this unpopularity yours?" he asked. "Or do I have a share in it?
Am I unwelcome to some parts of the population?"

"You're unwelcome to paras," said the police head coldly. "Paras don't
want you here. Whatever drives them is afraid the Med Service might
make them no longer paras. And they want to stay the way they are."
His lips twisted. "They aren't making this uproar, though. We gathered
everybody we were sure wasn't ... infected into Government Center.
These people were left out. We weren't sure about them. So they
consider we've left them to become paras and they don't like it!"

Calhoun frowned again. This confused everything. There was talk of
infection, and talk of unseen creatures come out of the jungle, making
men paras and then controlling them as if by demoniac possession.
There were few human vagaries, though, that were not recorded in the
Med Service files. Calhoun remembered something, and wanted to be
sick. It was like an infection, and like possession by devils, too.
There would be creatures not much removed from fields involved,
anyhow.

"I think," he said, "that I need to talk to your counter-para
researchers. You have men working on the problem?"

"We did," said the police head, grimly. "But most of them turned para.
We thought they'd be more dangerous than other paras, so we shot them.
But it did no good. Paras still turn up, in Government Center, too!
Now we only send paras out the south gate. They doubtless make out--as
paras."

* * * * *

For a time there was silence in the rushing cars, though a bedlam of
howls and curses came from aloft. Then a sudden shrieking of foreseen
triumph came from overhead. A huge piece of furniture, a couch, seemed
certain to crash into the car in which Calhoun rode. But it swerved
sharply, ran up on the sidewalk, and the couch dashed itself to
splinters where the car should have been. The car went down to the
pavement once more and rushed on.

The street ended. A high barrier of masonry rose up at a cross street.
It closed the highway and connected the walls of apartment buildings
on either hand. There was a gate in it, and the leading car drew off
to one side and the car carrying Calhoun and Murgatroyd ran through,
and there was a second barrier ahead, but this was closed. The other
cars filed in after it, Calhoun saw that windows in these apartment
buildings had been bricked up. They made a many-storied wall shutting
off all