hundred such ships-which would astonish me
then it will leave carrying a quarter of a million. Correct?”
Jorn began to feel sick. The Director saw it, obviously, but he continued
his explanation without mercy.
“Now let’s suppose that you’ve managed to disqualify tweny-five million
people, on sure sound principles. This leaves you with 2,475,000,000
eligible candidates from which to pick 250,000. About one from every ten
million. Would you like the job?”
“No,” Jorn said. “Great Ghost, no.”
“I don’t blame you,” Ertak sjid. “In fact nobody wants it. But all the
same, my deii Jorn, somebody is going to have to take it.”
Ertak did not take it, nor did anyone else who was known to Jorn, even
marginally. Perhaps the Matriarch herself did; if so, it was never written
against her name. Nor against anyone else’s.
The slashing, ruthless style of it might once have been Ertak’s signature,
but this time all such decadeponderable decisions were being made in his
style, overnight, on every level. And possibly only the Matriarch could
have killed off so much of the world on principle, long before the moral
agonies of even so ruthless a man as Ertak could have been much past
conception.
And all the Stars a Stage 6.5
Item: No marginal farmers.
Item: No piece-workers.
Item: No administrators-whtther private, government or technical; that was
what the crew was for.
Item: No drones.
Item: No infertiles; no disabled; no one over 30, except on the crews; no
one under 17; no one with a family history of cancer, insanity, epilepsy,
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