Once in a while I yield a little to that temptation O’Brien mentioned, but always in harmless ways, merely for amusement or out of curiosity to see just how much people _will_ swallow. Like in that fabrication of Howling Wolf, the genius of the North Woods, which I told you about in the beginning. More and more I find that they’ll believe almost anything, especially the younger generation. Older people still have a residuum of skepticism. Now it’s plain--using hindsight--that we should easily have foreseen the secondary effect. But it developed very slowly. No physiological effect, this, but a psychological one--or simply logical. Once people stop lying, they’ll also stop suspecting deceit. They’ll believe as they expect to be believed. Little by little, particularly as the young ones who don’t remember grow up, they’ll become totally--gullible, it used to be called. A while back, down South, there was an unwashed prophet who made converts right and left to а weird sect of his own devising--until somebody seduced him into heathenish ways, and he tried brushing his teeth. But incidents like that don’t really disturb me. As the example shows, they all come out in the wash. Yet there is something that bothers me. Back before Grandma’s lie soap, we used to get sporadic reports of “mysterious airships”, “Flying saucers”, or similarly named equivalents for unexplained objects in the sky. We laughed them off, mostly, because people were always starting crazy rumors.... After the great change, those reports might have been expected to stop coming. But they didn’t. And more recently there have been some queer phenomena noted by the space station and the bubbles on the Moon. So suppose we’re not alone in the Universe or even in the Solar System? And suppose that whoever is out there--circling us, observing us with immense caution for so long--are beings like _we_ used to be--fierce, wary, enormously suspicious as their behavior suggests, capable of any falsehood, any treachery? Wolves, circling the sheep.... Perhaps it’s all my imagination. I can’t be sure. There’s only one way I can be sure even of what I think myself. Pretty soon now I’ll go into the bathroom and wash my mouth with Grandma’s lie soap. Then I’ll look into the mirror and ask myself, face to face, with no possibility of deception: _Did I do right?_ What will my answer be? Transcriber’s note: This etext was produced from Fantastic Universe, February 1956 (Vol. 5, No. 1.). Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Obvious errors have been silently corrected in this version, but minor inconsistencies have been retained as printed.