ose-colored spectacles would swing gates that should never be
fully open. And he should have guessed _what_ and _who_ Mr. Eumenes was
when that encyclopedic fellow in the truck had singsonged those names.

How could he have been so stupid? Stupid? It was easy! He had _wanted_
to be stupid! And how could the Mr. Eumenes-or-otherwise have used such
obvious giveaway names? It was a measure of their contempt for the
humans around them and of their own grim wit. Look at all the double
entendres the salesman had given his father, and his father had never
suspected. Even the head of the Bureau of Health and Sanity had been
terrifyingly blase about it.

Dr. Vespa. He had thrown his name like a gauntlet to humanity, and
humanity had stared idiotically at it and never guessed its meaning.
Vespa was a good Italian name. Jack didn't know what it meant, but he
supposed that it had the same meaning as the Latin. He remembered it
from his high school class.

As for his not encountering the salesman until now, he had been lucky.
If he had run across him during his search, he would have been denied
the glasses, as now. And the shock would have made him unable to cry out
and betray the man. He would have done what he was so helplessly doing
at this moment, and he would have been carted off to an institution.

How many other transies had seen that unforgettable face on the streets,
the end of their search, and gone at once into that state that made them
legal prey of the Bohas?

That was almost his last rational thought. He could no longer feel his
flesh. A thin red curtain was falling between him and his senses.
Everywhere it billowed out beneath him and eased his fall. Everywhere it
swirled and softened the outlines of things that were streaking by--a
large tree that he remembered seeing in his living room, a naked giant,
his father, leaning against it and eating an apple, and a delicate
little white creature cropping flowers.

Yet all this while he lived in two worlds. One was the passage downwards
towards the Garden of Eden. The other was that hemisphere in which he
had dwelt so reluctantly, the one he now perceived through the
thickening red veil of his sight and other senses.

They were not yet gone. He could feel the hands of the black-clad
officers lifting him up and laying him upon some hard substance that
rocked and dumped. Every lurch and thud was only dimly felt. Then he was
placed upon something softer and carried into