"No, thanks. I want to get back to Flamme and join in something mild, like a dinosaur hunt."
"When you get there," said Magnan, "I hope you'll make it quite clear that this matter is to be settled without violence."
"Don't worry. I'll keep the peace, if I have to start a war to do it."
On the broad verandah at Government House, Retief settled himself comfortably in a lounge chair. He accepted a tall glass from a white-jacketed waiter and regarded the flamboyant Flamme sunset, a gorgeous blaze of vermillion and purple that reflected from a still lake, tinged the broad lawn with color, silhouetted tall poplars among flower beds.
"You've done great things here in sixty years, Georges," said Retief. "Not that natural geological processes wouldn't have produced the same results, given a couple of hundred million years."
"Don't belabor the point," the Boyar Chef d'Regime said. "Since we seem to be on the verge of losing it."
"You're forgetting the Note."
"A Note," Georges said, waving his cigar. "What the purple polluted hell is a Note supposed to do? I've got Aga Kagan claim-jumpers camped in the middle of what used to be a fine stand of barley, cooking sheep's brains over dung fires not ten miles from Government House—and upwind at that."
"Say, if that's the same barley you distill your whiskey from, I'd call that a first-class atrocity."