He felt the muscles in his jaw slacken, caught them.
"There's been a lot of progress since that era, of course. A lot of hard, exhausting work...." He was careful, lest any of his question-marks show. At any moment he could imagine her whirling upon him, shrieking "Imposter!"
But she was taking the bait.
"It seems impossible that there could ever have been a way of life without the Prelatinate, the Quadrature. Impossible even that there was once such a thing as war. How terrible it must have been—no conditioning, the constant killing of valuable adults...."
He let her words sink into his memory, pushed them, crammed them into it, then tried to make them follow through.
"Ironic, isn't it, that without such beastiality there might never have been a world as we know it now. I sometimes wonder how often they thought about the future—if they thought about it as we do today. You know, Jane, I think about the future a lot. Remember what we were talking about just the other day—a week or so ago, wasn't it?"
And he waited, tensed. Too far, perhaps—
"Doug—Doug you mustn't talk about that any more! The S-Council would have both of us in a minute if they ever heard us. The boys in white have sterilized people for less than talking about the desirability of inter-political marriages. But God, how I wish I'd been brought up a Liberal! Lisa wouldn't have had a chance!"
"I suppose it would've made the children a problem...."