I stammered, "But--but, Rena, the statistical charts show very clearly--" "No, Tom," she said, gentle again. "The statistical charts show _less_ war, not no war. They show _less_ disease." She rubbed her eyes wearily--and even then I thought: Marianna wouldn't have dared; it would have smeared her mascara. "The trouble with you, Tom, is that you're an American. You don't know how it is in the world, only in America. You don't know what it was like after the Short War, when America won and the flying squads of Senators came over and the governments that were left agreed to defederate. You're used to a big and united country, not little city-states. You don't have thousands of years of intrigue and tyranny and plot behind you, so you close your eyes and plunge ahead, and if the charts show things are getting a _little_ better, you think they are perfect." She shook her head. "But not us, Tom. We can't afford that. We walk with eyes that dart about, seeking danger. Sometimes we see ghosts, but sometimes we see real menace. You look at the charts and you see that there are fewer wars than before. We--we look at the charts and we see our fathers and brothers dead in a little war that hardly makes a ripple on the graph. You don't even see them, Tom. You don't even see the disease cases that don't get cured--because the techniques are 'still experimental,' they say. You don't--Tom! What is it?" I suppose I showed the pain of remembrance. I said with an effort, "Sorry, Rena. You made me think of something. Please go on." "That's all of it, Tom. You in America can't be blamed. The big lie--the lie so preposterous that it cannot be questioned, the thing that proves itself because it is so unbelievable that no one would say it if it weren't true--is not an American invention. It is European, Tom. You aren't inoculated against it. We are." * * * * * I took a deep breath. "What about your father, Rena? Do you really think the Company is out to get him?" She looked at me searchingly, then looked hopelessly away. "Not as you mean it, Tom," she said at last. "No, I am no paranoid. I think he is--inconvenient. I think the Company finds him less trouble in the deep-freeze than he would be walking around." "But don't you agree that he needs treatment?" "For what? For the radiation poisoning that he got from the atomic explosion he was nowhere near, Tom? Remember, he is my father! I was with him in the war--and he never stirred a kilometer from our home. You've been there, the big house where my aunt Luisa now lives. Did you see bomb craters there?"