Either way, I guess I lack that kind of faith in humanity too. Letting children play with weapons is not freedom. It is random death.

The ending surprised me a lot. I was horrified at the idea of that thought-volatile element being thrown to the masses. Yikes. Guess I don’t have that kind of faith in humanity to not be stupid.

Thanks for the hint about this book, I’d never have picked it up otherwise. It was as good a take on the Count of Monte Cristo story as I’ve read.

“The spaceship Nomad drifted halfway between Mars & Jupiter. Whatever war catastrophe had wrecked it had taken a sleek steel rocket, one hundred yards long and one hundred feet broad, and mangled it into a skeleton on which was mounted the remains of cabins, holds, decks and bulkheads. Great rents in the hull were blazes of light on the sunside and frosty blotches of stars on the dark side. The SS Nomad was a weightless emptiness of blinding sun and jet shadow, frozen & silent.”

“The wreck was filled with a floating conglomerate of frozen debris that hung within the destroyed vessel like an instantaneous photograph of an explosion. The minute gravitational attraction of the bits of rubble for each other was slowly drawing them into clusters which were periodically torn apart by the passage through them of the one survivor still alive on the wreck, Gulliver Foyle…”