Chapter 29

HE walked along the line of haggard creatures, in their filthy rags, and stared intently at each vacant face in turn. He had now seen hundreds, thousands of these faces of what had once been men and women. But neither Edith nor Maxwell was among them.

Chapter 30

EVEN Adams became cautiously enthusiastic when Peter explained all the consequences he expected from his proposed reform.

“I’ll put it into effect immediately,” said Peter.

“No, chief; it’s too revolutionary. You must consult the Politburo first.”

“But Bolshekov is certain to oppose it, Adams! And he would probably swing the whole Politburo with him, with the exception of ourselves. He has every advantage. He would probably argue that my plan was new, untried, untested, revolutionary.... He might even say that it was anti-Marxist!”

Chapter 31

AS the car got toward the outskirts of the city its speed rose to XJ L sixty-five miles an hour—to seventy—to eighty-five. They were now in fairly open country.

“Where are we heading?” asked Peter. Adams pointed meaningfully to the corporal, and then spoke to him:

“Listen, soldier, you have been taking part in a revolt. We could shoot you now and throw out your body. Or we could throw you out alive at this speed—”

“Oh, let’s stop and let him out here,” said Peter.

Chapter 32

PETER named the territory over which he ruled Freeworld. He was installed in Washington in a decrepit, smelly old building which someone, evidently with a fine sense of irony, had once named The White House. This, he was told, was where the old capitalist emperors used to live.

“Alone?” he asked—“with all this floor space?”

He assigned apartments in it to Adams and other officials.

“I am going to introduce my new economic reform immediately,” he told Adams.

Chapter 33

SUMMING up the sense of the meeting, then,” said Peter, consulting his penciled notes, “it is agreed that we should increase our production of tanks in the coming fiscal year by 20 per cent, our production of military planes by 35 per cent, and our production of transport ships by 50 per cent. Other military production is to continue at approximately the present rate, with the minor changes recommended by the Secretary of Defense.

Chapter 34

BUT these men, these enterprisers,” persisted Adams, “are not trying to do the best thing possible for the community. Each of them is merely interested in maximizing his own profit!”

Chapter 35

IN Moscow Marshall Zakachetsky was addressing the Politburo. “I have the pleasure to report,” he said, “that the government now has as many planes in operation as it had the day before the Uldanovite counterrevolutionaries flew off with our entire supply. This is even better than it sounds, for we have twice as many long-range bombers as we had then. And all our planes are new. Half of the rebels’ planes, on the other hand, were obsolete when they stole them.

Chapter 36

IN Washington, Adams and Peter sat listening to a shortwave broadcast of one of Bolshekov’s speeches in Moscow’s Red Square. It was full of the usual cliches of Communist propaganda, but suddenly Peter was pulled up:

Chapter 37

I’M still not reconciled, chief,” began Adams the next day, “to the unfair and unreasonable profits that some of these enterprisers are making. This creates great discontent—”

“Among those who haven’t made the profits?”

“Yes. And it doesn’t seem to me that such exorbitant profits are necessary to make your free market system work. Enterprisers should be content with a reasonable profit, and it seems to me that we ought to have a law fixing a reasonable profit, a fair profit.”

“What is a reasonable loss, Adams—a fair loss?”

Chapter 38

ANOTHER year passed. A state of war still existed between Wonworld and Freeworld, but it was still a war without battles and without bloodshed. It consisted of a tremendous barrage of propaganda and of feverish preparations for a resumption of the active war that everyone regarded as inevitable.