“I STILL FAIL TO UNDERSTAND why,” Hamelin said, “if, as you claim, you have methods of re-educating soldiers for surface life, you can’t do so for civilians as well. Or instead.”
The under-secretary, a tall, spare man, bald on top, and with a heavily creased forehead, spoke with the odd neutral accent—untinged by regionalism—of the trained diplomat, despite the fact that there had been no such thing as a foreign service for nearly half a century.
“We’re going to try to explain that to you,” Carson said. “But we thought that, first of all, we’d try to explain once more why we think it would be bad policy—as well as physically out of the question.
“Sure, everybody wants to go topside as soon as it’s possible. Even people who are reconciled to these endless caverns and corridors hope for s
