For years, he had kept peace by yielding to their demands. He suffered their company, succumbed to their activities. But every so often, when he felt especially disgusted, he retreated to his private sanctum under the deck. This was such a time now, he felt, as Eve and Mary giggled over to him. They were not nude as had been the custom aboard the ship ever since he turned off the mecs. They had clothes draped over parts of them that seemed somehow to make them more than nude. But they wore red coloring on their lips that he thought was repulsive. He ducked behind the couch, clicked open the familiar combination and descended into the only peace he ever knew. He sat at a chair-table he had lowered into the compartment long ago, and peered pensively at the drawings before him. If Mecteacher were here, he thought, the orbit wouldn't be so difficult to calculate. He'd explain how to do it. And then, he wondered, would Mecteacher have taught the others how to be deep? Or was depth something inside, something that could not be altered by education? If this were a world with other people, he thought, would my cousins be considered abnormals--or would I? * * * * * He pondered the question for a moment, then decided, as he had so often in the past, that it was truly the cousins who were the flat ones. They were deviants from an average that couldn't exist on the _Destiny_, but which must have once existed elsewhere. They had been flat at seven--perhaps when children are supposed to be flat, as Mecmother had suggested--but they stayed that way. At eighteen, as at seven, they still played the same games with scarcely any variation. He heard them rummaging above, attempting again and again to pull open the hatch. It had happened this way for years: They'd try to open the trapdoor for an hour or two, then give it up and turn their attention to something else. They never thought to turn the handle. Maybe an undeep person wouldn't be able to reason the combination clicks, but only a completely flat one would persist in pulling when it always ended in failure. Possibly, he thought, the cosmic rays had been more destructive to their egg cells. Or maybe the alien radiations subtracted something from the other cells to add to his. If this were true, he was partly a product of the others and owed his depth to them. Adam felt sorry for his cousins then and wished he hadn't hurt them by avoiding their presence. Despite their undepth, they must have feelings. The mecs probably wouldn't have been able to give them depth but, he remembered, the other role of the mecs was to prevent each one of them from harming the others. In their role as arbitrator, Adam realized, they might have stopped him from hurting them so.