"This heat is murder, isn't it? Especially here in these concrete canyons. Sometimes I wish I was back in Springfield. Cool, shaded streets...." "Listen to me! These people, they're conspiring against me, trying to drive me insane! Two men, a girl--" "For my money, Marilyn Monroe is _the_ doll of the world. I just don't understand these guys who say she hasn't got class. She gets class by satirizing girls without any...." He was like anybody you might talk to on the street. I knew what he would say if I cued him with "baseball" or "Russia" instead of the key words I had used. I should have known better, but I wanted to touch him in some way, make him know I was alive. I grabbed him and shook him by the shoulders, and there was a whoosh and as I might have expected he collapsed like the insubstantiality he was. There was a stick figure of a man left before me, an economical skeleton supporting the shell of a human being and two-thirds of a two-trouser suit. Hide. I went into the first shop I came to--Milady's Personals. Appropriately, it was a false front. A neutral-colored gray surface, too smooth for concrete, stretched away into some shadows. The area was littered with trash. Cartons, bottles, what looked like the skin of a dehydrated human being--obviously, on second thought, only the discarded skin of one of the things like the one I had deflated. And a moldering pile of letters and papers. Something caught my eye and I kicked through them. Yes, the letter I had written to my brother in Sioux Falls, unopened. _And which he had answered._ My work. The work I had done at the agency, important, creative work. There was my layout, the rough of the people with short, slim glasses, the parents, children, grandparents, the caption: Vodka is a Part of the American Tradition. All of it lying here to rot. Something made me look away from that terrible trash. Sergeant stood in the entrance of Milady's, something bright in his hand. Something happened. I had been wrong. The shining instrument had not been a hypodermic needle. * * * * * "You're tough," Sergeant said as I eased back into focus. "You aren't, not without help," I told him in disgust. "Spunky, aren't you? I meant mental toughness. That's the one thing we can never judge. I think you could have taken the shock right from the start. Of course, you would still have needed the conditioning to integrate properly." "Conditioning? Conditioning?" It came out of me, vortexing up, outside of my piloting. "What have you done to my mind?"