"No. By the way, make sure the troops realize they won't look exactly like kids. We're taking them in their last year of development. They're mostly ten or eleven years old, but due to the growth accelerators they will appear to have the bodies of late teenagers."

"Gawky?"

"Not really. They get great physical conditioning. Healthy as hell. That's the whole point of not just growing them in a vat till transplant time."

"Do they . . . know? Know what's going to happen to them?" Thorne asked with an introspective frown.

"They're not told, no. They're told all kinds of lies, variously. They're told they're in a special school, for security reasons, to save them from some exotic danger. That they're all some kind of prince or princess, or rich man's heir, or military scion, and someday very soon their parents or their aunts or their ambassadors are going to come and take them away to some glamorous future . . . and then, of course, at last some smiling person comes, and calls them away from their playmates, and tells them that today is the day, and they run . . ." he stopped, swallowed, "and snatch up their things, and brag to their friends. . . ."

Thorne was tapping the vid control unconsciously in its palm, and looking pale. "I get the picture."

"And walk out hand-in-hand with their murderers, eagerly."

"You can stop with the scenario-spinning, unless you're trying to make me lose my last meal."

"What, you've known for years that this was going on," he mocked. "Why get all squeamish about it now?" He bit off his bitterness. Naismith. He must be Naismith.

Thorne shot him a sharp glare. "I was ready to fry them from orbit the last time, as you may recall. You wouldn't let me."

What last time? No time in the last three years. He'd have to scan the mission logs back even further, dammit. He shrugged, ambiguously.

"So," said Thorne, "are these . . . big kids . . . all going to decide we're their parents' enemies, kidnapping them just before they go home? I see trouble, here."

He clenched, and spread, the fingers of his right hand. "Maybe not. Children . . . have a culture of their own. Passed down from year to year. There are rumors. Boogeyman stories. Doubts. I told you, they aren't stupid. Their adult handlers try to stamp out the stories, or make fun of them, or mix them up with other, obvious lies." And yet . . . they had not fooled him. But then, he had lived in the crèche much longer than the average. He'd had time to see more clones come and go, time to see stories repeated, pseudo-biographies duplicated. Time for their handlers' tiny slips and mistakes to accumulate in his observation. "If it's the same—" If it's the same as it was in my time, he almost said, but saved himself, "I should be able to persuade them. Leave that part to me."