etorted. "I maintain that one of the reasons man is losing his power
and strength is that he has so long been upon a vegetable diet. He is
as cowed and submissive as the grass-eating beast of the fields."

Lusine put her face against the bars.

"That is interesting," she said. "But how did you happen to begin
eating fish? I thought we Amphibs alone did that."

What Lusine had just said angered him. He had no reply.

Rastignac knew he should not be talking to a Sea-changeling. They were
glib and seductive and always searching for ways to twist your
thoughts. But being Rastignac, he had to talk. Moreover, it was so
difficult to find anybody who would listen to his ideas that he could
not resist the temptation.

"I was given fish by the Ssassaror, Mapfarity, when I was a child. We
lived along the sea-shore. Mapfarity was a child, too, and we played
together. Don't eat fish!' my parents said. To me that meant 'Eat
it!' So, despite my distaste at the idea, and my squeamish stomach, I
did eat fish. And I liked it. And as I grew to manhood I adopted the
Philosophy of Violence and I continued to eat fish although I am not a
Changeling."

"What did your Skin do when it detected you?" Lusine asked. Her eyes
were wide and luminous with wonder and a sort of glee as if she
relished the confession of his sins. Also, he knew, she was taunting
him about the futility of his ideas of violence so long as he was a
prisoner of the Skin.

He frowned in annoyance at the reminder of the Skin. Much thought had
he given, in a weak way, to the possibility of life without the Skin.

Ashamed now of his weak resistance to the Skin, he blustered a bit in
front of the teasing Amphib girl.

"Mapfarity and I discovered something that most people don't know," he
answered boastfully. "We found that if you can stand the shocks your
Skin gives you when you do something wrong, the Skin gets tired and
quits after a while. Of course your Skin recharges itself and the next
time you eat fish it shocks you again. But after very many shocks it
becomes accustomed, forgets its conditioning, and leaves you alone."

Lusine laughed and said in a low conspirational tone, "So your
Ssassaror pal and you adopted the Philosophy of Violence because you
remained fish and meat eaters?"

"Yes, we did. When Mapfarity reached puberty he became a Giant and
went off to live in a castle in the forest. But we have remained
friends through our connection in the undergroun