Craven shook his head. "No, I'm going with Chambers. I don't know what he's thinking of, but whatever it is, it's all right with me. We've been together too long. I'd miss someone to fight with."
Chambers was still staring out the vision port. He was talking, but he did not seem to be talking to them.
"I had a dream, you see. I saw the people struggling against the inefficiency and stupidity of popular government. I saw the periodic rise of bad leaders. I saw them lead the people into blunders. I read history and I saw that since the time man had risen from the ape, this had been going on. So I proposed to give the people scientific government ... a business administration. An administration that would have run the government exactly as a successful businessman runs his business. The people would have resented it if I had told them they didn't know how to run their affairs. There was only one way to do it ... gain control and force it down their throats."
Chambers was no longer a beaten man, no longer a man with a white bandage around his head and his power stripped from him. Once again he was the fighting financier who had sat back at the desk in the Interplanetary building on Earth and issued orders ... orders that sped across millions of miles of space.
He shrugged his shoulders. "They didn't want it. Man doesn't want to live under scientific government. He doesn't want to be protected against blunders. He wants what he calls freedom. The right to do the things he wants to do, even if it means making a damn fool of himself. The right to rise to great heights and tumble to equally low depths. That's human nature and I ruled it out. But you can't rule out human nature."
They sat in silence, no one speaking. Russ cupped his pipe bowl in his hand and watched Chambers. Chambers leaned back and slowly puffed at the cigar. Greg just sat, his face unchanging.
Craven finally broke the silence. "Just what are you planning to do?"
Chambers flicked his hand toward the distant sun that gleamed through the vision port.
"There's a new solar system out there," he said. "New worlds, a new sun. A place to start over again. You and I discovered it. It's ours by right of discovery. We'll go there and stake out our claim."
"But there may be nothing there," protested Greg. "That sun is younger than our Sun. The planets may not have cooled as yet. Life may not have developed."