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or friendship, but because the migrant society required it. It was the code of the song. That gave me an odd, deep comfort.
    It was almost a year after my entry into the migrant labor circuit when things got ugly. My replacement identification had never come through; all I had was a temporary card that listed only my name and planet of origin: Callisto. The bureaucracy ground exceeding slow! The bubble-farmers and labor foremen didn't care, but this prevented me from seeking better employment elsewhere. So I was locked in, but as long as I was with Joe Hill, I didn't really mind.
    The people changed, but Rivers was always with us. Fascinated for more than incidental reason now, I studied the relations between Joe and Rivers. Though their politics were opposite, and the two often came to blows, I noticed that the quarrels were never serious. Neither man ever drew his knife or tried for a mutilating blow. Other men in other controversies sometimes went the whole route, and once I saw one killed. The migrant code was strong, but not absolute; passions of the moment could erupt disastrously. No one seemed overly concerned about the dead man. The bubble-guards picked up the one who did it and turned him over to the police, and he did not return; maybe he was brought to trial, maybe just bounced to another orbit. It was the nuisance of violence the police objected to, not the loss of a worker or two. But Joe and Rivers never went that far. Could they, in fact, be brothers, bound by a more subtle tie than they advertised? I concluded that they did hold each other in a certain veiled respect.
    Rivers was well named. He sang his song, and it was him:
    ...Tired of livin', and feared of dyin'!
    But Old Man River, he just keeps rollin' along.
    There was something about the way he sounded the word “dyin'” that sent a shiver through me. It signaled an enormous and terrible comprehension of the concept. I had seen my father treacherously and brutally slain; I had seen my fiancée's body cut open, her guts drawn out. I knew what death was!
    But Rivers was no death-dealer, but the apostle of peaceful change. He argued that the condition of the pickers, which he deplored as much as Joe Hill did, would not change until underlying economics and social factors changed. Until the climate was right, he said, overt action could only be counterproductive.
    Joe, by inciting open resistance to oppression, was more apt to bring the storm down upon his own head, and increase the suffering of the rest of us.
    I sided with Joe, of course, though in retrospect I feel I was mistaken. As the Jupiter-System economy wallowed in the ebb tide of an economic recession, and things tightened up all over the Juclip, and the slop the bubble-farmers fed us got worse, and the work harder for no increase in pay, my anger boiled up along with that of the others. Now Joe's reception was serious, not polite; the pickers were at last ready to organize, and the ones with this militant attitude were becoming a clear majority. The union songs became more strident, and the first open signs of rebellion manifested.
    Then Joe got sick. His harvesting suffered, and he missed his quota. Now I carried him, paying for his meals and bunk. I was glad to expiate my social debt this way, owed for the manner in which he had rescued me from the concourse at Leda and given me support and a kind of family. I was a good picker now, well able to stay ahead, and on good terms with most of the other workers. I was, for one thing, thoroughly literate; when others had paperwork to decipher, I helped, sometimes saving them grief. Had either Joe or I asked for help, it would have been provided, but I preferred to help him myself.
    I brought Joe his supper, which the foreman had served out especially for him, a generous portion. But he consumed only a mouthful and relapsed into his lethargy. There was no doctor; I could only sit by him and hope he got better.
    I waited, finishing some of his meal