ago--either he was lost in a crowd
or he was alone, at home. Firm friendships were rare, and family units
survived on the flimsiest of foundations. It took too much time and
effort just to follow the rules, follow the traffic, follow the
incessant routines governing even the simplest life-pattern in the
teeming cities. For leisure there was the telescreen and the
yellowjackets, and serious problems could be referred to the psych in
routine check-ups. Everybody seemed lost in the crowd these days.

Harry discovered that Dr. Manschoff had indeed lied to him; mental
disorders were on the increase. He remembered an old, old book--one of
the very first treatises on sociological psychology. _The Lonely
Crowd_, wasn't it? Full of mumbo-jumbo about "inner-directed" and
"outer-directed" personalities. Well, there was a grain of truth in it
all. The crowd, and its individual members, lived in loneliness. And
since you didn't know very many people well enough to talk to,
intimately, you talked to yourself. Since you couldn't get away from
physical contact with others whenever you ventured abroad, you stayed
inside--except when you had to go to work, had to line up for
food-rations or supplies, had to wait for hours for your check-ups on
off-days. And staying inside meant being confined to the equivalent of
an old-fashioned prison cell. If you weren't married, you lived in
"solitary"; if you were married, you suffered the presence of
fellow-inmates whose habits became intolerable, in time. So you
watched the screen more and more, or you increased your quota of
sedation, and when that didn't help you looked for a real escape. It
was always available to you if you searched long enough; waiting at
the tip of a knife, in the coil of a rope, the muzzle of a gun. You
could find it at the very bottom of a bottle of pills or at the very
bottom of the courtyard outside your window. Harry recalled looking
for it there himself, so many years ago.

But now he was looking for something else. He was looking for others
who shared not only his viewpoint but his purposefulness.

Where were the Naturalists?

Harry searched for several years.

_The press?_

But there were no Naturalists visible on the telescreens. The news and
the newsmakers reflected a national philosophy adopted many
generations ago by the Founding Fathers of mass-communication in their
infinite wisdom--"_What's good for General Motors is good for the
country._" And accordi