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adjective thing!"
    Boyne winced and closed his eyes in protest. "Clean thy mouth, infidel," he muttered. But he was careful to say it so that Robertson couldn't hear him.
    No violence of expression could stir Mary to answering violence. "And whose fault is that?" she asked quietly. "Who brought them up? Who told them all they know?"
    There was no reassuring answer to that. The parents of the past, in other circumstances, could blame a thousand influences for things they considered wrong in their children, or other people's children -- films, shows, books, newspapers, schools, teachers, comic sections, advertisements, graft, poverty, alcoholism, the color bar, the Democrats or the Republicans. Blame wasn't so easy to dole out now. Everything that had influenced the children had been instituted or promulgated or permitted by the founder colonists as a group.
    Except: "The Gap is what's at the root of this trouble, and that wasn't our fault," Jessie Bendall remarked.
    Everybody's thoughts slid back thirty-eight years. No, nobody had consulted the people who were actually to leave the dying Earth. They were told practically nothing about it. They had no choice about anything, not even the world they were going to. They could go or not, that was all. They were all sixteen, hardly more than children. They hadn't selected each other.
    They were selected, trained, tested, crammed each with the essence of some branch of knowledge, conditioned, toughened, taken to pieces and put together again. Lionel Smith had been packed with all the biology he could take and told to get the rest from the microfilm library. Bentley had had physics hammered into him by the cubic foot. Will Hunter had been made a reasonable facsimile of a medical doctor and told to get the experience he needed where and when he could. Unfortunatdy he had died while he was still getting it.
    It was almost true to say that no one knew less about Project Survival than the adolescents who were detailed to survive. From the moment they were chosen, their last few months on Earth were such a whirl of conditioning of one kind or another that not one of the two hundred of them had ever been able to sort it out completely.
    "We should have had kids on the way," Robertson declared.
    Mary sighed. "Yes, on the basis of what we know now."
    "Nonsense," said Boyne, indignation making him brave Robertson's wrath. "Free fall -- complete absence of gravity -- it would have been cruel -- "
    "The animals did it," Robertson snapped.
    "Animals are often cruel," Bentley observed. "Anyway, they didn't know that their offspring reared in weightlessness would have to learn painfully and possibly unsuccessfully to cope with gravity later. We did."
    Robertson repeated: "We should have had children."
    "/I/ wasn't going to have any children for whom there might have been no future," Jessie remarked. "Quiet, everybody. We're going round in circles on an old, dead question. Mary's right. On the basis of what we know now, we'd have had children and the Gap would only have been half what it is. But we didn't know. We waited until we saw Mundis and knew we could live on it and then said, 'Right, we'll have children.' That was reasonable and humane and many years ago, so let's hear no more about it."
    Jessie was motherly and kindly, but when she spoke like that she was quite forceful and people were liable to pay attention to what she said.
    "The fact is," she went on more quietly, "that when the first child was born here on Mundis his parents were thirty-three, and everyone else was thirty-three.
    "There was always a certain amount of friction between youth and age, and they were never as sharply divided as this before. But that's old stuff. Let's -- "
    "Excuse me, Jessie," said Mary firmly. "It may be old stuff, but it's as relevant now as at any time since the landing. More. This friction, as you call it, was hardly noticeable five years ago, when the children were still children. It's grown every week