h 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 both