"Polypenthium." Madison's face was as blank as Johnson's--only his body seemed at once tired and taut.

"What's it for?" I rasped.

"You're the psychologist," he said sharply.

I met his eyes and held on but it was impossible to stare him down.

"I don't know about physical methods, I told you. I've been dealing with people in books, films, tapes all my life, not living men up till now, can't you absorb that?"

"Apparently I've had more experience with these things than you then, Doctor. Shall I proceed?"

"You shall not," I cried omnisciently. "I know enough to understand we can't get the results the government wants by drugs. You going to put that away?"

Madison nodded once.

"All right," he said.

I unshackled my fingers and he put the shiny needle away in its case, in his suitcoat pocket.

"You understand, Thorn," he said, "that the general won't like this."

I turned around and looked at him.

"Did he order you to drug Johnson?"

The government agent shook his head.

"I didn't think so." I was beginning to understand government operations. "He only wanted it done. Get out."

Madison and his assistants marched out in orthodox Euclidian triangle formation.

The doors hissed shut.

"You know what?" The words jerked out from Johnson. "I think the bunch of you are crazy. _Crazy._"

I decided to treat him like a client. Maybe that was the way contemporary psychologists handled their men.

* * * * *

I sat on the edge of the desk jauntily, confidently, and tried to let the domino mask up a father image.

"You may as well get it straight, Stan. The government needs you and it's pointless for you to say that need is unconstitutional or anything. Bring it up and it won't be long. When survival is outside the rules, the rules change."

The eyes of Johnson were strikingly like Meyverik's, dark and unsettled. Only this boy, younger, smaller than the Nordic, had an appropriate skin tone, stained by the tropical sun somewhere in his ancestral past. He dropped his gaze, expelled his breath mightily and pounded one angular knee with a half-closed fist.

"I'm not complaining about conscription without representation, Doctor, but I can't make any sense out of these fool questions you keep firing at me. What in blazes are you trying to get at? What kind of reason are you after for my staying by myself? I just do it because I _like_ it that way."

With a galvanic jolt, I realized he was telling the painfully simple truth. I groaned at the realization.

Meyverik had convinced all of us that in our well-adjusted or at any rate well-conditioned world somebody had to have some purposeful _reason_ in loneliness, solitude, so on that one instance our thinking had already been patterned, discarding all the other evidence of generations that the lonely man was only a personality type, like Johnson.

I felt I had achieved at least the quantum state of a fool.

Johnson silently studied the half-cupped hands laying in his lap.

"The hunting lodge in the Andes seemed as good a place as any to live after mother and father were killed.