A girl yelled, “Good for you, Junior!” and jumped like a wildcat onto a slim, gray-haired lady, clawing, and slapping. The throng dissolved immediately into a wild melee. Ross, busily fighting off the fortyish fellow and a couple of his stocky buddies, noted only that the scrap was youth against age, whatever it meant. “How _dare_ you?” a voice thundered, and the rioters froze. A decrepit wreck was standing in the doorway, surrounded by three or four gerontological textbook cases only a little less spavined than he. “Glory,” a girl muttered despairingly. “It would be the minister.” “What is the meaning of this brawl?” rolled from the wreck’s shriveled lips in a rich basso—no; rolled, Ross noted, from a flat perforated plate on his chest. There was a small, flesh-colored mike slung before his lips. “Who is responsible here?” asked the golden basso. Ross’s fortyish assailant said humbly: “I am, sir. This new fellow here——” “Manners! Speak when you’re spoken to.” Abjectly: “Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir.” “Silly fools!” the senile wreck hectored them. “I’m going to take no official notice of this since I’m merely passing through. Luckily for you this is no formal inspection. But you’ve lost your lunch hour with your asinine pranks. Now get back to your work and never let me hear of a disgraceful incident like this again from Junior Unit Twenty-Three.” He swept out with his retinue. Ross noted that some of the younger girls were crying and that the older men and women were glaring at him murderously. “We’ll teach you manners, you pup,” the foreman-type said. “You go on the dye vats this afternoon. Any more trouble and you’ll miss a few meals.” Ross told him: “Just keep your hands off me, mister.” The foreman-type expanded into a beam of pleasure. “I thought you’d be sensible,” he said. “Everybody to the plant, now!” He collared a pretty girl of about Ross’s age. “Helena here is working out a bit of insolence on the dye vats herself. She’ll show you.” The girl stood with downcast eyes. Ross liked her face and wondered about her figure. Whatever it was like, it was covered from neck to knee by a loose shirt. But the older women wore fitted clothes. The foreman-type led a grand procession through the door. Helena told Ross: “I guess you’d better get in front of me in line. I go here——” She slipped in deftly, and Ross understood a little more of what went on here. The procession was in order of age. He had determined to drift for a day or two—not that he seemed to have much choice. The Franklin Foundation, supposedly having endured a good many years, would last another week while he explored the baffling mores of this place and found out how to circumvent them and find his way to the keepers of F-T-L on this world. Nobody would go anywhere with his own ship—not without first running up a setting for the Wesley Drive!