-class neighborhood. Around him were the stark, plain
housing groups of Class Six families. The streets were more dimly lit,
and there was almost no one on the street, since it was after curfew
time for Sixes. The nearest pedestrian was a block off and moving away.

All that took him but a fraction of a second to notice, and he knew that
it was not his surroundings which had sparked the warning in his mind.
There was something behind him--moving.

What had told him? Almost nothing. The merest touch of a foot on the
soft pavement--the faintest rustle of clothing--the whisper of something
moving through the air.

Almost nothing--but enough. To a man who had played blindfold baseball,
it was plenty. He knew that someone not ten paces behind him had thrown
something heavy, and he knew its exact trajectory to within a thousandth
of a millimeter, and he knew exactly how to move his head to avoid the
missile.

He moved it, at the same time jerking his body to one side. It had only
been a guess--but what more did a Guesser need?

From the first hint of warning to the beginning of the dodging motion,
less than half a second had passed.

He started to spin around as the heavy object went by him, but another
warning yelped in his mind. He twisted a little, but it was too late.

Something burned horribly through his body, like a thousand million
acid-tipped, white-hot needles jabbing through skin and flesh and
sinking into the bone. He couldn't even scream.

He blacked out as if he'd been a computer suddenly deprived of power.

II

_Of course_, came the thought, _a very good way to put out a fire is to
pour cold water on it. That's a very good idea._

At least, it had put out the fire.

_Fire?_ What fire? The fire in his body, the scalding heat that had been
quenched by the cold water.

Slowly, as though it were being turned on through a sluggishly turning
rheostat, consciousness came back to The Guesser.

He began to recognize the sensations in his body. There was a general,
all-over dull ache, punctuated here and there by sharper aches. There
was the dampness and the chill. And there was the queer, gnawing feeling
in the pit of his stomach.

At first, he did not think of how he had gotten where he was, nor did he
even wonder about his surroundings. There seemed merely to be an
absolute urgency to get out of wherever he was and, at the same time, an
utter inability to do so. He tried to move, to shift pos