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since then. What's the situation going to be in five years?"
    Brad Hulton was slow and even-tempered and steady, like many big men. "I can't see that this is a vital problem," he said. "Suppose we don't always agree with our kids? Suppose it's due to that thirty-three year Gap of understanding? Soon we'll all be dead and the kids will have their own way anyway and there won't be any Gap any more."
    What he said was undoubtedly true, but no one else was inclined to be so philosophical about it.
    "I want to take up what Mary's been saying," said Jim Bentley. "Truth is, friends, we made mistakes. Maybe they weren't our fault -- maybe they were the fault of people who sent out youngsters with hardly any experience of life to build a new world. But anyway, we made them. What's our general line about them going to be? Are we going to say to the young folk now 'All right, we were wrong, let's do it your way,' or are we going to insist to the death that black is white and we were never wrong and we couldn't possibly be wrong if we tried?"
    This was plain speaking, too plain for Robertson and Boyne. Robertson went white with rage. He was angry at everything, but angriest at any suggestion or hint that he could possibly have been wrong, ever. Boyne took Bentley's observations quite differently. Against such stupidity, such failure to see the obvious, what could one do? Clearly all that was wrong in the community was the absence of Faith. Sooner or later everyone would turn to God and there would be a new heaven on Mundis,
    "Well, you know," said Brad easily, "granting you're right, Jim, I don't see how we can take everything back and start all over again."
    "No," Mary agreed. "In theory it sounds very nice to admit one is wrong . . . "
    "But in practice," Jessie took it up, "One finds that the opposition, which is cocky anyway, gets even cockier, thinks it knows everything, takes control, and proceeds to make far worse mistakes."
    "That's all beside the point," Robertson said furiously. "If the youngsters don't realize how little they know, we'll have to show them. We haven't lived all these years longer for nothing. One of us is still worth any two of them. They need a lesson -- "
    "The first Mundan war?" inquired Brad gently.
    "Oh, no war," said Boyne hastily. "Don't even speak of it. Nothing like that can ever happen again. Everything will come out for the best, so long as we have trust and faith and follow . . . "
    "That's just the trouble," complained Bentley. "We expect our kids to share our horror of things we won't tell them about. We ask for blind trust, and insist it must be blind. The other day Dick Smith was talking about atomic energy . . . "
    He had to wait for Jessie to shush Robertson and Boyne. Robertson wanted Dick Smith haled before the Council right away and put on trial for offense against the Constitution. Boyne was saying something about anti-Christ.
    Bentley caught Jessie's eye. They would get on much better without Robertson and Boyne; but the trouble was, Robertsen and Boyne were just as representative as Bentley himself or Brad. They reacted as a large group of their contemporaries in the Council would react.
    "And why shouldn't Dick talk about atomic energy?" Bentley went on, when he could. "Because he'd been told not to. Reasons? Because we'd seen cities destroyed, first in war and then in peace, by atomic power. What's that to Dick? What is a city? What is destruction? What is power? What is war?"
    "So what do we do?" asked Brad. "Have a small-scale atomic war here so that they'll know what it's like?"
    "We must at least /tell/ them," said Bentley. "I'm asking permission of the Inner Council to tell Dick what I think I ought to tell him."
    "In open defiance of the Constitution!" exclaimed Robertson.
    "Not defiance. Not when I ask for permission."
    Jessie frowned. "You're not going to give him a lot of clues he can use to work out the fundamentals of nuclear fission, are you?" she asked.
    "It's a pity," said