Worlds Apart by J. T. McIntosh Page A

power, I suppose. No, but they're reasonable enough in a spaceship, where things tend to stay put given the slightest help. And do you know why nothing anybody wears hampers the waist? Because in space you swim from the waist. Up, down, forward, back, side -- all directions are the same, and if you want to get anywhere you push off from something, keep your legs together like a tail and curve smoothly from the waist when you want to turn."
    "All that's very interesting," T~n/observed. "Why did I never hear it before?"
    "Because you didn't ask. You youngsters never do ask. I only know one of your generation who has a really omnivorous curiosity -- Rog Foley."
    Mention of Rog made Toni uneasy. She didn't like secrets or barriers of any kind between people. Particularly she didn't like having even a little secret from Pertwee, as if she were in some sort of ailiance with someone else against him. So she told him frankly that if Rog hadn't put the idea in her head it would never have occurred to her to run away with him. She told him that Rog had admitted it was one of his schemes to undermine the Constitution. When she had told Pertwee all she could remember of what Rog said, she sat back and looked at him anxiously. Though she hated secrets she knew that sometimes it was risky to admit certain things. People just wouldn't understand.
    But Pertwee merely pondered calmly. "Interesting," he said. "You know, Toni, I've never considered myself on one side of the Gap and you youngsters on the other -- you know that. I like Rog, and in a dispute I'd be just as likely to be on his side as the other. And yet . . . "
    It was getting dark more abruptly than usual, for all round them hills made walls that cut off the sunlight.
    "I could still take command in an emergency," Pertwee observed. "I've been voted into a lot of positions of responsibility since the Mundis took off. But if there's no emergency, I'm happy in a back seat. Rog isn't. He has to make an emergency, find something to do, something to build up, something to knock down . . . Sometimes I think what we really ought to do, on this world which will never have a real emergency, is hang Rog -- "
    "Hang him!" exclaimed Toni, sitting up abruptly.
    "Or shoot him or poison him," said Pertwee equably.
    "Oh." Toni lay back on the grass again. "You were just joking."
    "I was not. He's a born leader in a community that doesn't need a leader. So what does he do? Leads. But since he had only Lemon to control, he cuts it into two, at twenty-one, and leads one side of it against the other."
    Though Toni had once taxed Rog with the same thing, she felt a curious urge to defend him. "And yet you say you're for him! That doesn't sound like it."
    "I don't know. Half and half. But Rog isn't our concern at the moment," he said briskly, dismissing the, subject. "We should be feeling a sense of accomplishment."
    "Why?"
    "Because the colony has existed on Mundis for twenty-two years, and it's been left to us to find the first lake."
    Toni agreed and accepted the change of subject contentedly. Water had never been a real difficulty. There was no need to make reservoirs to trap the rainwater -- there were natural reservoirs not far underground. The steam pumps at Lemon brought up enough water for the whole colony, and the supply was practically unlimited.
    Still, it was good to know that in at least one place on the planet there was water in abundance, out in the open. It had been beyond Toni's imagination, until she saw it, to picture a body of water so vast and deep that Lemon could be sunk beneath it and lost forever.
    She lay in Pertwee's arms and watched the stars twinkling in the dark surface of the water. She noticed one in particular, a bright, fat star, an especially cheerful star. She turned her head and looked at it direct.
    "Jack," she murmured. "I've never noticed that one before, have you?"
    Pertwee turned his head lazily. She felt the arm that held her suddenly go stiff. He jumped to his