"Oh, dreeze. You're too impatient. You never give anything time to work." He got up and walked off. For the next few days, everybody in the village avoided Neeshan. They all felt sorry for Rhn, who'd worked so hard, done everything he was told to, and been cheated out of his tooter by Neeshan. In the end the magician, cursing his own weakness, surrendered the tooter to Rhn. The accusatory atmosphere in the normally indifferent Free'l was intolerable. But now what was he to do? He'd given up his tooter--he had to ask Rhn to lend it to him when he wanted to contact headquarters--and the senior rating was no nearer than before. His head ached constantly, and all the spells he performed to cure the pain left him feeling wretchedly tired out. Magic, however, is an art of many resources, not all of them savory. Neeshan, in his desperation, began to invoke demons more disreputable than those he would ordinarily have consulted. In effect, he turned for help to the magical underworld. His thuggish informants were none too consistent. One demon told him one thing, another something else. The consensus, though, was that while there was nothing the Free'l actually wanted enough to go to any trouble for it (they didn't even want to get rid of their nasal drip, for example--in a perverse way they were proud of it), there _was_ one thing they disliked intensely--Neeshan himself. The Free'l thought, the demons reported, that he was inconsiderate, tactless, officious, and a crashing bore. They regarded him as the psychological equivalent of the worst case of dreeze ever known, carried to the nth power. They wished he'd drop dead or hang himself. Neeshan dismissed the last of the demons. His eyes had begun to shine. The Free'l thought he was a nuisance, did they? They thought he was the most annoying thing they'd encountered in the course of their racial history? Good. Fine. Splendid. Then he'd _really_ annoy them. He'd have to watch out for poison, of course. But in the end, they'd turn to magic to get rid of him. They'd have to. And then he'd have them. They'd be caught. One act of communal magic that really worked and they'd be sold on magic. He'd be sure of his senior rating. * * * * * Neeshan began his campaign immediately. Where the Free'l were, there was he. He was always on hand with unwanted explanations, hypercritical objections, and maddening "wouldn't-it-be-betters." Whereas earlier in his evangelical mission he had confined himself to pointing out how much easier magic would make life for the Free'l, he now counciled and advised them on every phase of their daily routine, from mud-smearing to rain-sitting, and from the time they got up until they went to bed. He even pursued them with advice _after_ they got into bed, and told them how to run their sex lives--advice which the Free'l, who set quite as much store by their sex lives as anybody does, resented passionately.