"I _want_ another kid," said the female cook. "Two ain't really enough. They're good boys, but I want a girl too. Only the Eridanian law says if I go over my quota, if I have one more, they'll sterilize me! And they'd do it, the meddling devils." _A billion Earthlings are all the Solar System can hold under decent standards of living without exhausting what natural resources their own culture left us_, I thought. _We aren't ready to permit emigration; our own people must come first. But these beings can live well here. Only now that we've eliminated famine, plague, and war, they'd breed beyond reason, breed till all the old evils came back to throttle them, if we didn't have strict population control._ * * * * * "Yeah," said her husband bitterly. "They never even let my cousin have kids. Sterilized him damn near right after he was born." _Then he's a moron, or carries hemophilia, or has some other hereditary taint_, I thought. _Can't they see we're doing it for their own good? It costs us fantastically in money and trouble, but the goal is a level of health and sanity such as this race never in its history dreamed possible._ "They're stranglin' faith," muttered someone else. _Anyone in the Empire may worship as he chooses, but should permission be granted to preach demonstrable falsehoods, archaic superstitions, or antisocial nonsense? The old "free" Earth was not noted for liberalism._ "We want to be free." _Free? Free for what? To loose the thousand Earthly races and creeds and nationalisms on each other--and on the Galaxy--to wallow in barbarism and slaughter and misery as before we came? To let our works and culture be thrown in the dust, the labor of a century be demolished, not because it is good or bad but simply because it is Valgolian? Epsilon Eridanian!_ "We'll be free. Not too long to wait, either--" _That's up to nobody else but you!_ I couldn't get much specific information, but then I hadn't expected to. I collected my pay and drifted on eastward, talking to people of all classes--farmers, mechanics, shopowners, tramps, and such data as I gathered tallied with those of Intelligence. About twenty-five per cent of the population, in North America at least--it was higher in the Orient and Africa--was satisfied with the Imperium, felt they were better off than they would have been in the old days. "The Eridanians are pretty decent, on the whole. Some of 'em come in here and act nice and human as you please." Some fifty per cent was vaguely dissatisfied, wanted "freedom" without troubling to define the term, didn't like the taxes or the labor draft or the enforced disarmament or the legal and social superiority of Valgolians or some such thing, had perhaps suffered in the reconquest. But this group constituted no real threat. It would tend to be passive whatever happened. Its greatest contribution would be sporadic rioting.