Joe reached out and clicked on the screen. The announcer's tunic was wrinkled, his sash was awry. He looked as if he'd been up all night. "--are advised to stay within the city limi--" Joe snapped off the telaudio and glanced over at Sarah's bed. She was snoring delicately, one smooth arm pillowing her mass of blue-black hair. Better that she doesn't hear any more about that business, he decided firmly. Joe liked the simple life. No servants, no flunkies, although he could have afforded a dozen. Five sunshiny rooms on the Great Canal, with a nice view of Mars Memorial Park on the bank opposite. He robed himself against the early morning chill and headed for the kitchen. His head ached faintly and, to judge by what little he could remember of it, he'd had a dilly of a nightmare. Something about ... being chased, or something? Or smothered by a.... Even as he stopped in his tracks to try to pin it down, the memory broke, dissolved as if in flight. Frowning, he pushed through the kitchen door and crossed to the deep-freeze, slid it open and rummaged in it. The nightmare wasn't important surely, but he mulled it over with interest as he prepared breakfast, for Joe, being rather well adjusted, dreamed rarely, and then mostly about Iowa, back on Earth ... a long-ago picture of a twelve-year-old boy, his first day in college; the boy sitting under his shining Projector, surrounded by a group of thunderstruck Psychologists; the quick death of their initial skepticism, and in its place a growing wonder as it became evident that, although a History spool was whirling in the scanner and the thought-helmet functioning to perfection, the boy's mind was receiving neither spoken text nor images.... "You don't feel anything?" a Psychologist asked skeptically. Joe closed his eyes. There was a low, unmusical humming in his ears and that was all. He tried to shake his head and couldn't, so he said: "No, I don't." "When was the World Federation formed?" "I don't know." "Are you lying?" "No." One of the other Psychologists standing nearby looked up from the little box he held in his hand and said that Joe wasn't lying. The first Psychologist raised his eyebrows. "We'll try another Projector." While Technicians dismantled Joe's Projector and examined it for shorts or haywire, the Psychologists had Joe sit down under all the other Projectors in 1stY-Cubicle 149. Then they tried 148 and 150. "It's some kind of block," the first Psychologist said finally, looking profound to cover up his tizzy. "There's some kind of barrier in his mind." Joe Caradac clenched his fists. "That's not true--I want to learn!" "Then you probably will, boy--" the Psychologist sat down to fill in some forms--"but you'll have to go back three hundred years to do it. You'll have to learn from books!"