Ellynne wrote: <One thing that does irritate me with Countdown is that no one considers evacuating part of the population to the Liberator. They could have reasonably gotten at least a few children on board.>

This is a good question (I've thought before that in between Fighting for Freedom, the Librator could be and quite possibly was used to ferry refugees and dissidents around). I suppose the main problem *would* be whether they could get more than a few people on board and, if not, how to select the few and get them away without the rest of the population fighting them for a berth, and panic leading to a lot of violence. It's rather like trying to get the passengers of a *very very* large Titanic into very very tiny lifeboats ...

Pre-supposing that we're talking about a fairly breif period of time, a few hours at most and probably only a couple, the difficulties include:

1. the numbers you could teleport would be restricted by the number of bracelets (what were there supposed to be, thirty?) and how many the system will take at a time (and that teleport bay is rather small). Even a single school (which is as many as you could hope to manage by teleport, and *how* do you pick just one school?) would mean several trips (with the time-consuming business of collecting bracelets and controlling rightened children sloing things down), and the chances of other schools and parents hearing about it - and that *their* children were not going to be offered the chance - are significant. Especially since it would be likely (and entirely understandable) that some of the 'local authorities' would want to save their own (and possibly themselves) first.

2. we don't know that the Albian people have much access to spacecraft of their own that could ferry larger numbers up to the Liberator. Yes, there is the cruise ship in Gold and the passenger ship in Star One, but - even if there were such things on Albian*, requisitioning one would again [a] take time and [b] ensure that people who were *not* going to saved would get to know about it :-( Could the authorities control the inevitable riots?

The other alternative is whatever military craft are at the base - from the looks of it, that's next-to-none, and we don't know how far the base is from any population centre where the pick-ups could take place.

3. And with the children, of course, there's the problem of where the traumatised orphans would go, in the event the bomb goes off, in this very cold, hard universe. Hopefully there would be a world willing to take them ... in this galaxy, I wouldn't bet my life savings on it.

So the practical alternatives seem to be [a] offer the people actually on the base with them a chance (they did, and were declined); or [b] offer to take a handful of people - a couple of classes of children from the thousands there, or a few families - and let the Albian rebels decide if they can/want to pick the lucky few (well, Our Heroes hardly could!) and organise the mini-rescue in the limited time available.

Sally

* and the fact that no one considers using them as 24-hour safety zones seems to indicate that they aren't there.

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