"Did I say we were so restricted?" answered Sark, smiling for the first time. "You cannot imagine what a fresh vegetable means on a professor's table in Moscow. In Atomgrad a ripe tomato is worth a pound of uranium. How do I know? Because I walked the streets of Atomgrad with my grandfather."
"Then you're a—"
Sark's face grew hard and bitter in the half light of the room. "Was," he corrected. "Or might have been. There are no nationalities where there are no nations, no political parties where there are only hunger and death. The crime of the future is not any person's or country's. It is the whole of humanity's."
An alarm sounded abruptly.
"Carlson!" someone tensely exclaimed.
Sark whirled to the panels and adjusted the controls. A small screen lighted, showing the image of a man with graying hair and imperious face. His sharp eyes seemed to burn directly into Curt's.
"How did it go?" exclaimed Sark. "Was the Prime Continuum shift as expected?"
"No! It still doesn't compute out. Nothing's right. The war is still going on. The Continuum is absolute hell."
"I should have known," said Sark in dismay. "I should have called you."
"What is it? Do you know what's wrong?"