other time? the radial city is preferred for rapid transportation, being the accepted pattern in the great economic hubs and ports like Greater New York and Hampton Roads.

"You will have to live here with me" Dorcas Sinclair told Ellaby, "until you pass your tests for employment. I don't have to tell you how much depends on the outcome of those tests, Ellaby."

"But I can't fail them. I thought you knew my record."

With an unnerving unmodal violence, Dorcas Sinclair's strong fingers dug into the flabby muscle of Ellaby's upper arm. "Well, you had better not," she said, her large teeth hardly parting to let the sounds out.

Ellaby was suddenly alarmed. He had had very little truck with people of this sort. They were as unpredictable as the weather in High Falls which having a population under twenty-five thousand, had never qualified for weather control. Unlike modal man, they had never been exhaustively studied. Their likes and dislikes were not catered to, but their passions couldn't be predicted, either.

"Ease up, Dorcas," a deep voice said from the doorway leading to the kitchen.

Ellaby stared in that direction gratefully. It was indecent for a woman, for anyone, to expose her emotions that way. Ellaby was almost inclined to thank the stranger.

"Stranger, nothing!" Ellaby blurted aloud. Ellaby's face reddened and he apologized. "I didn't mean to raise my voice," he explained. "You surprised me."

"I guess you didn't expect to find me here, at that. You haven't changed much, Ellaby."

Automatically, Ellaby mumbled his thanks for the compliment. Sam Mulden, though, had changed. He'd always been a radical. He wore his hair cropped too short. He was tall and thin, his elbows and knees exposed by the tunic he wore like knots on gnarled, living wood. Mulden looked older. He hadn't bothered to dye his graying hair, or to smooth the premature wrinkles on his long-nosed, thin-lipped face. He was smiling sardonically at Ellaby now, as if he could read Ellaby's mind. "I might have known it would be you," he said. "As soon as they said the assassin was coming from High Falls, I should have guessed."

"Why?" asked Ellaby. It was a question which had nudged for ten years at his docile patience. When people go out of their way to train you, though, to spend ten years teaching you every inch of Capitol territory without once taking you there, to make you proficient with various deadly weapons although your reflexes are splendidly modal, to teach you meaningless phrases like democratic inequality (?) and individuality (?) and the right to live a self-directed (?) life, to make your own decisions (?), when people act, in short, like a very thorough government school, even if their motives seem strangely misdirected, you don't question them.

"For two reasons," Mulden said. "You can understand the first, Ellaby. If the second one bothers you, forget it. In the first place, you're so perfectly modal, the government would never suspect you. In the second place, you're so well adjusted you're bound to follow our instructions."

"Or any instructions," Dorcas Sinclair said. "That's what I'm afraid of, Mulden."

llaby still couldn't get over it. He never expected to find poor, unfortunate Sam Mulden in such a high position in the organization or anywhere. He remembered Mulden clearly from their school days together. Mulden was a character, a real character. Physically, he was barely acceptable: more than eighty percent of the men and some sixty-five percent of the women were able to knock Mulden down in the High Falls gymnasium classes. But mentally Mulden was a misfit. His I. Q. was in the neighborhood of a hundred and fifty. His gangling, ineffectual physique wasn't too far below the mode, but mentally he soared intolerably above it.

Now Mulden told Dorcas Sinclair, "Don't worry