He said, “You must get a lot of laughs out of it. If I say, it seems to me democracy is a good thing, you give me an argument about the superiority of rule by an elite. If I say anarchism is ridiculous, you dredge up an opinion that it's man's highest ethic. You must laugh yourself to sleep at nights. You and Metaxa and Jakes and every other agent in Section G. Everybody is in on the Tog gag but the sucker.”
“Sometimes there are amusing elements to the work,” Lee Chang conceded, demurely.
“Just one more thing I'd like to ask,” Ronny rapped. “This first assignment, agents are given. Is it always to look for Tommy Paine?”
She looked up at him, said nothing, but her eyes were questioning.
“Don't worry,” he snapped. “I've already found out who Paine is.”
“Ah?” She was suddenly interested. “Then I'm glad I ordered that other probationary agent to leave. Evidently, he hasn't. Obviously, I didn't want the two of you comparing notes.”
“No, that would never do,” he said bitterly. “Well, this is the end of the assignment so far as you and I are concerned. I'm heading back for Earth.”
“Of course,” she said.
He had time on the way to think it all over, and over and over again, and a great deal of it simply didn't make sense. He had enough information to be disillusioned, sick at heart. To have crumbled an idealistic edifice that had taken a lifetime to build. A lifetime? At least three. His father and his grandfather before him had had the dream. He'd been weaned on the idealistic purposes of the United Planets and man's fated growth into the stars.