It was enough. Their prisoner's doughy face seemed to fall apart a little. "All right!" he cried. "But what's the use telling you when you just say I'm lying?" "Nevertheless, give it to me from the first," Wales ordered. Pudgy said, "Look, this whole scheme to keep the crummy no-goods here on Earth--that wasn't _my_ idea. Five years ago, when they were first organizing Operation Doomsday, I got a job in the Evacuation Police. I did all right. Pretty soon I was a sergeant. Then--I began to hear things about the Evacuation from one of the other sergeants." The man paused, then went on. "Eugene--that was my friend in the Police--told me that Fairlie and some other Evacuation officials needed some men for special secret police work. Said the work was so important and so secret nobody must know about it. I said okay, I'd like to be one of these special secret Evacuation Police. So they took me in. And Fairlie himself talked to me and a couple of others." * * * * * Wales, watching Pudgy narrowly, saw him mop the sweat off his brow. "Fairlie told us, that they weren't going to be able to get _everybody_ off Earth before Doomsday. He said it was impossible, there was bound to be millions would get left. He told us that he and some of the other officials in key places in the Evacuation had decided that since they were going to have to leave people, it'd be better to leave a lot of crummy hillbillies and share croppers and ignorant trash. He said they'd only make things tougher for everyone on Mars, anyway. It was better, Fairlie said, to weed them out and leave them here." An icy feeling of terrible conviction began to grow in Wales, despite all his attempts to repel it. He'd heard just that kind of talk, before. Not openly, but in sly whispers and hints. People who felt sure of escaping from Earth themselves had expressed aristocratic regret that _all_ Earth's people must be saved, that they must be burdened on the new world by the "backward." No one had quite dared to advocate such ideas publicly. But there were those who secretly held them. And those who did, very well might have secretly decided to see that the "useless, backward" ones _didn't_ escape Earth. Fairlie--and others like him--could be among them-- "Fairlie told us," Pudgy went on, "that they wouldn't prevent anyone leaving that wanted to leave. But, he said, lots of the dumber ones wouldn't want to leave if things were managed right, and that would solve the whole problem." Martha interrupted. "But my brother--what of him? You said they had Lee?" Pudgy nodded. "I was coming to that. Fairlie called some of us in real worried one night and told us we had to go to Castletown and grab Lee Kendrick. He said they'd been sounding Kendrick out about helping along the scheme, and that Kendrick wouldn't play ball." "You mean," Wales said quickly, "that Fairlie and his group wanted Kendrick to _help_ them trap the 'backward ones' here on Earth?"