Even from a distance, they didn't have the young look of the previous groups. Up close, they looked like the sweepings of the slums.
He and Biddington talked to a few before they fully realized what Jaimie had done. All the men were sure that Venus was a mineral paradise—gold in the streams, uranium lodes so pure you had to wear a shield to get near them, diamonds, silver—every treasure that had ever excited men on Earth was scattered around the new world waiting to be picked up. That was what Jaimie had told them.
Rod got to a phone, fast.
"Jaimie, you fool! I know what you're doing, and I won't put up with it! You've told these dupes they can get rich on Venus! You intended to attract large numbers of recruits, in the hope that some of them will be what we need—but look at what you attracted! Crooks, gangsters, bums, hoboes, sharecroppers and I don't know what. You got recruits all right ... but what the hell kind of a society are you going to start with them! And who will go and live there among them later?"
"What's the matter, Workham?" Jaimie asked coldly. "Are you a racial purist? Want only your kind of people to get to Venus?"
"I don't care who goes, as long as they fit some standards. But to make a decent place, you need decent people—morally clean and healthy. Not this collection of mental cripples, alcoholics and thieves. Probably half of them are wanted men!"
He argued further, unable to believe that this was Jaimison's great fifty-fifty chance. He said many things ... and regretted every one; for that night the telecasts carried a recorded version of his outburst. Jaimie had maneuvered him into saying things he didn't quite mean, so that it looked as if he was trying to hide the all good things on Venus and save them for his own friends. One commentator said outright that if you weren't a college graduate recommended by one of Workham's friends, it would cost you a thousand dollars to get on an outgoing ship. By the next morning, half the papers in the world were after Workham's scalp.
Rod could only take the abuse and grind his teeth. How did you fight a thing like that? You were condemned if you kept silent, and if you answered, people nodded their heads and said, "See—he's still trying to deny it."