Unfortunately, there were hundreds of other people we Powers-That-Be would just as soon not be given that kind of choice. And there is no question of keeping the report secret. Almost everybody in Crypto knows.

The timing is an unfortunate coincidence, since we’re now a little less than forty-eight years away from Epsilon, which until today was the one inflexible period for cryptos. So back in January we thought it was a nowor-never proposition, and we allowed a lot of borderline cases to go in the cans, people still more than marginally useful in the Key West project. Now we could call them back, but twenty years from now, who knows? At the present rate, transferring data visually a page at a time, we’ll still need them. But Ahmed’s confident that we’ll have a dataflow breakthrough any time now.

The next few days and weeks are going to be interesting. Joint Cabinet powwow first thing in the morning to discuss new crypto rules. Morale is not high, a lot of people complaining about busywork and probably wishing they had gone into the can while they were still young enough for it not to be a bad gamble. You can’t really blame them. Trained for science or engineering and now putting in long hours on work any fairly well-educated clerk could do. A lot of them will want to say the hell with it for twenty, thirty, forty years. How many can we afford to lose? Which individuals would we be better off without?

I personally don’t think we need any new rules. The current principle, that anybody be allowed to go crypto unless we can demonstrate that we need him or her, will do.

We just have to adjust the criteria to a level low enough that we need everybody.

That was essentially what the Cabinet and Coordinators decreed: you’re welcome to it if you qualify, but you probably won’t qualify. There were appeals through the legal system, usually based on mitigating family circumstances—“I want to join my husband after all”—and most of them were resolved by the extrajudicial, unconstitutional, use of discreet psychometrics: would keeping her here make her so miserable that it would be counterpro-ductive? Or will she get over it like the rest of us?

There was a vocal minority who claimed, with some justification, that their civil rights were being ignored; that the ship could be run with a skeleton crew of a few hundred. So anybody not crucial to maintaining life support or propulsion should be allowed to do as they wished. Key West would still be there in forty-some years.