"But if they improve the rockets, manage to make room for a bigger payload, wouldn't it be cheaper?"
"It would still cost roughly a billion dollars to equip a flight and maintain a personnel of twenty men for a year," the President told him. "I've checked into that, and even this estimate is based on the most optimistic projection. So you can see there's no use in continuing now. We'll never solve our problems by attempting to colonize the moon or Mars."
"But it's the only possible solution left to us."
"No it isn't," the President said. "There's always our friend Leffingwell."
The Secretary of State turned away. "You can't officially sponsor a thing like that," he muttered. "It's political suicide."
The gray smile returned to the gray lips. "Suicide? What do you know about suicide, Art? I've been reading a few statistics on that, too. How many actual suicides do you think we had in this country last year?"
"A hundred thousand? Two hundred, maybe?"
"Two million." The President leaned forward. "Add to that, over a million murders and six million crimes of violence."
"I never knew—"