"No, Father," said O'Hara. "No, Stephen Bryce. No more." "Compassion, O'Hara?" "Disgust. Loathing." "For me. I can understand that. When I was younger there were times when I felt it too. But how else can the problem of overpopulation be solved, O'Hara?" "You have the means. There are no births except at your direction." "You would have me deprive the women of the masses of their sole amusement, which is the bearing of children? And further, you forget the declining ratio of potential Sons among the newborn--to keep constant the total of Sons, the birth rate of the women of the masses constantly must be stepped up--we must have more babies, more population to select from, but our supply of food material is constant, adequate for a constant population, which through these periodic Deluges I achieve. An instant's agony--no worse than that experienced in that painless institution of your hemisphere, the electric chair--avoids the months and years of slow starvation which your own estimable system, O'Hara--the system of your hemisphere--enforces. Which do you actually believe to be less cruel?" "But in our hemisphere there is no volition--" "The truth is, isn't it, that no one will accept the responsibility for managing society?" "We have had such men. We called them monsters." "You are not yet quite adults. But I have lived now for almost three hundred years. I was born before the establishment of the Curtain, while a people of your hemisphere were loosing upon our cities a murderous rain of warheads, destroying among others the city of my birth, killing my father and my mother and my small brother--I have lived, O'Hara, long enough to remember the monsters of your hemisphere, and remember them acutely, not as vague names in history. And also I have lived long enough to recognize the immutable facts of a mechanical world, and to lose, I suppose, my childish scruples. And yet, had I any choice at all in these matters, had I less responsibility, had I someone to lean upon, someone with the physical abilities that I no longer have--yourself, O'Hara." "I reject you, Stephen Bryce. For after all of your excuses you remain a monster who has lived too long to value life." "And will live long enough to fit you into my purposes." "If I don't destroy you now." "Destroy a cripple? You haven't the capacities for it. And destroy all of my people in this hemisphere? You call me a monster, O'Hara? Come now, tell me--is that the ethics of the world beyond the Curtain nowadays? To shrink from necessary cruelties to perform those that would be incalculably more terrible?" "It is a matter--a matter of intentions--"