(How he tried not to think of it and, how his memory presented him with it, over and over again, as though it could never get enough of grief and despair.)
If he had won out, Earth would have remained isolated and alone and he would have seen to it that Earth declined, decayed, and finally faded into dissolution. Why not? The short-lived people of a diseased, overcrowded world were better off dead—a hundred times better off dead than living the life they had forced themselves to lead.
And the Spacer worlds, calm and secure, would then have expanded further, Fastolfe had always complained that the Spacers were too long-lived and too comfortable on their Droidic cushions to be pioneers, but Amadiro would have proved him wrong.
Yet Fastolfe had won out. At the moment of certain defeat, he
