The Penultimate Truth

by Philip K. Dick

But he could hardly blame Lindblom for being upset. Because all the Yance-men had this streak. They were selfish; they had made the world into their deer park at the expense of the millions of tankers below; it was wrong and they knew it and they felt guilt—not quite enough guilt to cause them to knock off Brose and let the tankers up, but enough guilt to make their late evenings a thrashing agony of loneliness, emptiness, and their nights impossible. And they knew that if anyone could be said to be amending the crime committed, the theft of an entire planet from its rightful owners, it was Louis Runcible. They gained by keeping the tankers down, and he gained by luring them up; the Yance-man elite confronted Runcible as an antagonist, but one whom they knew, deep down inside, was morally in the right.