Normally, in a discussion of this sort, Alex would have pitched right in with a few devil’s-advocate arguments, just to mess everything up and kinda make it more interesting. Under the circumstances, though, he thought it was wisest to let Ellen Mae talk it out. A good idea, for instance, not to mention the many other places in the world where relocations had been a hundred times worse than in West Texas. After all, the people in West Texas had had the giant, well-developed United States to help them. So that they didn’t starve on the spot. They didn’t break out in eye-gouging, street-to-street, structure-hitting, down-and-dirty little ethnic wars. And they weren’t wiped out by massive septic plagues, all the little predatory bugs that jumped out of the woodwork whenever people got seriously disorganized: dysentery, cholera, typhus, malaria, hantavirus.