I suppose I was to blame anyway. If I hadn't been alive, if I hadn't been there to get beaten up, it wouldn't have happened. I could see the point in making me suffer for it. There was a lot to be said for looking at it like that. But there was nothing to be said for telling Brother Partridge about the accident, or murder, or whatever had happened that day. * * * * * Searching myself after I left Brother Partridge, I finally found a strip of gray adhesive tape on my side, out of the fuzzy area. Making the twenty the size of a thick postage stamp, I peeled back the tape and put the folded bill on the white skin and smoothed the tape back. There was only one place for me to go now. I headed for the public library. It was only about twenty blocks, but not having had anything to eat since the day before, it enervated me. The downstairs washroom was where I went first. There was nobody there but an old guy talking urgently to a kid with thick glasses, and somebody building a fix in one of the booths. I could see charred matches dropping down on the floor next to his tennis shoes, and even a few grains of white stuff. But he managed to hold still enough to keep from spilling more from the spoon. I washed my hands and face, smoothed my hair down, combing it with my fingers. Going over my suit with damp toweling got off a lot of the dirt. I put my collar on the outside of my jacket and creased the wings with my thumbnail so it would look more like a sports shirt. It didn't really. I still looked like a bum, but sort of a neat, non-objectionable bum. The librarian at the main desk looked sympathetically hostile, or hostilely sympathetic. "I'd like to get into the stacks, miss," I said, "and see some of the old newspapers." "Which newspapers?" the old girl asked stiffly. I thought back. I couldn't remember the exact date. "Ones for the first week in November last year." "We have the _Times_ microfilmed. I would have to project them for you." "I didn't want to see the _Times_," I said, fast. "Don't you have any newspapers on paper?" I didn't want her to see what I wanted to read up on. "We have the _News_, bound, for last year." I nodded. "That's the one I wanted to see." She sniffed and told me to follow her. I didn't rate a cart to my table, I guess, or else the bound papers weren't supposed to come out of the stacks. The cases of books, row after row, smelled good. Like old leather and good pipe tobacco. I had been here before. In this world, it's the man with education who makes the money. I had been reading the Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia. So far I knew a lot about Mark Antony, Atomic Energy, Boron, Brussels, Catapults, Demons, and Divans. I guess I had stopped to look around at some of the titles, because the busy librarian said sharply, "Follow me." I heard my voice say, "A pleasure. What about after work?"