"For a time we were worried about you. Thought maybe you was a quisling. Now I had to take the chance. I just had to tell you. Listen, here's the thing. Here's what we'll do. We'll let the announcement stick in the paper. Got to make them think we believe. Then we'll have ourselves a real solemn funeral out to the graveyard near 92nd Street. Know a preacher who'll wring every last tear out of all of us. I mean all. We'll all go. The Kopaks, the Schwartz's, the Peters, everyone who heard in on the short-wave about Freddie and how he's alive and everything. The sadder we look, the happier we'll feel later on. Then we'll have ourselves a real old fashioned celebration, like before the Karadi came. Mr. McDonald says he has a bottle of real champagne he was saving for when his girl Betty got married, but I talked him into letting us use it. Son, we'll pull out all the stops. Of course, you can't really get looped on an ounce or so of champagne, but we sure can try! Well, see you at the funeral." And Mr. Davidson went downstairs, cackling and whistling the dirge from Beethoven's Eroica. * * * * * "Well," said Mr. Friedlander to his wife, "what do you think?" "I think it's wonderful. That nice man, going to all that trouble." "I'm not so sure. What do we know about Mr. Davidson? Maybe he's lying. Maybe he's--" "He wouldn't lie, not about a thing like that." "I know how you feel. I felt that way at first, too. Free and--well, relaxed for the first time in so long I can't remember. But then I got to thinking. What if he's senile? What if he imagined the whole thing? It would be a sin to celebrate, with Freddie dead." "We could ask Mr. Peters, or the others. And Freddie's not dead!" "That's what you want to believe. It's what I want to believe, too." Mr. Friedlander walked to the window again, where the pane was frosting over once more, giving a ghostlike quality to the street, the lamps, the facades of the other tenements, the snow-laden trees outside. He wanted to believe. But he had wanted to believe, in his youth, that the killing war would one day end. When it did, the Karadi had come, with talk of peace--although with their invincible weapons they had disarmed all the world's armies and, instead of rebuilding, had made a shambles of our civilization. Every day the Karadi told lies and told you to believe. And planted spies to see that you did. And visited you at unexpected moments to see that you conformed. And trained your children to fight against free people, free people who they said were your enemies. And gave extra clothing rations to a spy, to a believer, to a man in the Karadi image. "We can't ask the others," Mr. Friedlander said. "What if Mr. Davidson was lying, or making it all up? You can't go around talking about short-waves and things. It isn't safe." "We have to know!"