They left the ship there and took the flyer back to the place where they had buried the box of mice. Then they sent the flyer back to the ship.

Noxon and Ram stood over the burial place. “Think they’re still alive in there?” asked Noxon.

“How long since we buried them?” asked Ram Odin.

“Not sure how precisely we handled our return time, but I’m betting they’re still in there,” said Noxon.

“If you open the box to see,” said Ram Odin, “they’ll be out of it in a second and we’ll never get them back.”

“Oh, I have no intention of letting them out,” said Noxon. “What I’m wondering is, what are the odds that as soon as we slice forward in time from here, the flyer will return and the expendable will dig them up?”

“I think seventy-five percent against it,” said Ram Odin. “But it’s impossible to be sure.”

“In my experience, the only creatures more devious than the mice are the expendables.”

“To be fair,” said Ram Odin, “their deviousness on Garden could have been due to their following Old Ram’s instructions.”

“They’re very good at giving truthful answers to the wrong questions,” said Noxon.

“And humans are very good at coming up with all the wrong questions,” said Ram Odin.

“We never have complete control over anything,” said Noxon.

“No,” said Ram Odin. “Because at some point, we have to trust machines and people to do what they say they’ll do.”

“And every now and then,” said Noxon, “their disobedience is actually wiser than if they had done what we commanded. Because they have their own wisdom, and we have no guarantee that ours is wiser.”

“Trust and obedience,” said Ram Odin. “Every cruel dictator in history has only had the power to do evil because so many other people were willing to obey him and carry out his orders.”

“And every wise and good leader has been repeatedly stymied,” said Noxon, “because no matter how wise his commands, some bureaucrat somewhere believed that it wasn’t in his self-interest to carry them out.”

“So what are you going to do about this?” asked Ram Odin.

“Well,” said Noxon. “I could stay here with you and slice time for a few months, watching to see if the flyer returns. We wouldn’t leave the surface here until we were sure the mice were dead.”

“We’d also see that we didn’t return from the future during that time,” said Ram Odin.

“The first time through, we’d see that,” said Noxon. “The problem is that the second time through, we would see ourselves come back, and that would change our behavior, and therefore it would create two new copies of the two of us because we would then behave differently.”

“At least we’d know the mice and the expendables hadn’t disobeyed us,” said Ram Odin.