If they had faced the truth then--but they were far too human to admit the failure of the dream. Instead, they found a scapegoat. John Firth has left us a record of a conversation he had with Adam Boetz; it is typical of their thinking at the time. Boetz, as you may know, was one of the outstanding physicists of his day; he had created and built Atomic Cores, Incorporated, until it was the largest power company in the Confederation. John Firth met Boetz one morning on the golf course in the recreation cavern. "Adam!" Firth cried, with his usual, boisterous good-humor. "I never thought I'd find you out here at this time of day." "Why not?" The physicist shrugged. "I'm tired, Firth. I had to do my four hour shift in the light plant last night. Maybe I'll feel like working in the lab tomorrow--and maybe not. I'm scheduled for a shift in hydroponics then." "The shifts are short, Adam, and--" "Still too long for me. I'm not used to so much physical labor." The physicist's lips curled in a sneer. "So very democratic, isn't it, Firth? Back home I hired men to do that kind of work for me." Firth clapped him heartily on the back. "But we have other compensations, Adam. Four hours out of twenty-four is a small price to pay for freedom." "Twenty-eight hours a week. Remember the new labor law the Earth government put into effect before we left? It proscribed a maximum work week of twenty-five hours for every man. We came here to escape restrictions, but we've saddled ourselves with more hours of manual labor than the least skilled laborer has to do on Earth. Firth! I'm not a manual laborer; neither is anyone else you've brought here." "Do you want to go back?" "What answer can I make to that? We're executives, Firth; but here we're a brain without a body. We can formulate the orders, but we've neither arms nor legs to carry them out." "In other words, you're saying we should import a labor force to do our basic work for us?" "Why not?" "They're the fools, Adam, the incompetents! On Earth they were the millstones around our necks--envying us, hating us, building a prison for us with their laws and their regulations." "All very true, Adam, where the government is in their hands. But we could keep them under control." After that John Firth heard the same complaint from the others, over and over. They said they could not take advantage of their freedom because of the chores they had to do to keep Firth's world functioning. Firth called a meeting of the colonists. It was the closest approximation to a government they had; government itself was one of the things they wanted to escape. They unanimously agreed that a labor force had to be recruited, and they settled upon one hundred and fifty as the necessary number, half of them to be women. Working eight hours a day, such a force could perform the work of Firth's world, yet the colonists would outnumber them two-to-one and the labor force would not be large enough to constitute a threat.