I Speak for Earth by John Brunner Page B

her, but when she came back, there was an unequaled radiance in her eyes when she spoke of you. There is a small confession of guilt, and I hope also a promise of happiness. It was that glow in her eyes which made me certain about you.”
    He looked around. “We are making offerings,” he said, “to each other, and yet not to each other. We are committed to a grand scheme of deceit. We are doing it because we do not feel it fair to humanity to allow it to be judged on a single individual’s thoughts and actions. Nonetheless, it is deceit, and we must redeem ourselves if we can by honorable sacrifice. For the present, it is we who are man; personified in us, man is going to do the best he can.
    At first it seemed to Joe that the little room was intolerably narrow and confining; he itched to go out and walk in the sun, he ached to return to the room he had left where he could sleep without hearing five other breathing rhythms in the still night. Yet, as time passed, the confines of his surroundings began to trouble him less and less. Interests sprang up in what Mrs. King had to say about the philosophy of music, in what Lawrence could tell about the conflict between new and old in Africa, in what Stepan said about the concept of victory.
    The lack of room to move affected Stepan worst; he was accustomed to exercise, and his restlessness was painful to see. As a substitute, he set himself to work out patterns of gymnastics on the frame that held the bunks, and sometimes an hour went by without him touching the floor as he manhandled himself about the room in ceaseless circling.
    For Joe, the lack of privacy in the physical sense was worse than the confinement, simply because he had been accustomed to confinement in the cramped quarters of the starship project, where cabins were scarcely more than tin cans and were sometimes referred to as vampires’ coffins. But he had always been accustomed to being alone occasionally. Only in the memory of what it had meant to him to give up that privilege in order to share Maggie’s time twenty-four hours a day, sustained him. That was perhaps the next most precious gift she had given him after her rich affection.
    He had the impression that Mrs. King’s worst lack in this closed room was visual stimulation; after a while, you hadseen everything there was to see, and when he recalled how she had opened his eyes to the almost frightening beauty of the flowers she had found, he suspected that she suffered emotional starvation without it. At any rate, she spent half the day wistfully looking through the windows and talking little, although her composure remained nearly perfect.
    What troubled Rohini Das was different again, but harder to define. It was also a question of stimulus, but not so simple as Mrs. King’s. Her mind was lively, but she lacked persistence; in conversation, she evinced interest in almost everything, yet on any subject other than her own two specialties, she had the irritating habit of dashing off down irrelevant side tracks, never quite finishing an argument. There was a pattern to this that implied frustration and inability to accept restrictions even though she had to admit the need for them.
    What irked Lawrence Tshekele, it seemed, was simply the absence of change and new challenges in this tight society. To know that eventually a single great challenge would test his talents seemed to be no consolation for him; the situation starved and blunted the keen excited edge of his mind.
    Yet none of their mutual irritations struck the fatal spark which could have ended in hate. That this was so was due entirely to Schneider. He himself, displayed no irritation, although he betrayed signs of strain—his voice occasionally sharpened uncontrollably, his hands shook, and more often than the heat would account for, his forehead shone with sweat. But deliberately, whenever the air grew tense, he turned aside the unuttered insult, the outburst of anger. When Stepan’s