The albino blinked rapidly. "Ker-jon, is it not?"
"It looks like you have another recruit. That is, if you're still in business."
The albino chuckled. "We're in business, young man. As a matter of fact, we got an additional recruit the day before yesterday. You know her, I think."
Cluny-ann came in from the next room, looking very trim and pretty in her jumper. "It's about time you woke up," she said, but then Ker-jon took her hand and held it, and soon she forgot all about being contrary. She said, "Wi'son-gil says we're going to have a rough time of it."
"That's true," Wi'son-gil agreed, adjusting a pair of dark glasses over his pink eyes, then sighing with satisfaction. "It would have been simpler had the revolution failed. Enough people hated the rule of the Mutant-maker before the revolution; probably, instilling the intellectual challenge of the physical sciences would have been enough. Now, unfortunately, it won't."
Ker-jon frowned. "I'm not sure I understand. What do you mean?"
"Flam-harol is developing a militant organization and a more rigid caste-system than we've ever had before; you know that. What we've got to do—what we've been trying to do all along—was to unite the mutants and the non-mutants with a real external challenge. A rebirth of the physical sciences and a subsequent conquest of them would have done it. But not now; now we'll need something more concrete.
"A serious threat, perhaps. What if the Ark stopped functioning, Ker-jon?"
"Stopped functioning?"
"Of course. We have day-lights. We have night-lights. We have hydroponic gardens supplying both air and food, which, except for a few minor adjustments that the bio-technicians can make, function perfectly in themselves. We have instruments of astrogation, and the same thing applies. We don't even know where we're going!