"The Fire Judges are not in control of it. We serve the nation, as part of the process. From time to time the System asks us to draw a line in the air: what is better and what is worse? We do not confer. We think and we vote and we move on, as a Smart Crowd must. You see? We are disinterested. We have no stake. We are not promoted by one choice and nor can our prospects be harmed by another. We are not secret rulers, we are secret civil servants. You’ve been looking for corruption; you thought Oliver was a bad, bad man, but he wasn’t. He was trying to do right, and he was cack-handed, but that’s all. If he’d grown up under the society we are trying to build, he would never have made those mistakes. We are transitional. That’s all. A flawed early release."