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. You might think it was lonesome at
night in the mountains, but it isn't at all. You aren't alone when you
can watch the burning worlds shadow the bow of God...."

I cleared my throat. The poor kid sounded like he would begin spouting
something akin to poetry next.

"So I believe you," I told him. "That doesn't finish it. We have to
convince _them_. I don't like this, but the simplest way would be to
volunteer for their hibitor injection. I've found out Madison and his
crowd don't believe men awake, only assorted dopes."

Johnson deflated his area of the room with his breath intake.

"Okay," he said at last. "I guess so."

* * * * *

When Johnson gave us what we