There had always been strain and mutual exasperation in argument with Ed Spearman—long ago, on the ship Argo. The Collectivist Party, surviving as an innocuous political group after the horrors of the Civil War of 2010-13, lived strongly in Spearman's mind, not only because his father had fought for it. Lacking the frenzied dogmatism of the antique communism it resembled, it was nevertheless communism's natural heir, a party of iron doctrines simplified for minds that resented analysis and magnified Man out of a dislike for men. Like communism, it needed to imagine a class war and felt that it had a tight vested monopoly of the underdog. The C.P., said one of its late twentieth-century prophets as humorless as his predecessors, "believed in Man." You could always fluster a collectivist by asking for a logical breakdown of that—and make an enemy: they were usually good haters and made a virtue of it. The years following the Civil War had been troubled though materially prosperous, darkened by the build-up of yet another monolithic state under Jenga the Mongol, who had inherited the desolation of the Russo-Chinese war of 1970-76; in those years the Collectivist Party in the Federation, unsupported by any conveniently foreign deity, had become not much more than a serio-comic decayed socialism with a dash of bitters. But it was alive; at the time Argo left the spaceport it had had ten senators and a larger handful of delegates in the Federation Congress. It was respectable, no longer subversive, and owned a small hard core of the aggressively sincere.... Not Wright nor Sears nor anyone had ever been able to convince Edmund Spearman that evil means breed a further evil, which swallows up any good that may have been imagined in the beginning. Spearman could admit that (himself in no way an evil man) he would not do evil—if he could help it. But in the region of theory Spearman held quite simply that you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, and that settled it....
"They should be safe," Wright said. "You and Jocko saw the island."
"It's beautiful. I know they're all right."
"Yes.... Would you say it was a place where Ann might—oh, how shall I say it?—might attain tranquillity? Not cry too much for the moon?"
"If there is any such place in the Galaxy."
"Time," Elis said. "Little Black-Hair needs time. She is like grass I have seen growing in too much shade. She is not like our Mashana Dorothy who will make sunshine if the other sun is clouded."
"Listen!" Brodaa's voice. "Listen..."
Paul heard nothing, at first. Up ahead Abara sputtered: "Mister Johnson—hoo-hee—be quiet. Is nothing—be quiet—"
Nisana came broad awake in Paul's arms. Wright's mount halted, as did Susie, but Susie was trembling, raising and swinging her head in a way to make balance difficult; Paul saw the white writhing of her trunk lifted to explore for a scent.... He heard it then: a long rustling, like a repeated tearing of paper behind a closed door; nothing else.... A wet howl from Mister Johnson sent a spasm through Susie's mass; her muscles bunched; Abara's voice wailed back: "Mister Joh—I cannot hold him—kaksmas!"
Transition from realization to stampede was a flash like the pain of a blow. Paul heard Mijok: "My shield—it will hold more." Elis cried something to Brodaa. Then Susie had plunged ahead, uncontrollable; Paul could only bend low above the clinging of Nisana, hold on with hands and knees, hope that no trailing vine or branch would sweep them off into death. Mister Johnson could make no careful choice of a trail now—he would be parting the jungle like a six-ton bullet. "Don't be afraid, Nisana—we can outrun them—"