There was a revolted silence around the table. The chairman looked like a man sucking on a lemon. The member from Barca shrank in his seat.

The chairman spoke at last. "We're not that desperate yet. Although it may be well to have spoken what others will surely think of eventually."

"It needn't be public knowledge," the Barca man offered.

"I should hope not," agreed the chairman dryly. "The possibility is noted. Members will mark this section of the record classified. But I point out, for all, that this proposal does not address the other, perennial problem faced by this Council, and Athos: maintaining genetic variety. It had not pressed on our generation—until now—but we all knew it had to be faced in the future." His tones grew more mellow. "We would be shirking our responsibilities to ignore it now and let it be dumped on our grandsons in the form of a crisis."

There was a murmur of relief around the table, as logic safely propped emotional conviction. Even the junior member from Barca looked happier.

"Quite."

"Exactly."

"Just so—"

"Better to kill two chickens with one stone, if we can—"

"Immigration would help," put in another member, who doubled, one week a year, as Athos's Department of Immigration and Naturalization. "If we could get some."

"How many immigrants came on this year's ship?" asked the man across from him.

"Three."

"Hell. Is that an all-time low?"

"No, year before last there were only two. And two years before that there weren't any." The Immigration man sighed. "By rights we ought to be flooded with refugees. Maybe the Founding Fathers were just too thorough about picking a planet away from it all. I sometimes wonder if anyone out there has heard of us."