"I'm sorry," he said humbly, walking to the window of the room they had given him. He looked out over the variegated city below--strange and motley compared with the neat regularity of all Empire-built cities. "I'm imposing myself, and I'm acting like a fool." He wet his lips. "I'll go whenever you want me to." "Don't misunderstand," Foursmith warned. The mutant with the extended vertebrae was the current head of the mutie enclave. "We're not throwing you out. We think you should leave, that's all. For your good and ours." "Agreed," Kesley said. In the street below, a two-headed woman was making slow progress pushing a perambulator in which squirmed a many-armed monster-baby. He shuddered. He still was not used to such sights. This was the world's genetic refuse heap, the city where the alien race in mankind's midst could live in peace and security. Gradually, Mutie City was enfolding in itself the mutants of the Ducal cities; here, the grim souvenirs of the time-shadowed great war could walk unmolested. He could see the logic behind the agreement of the Dukes granting Mutie City total independence. The mutants came here and, gradually, the contamination of their genes would be localized, the cancer of mutation penned into one tiny area. Kesley wondered whether, on the day when the last mutant had left the Twelve Empires and entered Mutie City, the Dukes would bomb the city to shreds and thus restore mankind's genetic homogeneity. It was a terrible thought. He turned. There they were, Spahl and Foursmith and Ricketts and Huygens and Devree, each one looking as if he had come down from a different world. They ruled the city. "Why did you take me in?" he asked. "There were reasons," Huygens, the double-header, said resonantly. _Always reasons_, Kesley thought. _And everyone knows them but me._ "This Daveen--he's not a mutant, is he?" Kesley asked. "No," Foursmith said. "I saw him once, in the court of Duke Winslow. He is very tall, without hair, and blind. He's not one of us." "And you don't know where I could find him?" "You might try the Colony," Foursmith suggested. "He might be in hiding there, among the other artists. At any event, the Colony is safe from Winslow, too. Perhaps you could stay there for a while." "Good enough," Kesley said. * * * * * The Colony sprang from the blue-green grass of Kentucky like a sprawling, segmented worm. Its architecture bore no resemblance to that of any city Kesley had ever seen; broad, rambling, almost ramshackle, it presented an even more disorderly appearance than had Mutie City. He wheeled the exhausted, six-legged horse the mutants had given him up the final stretches of the roadway, looking around cautiously as he rode. It had been a tense but, happily, uneventful journey down from Illinois.