The eyes of Johnson were strikingly like Meyverik's, dark and unsettled. Only this boy, younger, smaller than the Nordic, had an appropriate skin tone, stained by the tropical sun somewhere in his ancestral past. He dropped his gaze, expelled his breath mightily and pounded one angular knee with a half-closed fist. "I'm not complaining about conscription without representation, Doctor, but I can't make any sense out of these fool questions you keep firing at me. What in blazes are you trying to get at? What kind of reason are you after for my staying by myself? I just do it because I _like_ it that way." With a galvanic jolt, I realized he was telling the painfully simple truth. I groaned at the realization. Meyverik had convinced all of us that in our well-adjusted or at any rate well-conditioned world somebody had to have some purposeful _reason_ in loneliness, solitude, so on that one instance our thinking had already been patterned, discarding all the other evidence of generations that the lonely man was only a personality type, like Johnson. I felt I had achieved at least the quantum state of a fool. Johnson silently studied the half-cupped hands laying in his lap. "The hunting lodge in the Andes seemed as good a place as any to live after mother and father were killed. You might think it was lonesome at night in the mountains, but it isn't at all. You aren't alone when you can watch the burning worlds shadow the bow of God...." I cleared my throat. The poor kid sounded like he would begin spouting something akin to poetry next. "So I believe you," I told him. "That doesn't finish it. We have to convince _them_. I don't like this, but the simplest way would be to volunteer for their hibitor injection. I've found out Madison and his crowd don't believe men awake, only assorted dopes." Johnson deflated his area of the room with his breath intake. "Okay," he said at last. "I guess so." * * * * * When Johnson gave us what we needed to clear the problem, it didn't take me long to finish processing the rest of the handful of possible loners we had located. Unlike Johnson, all the rest had _reasons_ for their self-imposed loneliness. Unlike Meyverik none of their reasons were associated with the interstellar flight. They instead involved literary research, swindles, isolated paranoid insanity and other things in which the government had no interest. Suddenly I found my job was done and that we had located only the two of them. Madison read my final report braced on the edge of my desk, his hand comradely on my shoulder. "Good job, Doc," he vouched replacing the papers on my blotter with a final rustle. "Now I've got news for you. The government wants you to _test_ these boys for us now that you've found 'em for us." I closed my jaw. "That's completely out of line--_my_ line. I know you need a contemporary man for that job." Madison punched me on the bicep, fast enough to hurt.