eliminate offensive flash.

"All the color has gone out of life on Earth, George. Women held out
longer than men did, but now no man or woman would be caught wearing a
bright-colored suit. You don't see any reds or yellows or blues or
greens or oranges--only grays and browns and black.

"It's not for me, George. I'd much rather live in fear of the few fools
who might pull a stupid trick that would kill me than live in the
constant fear of everyone around me, who all want to destroy me
deliberately."

"I know what you mean," said Alhamid, "but I think you've put the wrong
label on what you're calling 'fear'; there's a difference between fear
and having a healthy respect for something that is dangerous but not
malignant. That vacuum out there isn't out to 'get' anybody. The only
people it kills are the fools who have no respect for it and the
neurotics who think that it wants to murder them. You're neither, and I
know it."

The governor laughed. "That's the advantage we have over Earthmen,
George. We went through the same school of hard knocks together--all of
us. And we know how we stack up against each other."

"True," Alhamid said darkly, "but how long will that hold if Tarnhorst
closes the school down?"

"That's what you've got to prevent," said the governor flatly. "If you
need help, yell."

"I will," Alhamid said. "Very loudly." He hung up, wishing he knew what
Tarnhorst--and Danley--had in mind.

* * * * *

"The trouble with these people, Danley," said Edway Tarnhorst, "is that
they have no respect whatever for human dignity. They have a tendency to
overlook the basic rights of the individual."

"They're certainly--different," Peter Danley said.

Tarnhorst juggled himself up and down on the easy-chair in which he was
seated, as though he could hardly believe that he had weight again. He
hated low gee. It made him feel awkward and undignified. The only thing
that reminded him that this was not "real" gravity was the faint, but
all-pervasive hum of the huge engines that drove the big centrifuge. The
rooms had cost more, but they were well worth it, as far as Tarnhorst
was concerned.

"How do you mean, 'different'?" he asked almost absently, settling
himself comfortably into the cushions.

"I don't know exactly. There's a hardness, a toughness--I can't quite
put my finger on it, but it's in the way they act, the way they talk."

"Surely you'd noticed that before?" Tarn