The man nodded. He said nothing. The driver pressed no further, but said after a while, “I wondered what I’d do if my train ever got mobbed.”

“It never did?”

“No. See, I don’t carry foodstuffs; one truckload, at most, for Upper Sedep. This is an ores run. But if I got on a provisions run, and they stopped me, what would I do? Run ’em down and get the food to where it ought to go? But hell, you going to run down kids, old men? They’re doing wrong but you going to kill ’em for it? I don’t know!”

The straight shining rails ran under the wheels. Clouds in the west laid great shivering mirages on the plain, the shadows of dreams of lakes gone dry ten million years ago.

“A syndic, fellow I’ve known for years, he did just that, north of here, in ’66. They tried to take a grain truck off his train. He backed the train, killed a couple of them before they cleared the track, they were like worms in rotten fish, thick, he said. He said, there’s eight hundred people waiting for that grain truck, and how many of them might die if they don’t get it? More than a couple, a lot more. So it looks like he was right. But by damn! I can’t add up figures like that. I don’t know if it’s right to count people like you count numbers. But then, what do you do? Which ones do you kill?”

“The second year I was in Elbow, I was worklister, the mill syndicate cut rations. People doing six hours in the plant got full rations—just barely enough for that kind of work. People on half time got three-quarter rations. If they were sick or too weak to work, they got half. On half rations you couldn’t get well. You couldn’t get back to work. You might stay alive. I was supposed to put people on half rations, people that were already sick. I was working full time, eight, ten hours sometimes, desk work, so I got full rations: I earned them. I earned them by making lists of who should starve.” The man’s light eyes looked ahead into the dry light. “Like you said, I was to count people.”

“You quit?”

“Yes, I quit. Went to Grand Valley. But somebody else took over the lists at the mills in Elbow. There’s always somebody willing to make lists.”

“Now that’s wrong,” the driver said, scowling into the glare. He had a bald brown face and scalp, no hair left between cheeks and occiput, though he wasn’t past his middle forties. It was a strong, hard, and innocent face. “That’s dead wrong. They should have shut the mills down. You can’t ask a man to do that. Aren’t we Odonians? A man can lose his temper, all right. That’s what the people who mobbed trains did. They were hungry, the kids were hungry, been hungry too long, there’s food coming through and it’s not for you, you lose your temper and go for it. Same thing with the friend, those people were taking apart the train he was in charge of, he lost his temper and put it in reverse. He didn’t count any noses. Not then! Later, maybe. Because he was sick when he saw what he’d done. But what they had you doing, saying this one lives and that one dies—that’s not a job a person has a right to do, or ask anybody else to do.”