"Maybe? Just only maybe?" He shrugged a little. "I don't know. I've never been in trouble like this before. I just don't know." "What they going to do to you, you give up to them?" "I don't know that, either." Her eyes suddenly looked far off. "Me, I got an idea. Maybe get both of us some place." He looked at her quickly. "What do you mean?" Her gaze came back from the distance, and her eyes focused squarely on his. "The Misfits," she said in her flat voice. "We could go to the Misfits." III The Guesser had been fighting the Misfits for twenty years, and hating them for as long as he could remember. The idea that he could ever become one of them had simply never occurred to him. Even the idea of going to one of the Misfit Worlds was so alien that the very suggestion of it was shocking to his mind. And yet, the suggestion that the Sixer woman had made did require a little thinking over before he accepted or rejected it. The Misfits. What did he really know about them, anyway? They didn't call themselves Misfits, of course; that was a derogatory name used by the Aristarchy. But the Guesser couldn't remember off hand just what they _did_ call themselves. Their form of government was a near-anarchic form of ochlocracy, he knew--mob rule of some sort, as might be expected among such people. They were the outgrowth of an ancient policy that had been used centuries ago for populating the planets of the galaxy. There are some people who simply do not, will not, and can not fit in with any kind of social organization--except the very flimsiest, perhaps. Depending on the society in which they exist and the extent of their own antisocial activities, they have been called, over the centuries, everything from "criminals" to "pioneers." It was a matter of whether they fought the unwelcome control of the society in power or fled from it. The Guesser's knowledge of history was close to nonexistent, but he had heard that the expansion to the stars from Earth--a planet he had never been within a thousand parsecs of--had been accomplished by the expedient of combining volunteers with condemned criminals and shipping them off to newly-found Earth-type planets. After a generation had passed, others came in--the civilizing types--and settled the planets, making them part of the Aristarchy proper.