The five men on the opposite side of the desk had tacitly chosen Falconer for their spokesman. He said: "But we've all got something to say about it, Brendan. You're in charge, but nothing gives you the power to be an autocrat."
"No?"
"Nothing. The Expedition Charter, in fact, refers to a Board of Officers—"
"The Expedition Charter was written four hundred years ago, a thousand light-years away. The men who drew it up are dust. The men who signed it are dust."
"You're in the direct line of descent from the first Captain."
"Then you're recognizing me as a hereditary monarch, Falconer. I don't see the basis of your complaint."
Falconer—lean as a whip from the waist down, naked, thick-torsoed, covered with crisp, heavy fur—set his clawed feet a little apart and thrust out his heavy under-jaw, clearing his sharp canine tusks away from his flat lips. He lifted his enormous forearms out from his sides and curved his fingers. "Don't pare cheese with us, Brendan. The rest of the dome might be willing to let it go, as long as things're so near completion. But not us. We won't stand for it." The men with him were suddenly a tense pack, waiting, ready.
Brendan stood up, a member of Falconer's generation, no more evolved than any of them. But he was taller than Falconer or any other man in the room. He was bigger, his cruelly-shaped jaw broader, his tusks sharper, his forearm muscles out of all proportion to the length of the bone, like clubs. His eyes burned out from under his shaggy brows, lambent with the captive glow of the lighting coil, set far back under the protection of heavy bone. The slitted nostrils of his flat nose were suddenly flared wide.
