independent planets as a matter of policy. Your enemies the Hruntans will be taken in, too. I don't suppose we can explain why very convincingly. We aren't exactly in the confidence of Earth's government."

"Oh," the girl said. "Then perhaps you will help us? This immense fortress of yours———"

"I beg your pardon." Hazleton said, smiling ruefully. "The city is no fortress, I assure you.

We are only lightly armed. However, we may be able to help you in other ways—frankly, we're anxious to make a deal."

Amalfi looked at him under his eyelids. It was incautious, and unlike Hazleton, to discuss the city's armament or lack of it with an officer who had just come on board from a strange battleship.

The girl said, "What do you want? If you can teach us how those—those police ships fly, and how you keep your city aloft———"

"You don't have the spindizzy?" Amalfi said. "But you must have had it once, otherwise you'd never have got way out here from Earth."

"The secret of interstellar flight has been lost for nearly a century. We still have the first ship our ancestors flew in our museum; but the motor is a mystery. It doesn't seem to do anything."

Amalfi found himself thinking: Nearly a century? Is that supposed to be a long time? Or do the Utopians lack the anti-agathic drugs, too? But ascomycin was supposed to have been discovered more than half a century before the Hamiltonian Exodus. Curiouser and curiouser.

Hazleton was smiling again. "We can show you What the spindizzy does," he said. "It is too simple to yield its secret lightly. As for us—we need supplies, raw materials. Oil, most of all. Have you that?"

The girl nodded. "Utopia is very, rich in oil, and we haven't needed it in quantity for nearly twenty-five years— ever since we rediscovered molar valence." Amalfi pricked up his ears again. The Utopians lacked the spindizzy and the anti-agathics—but they had something called molar valence. The term told its own story: anyone who could modify molecular bonding beyond the usual adhesion effects would have no need for mechanical lubricants like oil. And if the Utopians thought they had only rediscovered such a technique, so much the better.

"As for us, we can use anything you can give us," the girl went on. Abruptly she looked very weary in spite of her healthy youth. "All our lives we have been fighting these Hruntan barbarians and waiting for the day when help would arrive from Earth. Now Earth has come—and its hand is against both worlds! Things must have changed a great deal."