If it were not for Ferguson himself, Cudyk thought, I believe I might do it. But Ferguson, inside a year, is going to be a pitiable and terrible object. This is his own punishment, his lesser evil--he chooses it himself. But he is not going to like it. "I think I understand," he said. "Believe me, Mr. Ferguson, I'm deeply grateful for this offer, and I am tempted to accept. But--I think I will stay and take my chances with the Quarter." Ferguson stared at him, then shrugged. "Don't make up your mind in too much of a hurry," he said. "Think it over--I'm not leaving for a couple of weeks. And listen, Cudyk, do me a favor. Don't spread this around." "Very well," said Cudyk. Ferguson did not get up to see him to the door. * * * * * There was a curious feeling of suspension in the Quarter. Trade was slow; only a few Niori and still fewer members of other Galactic races strolled down the narrow streets, and for more than a week Cudyk sold nothing. Human faces were missing, too. Almost two hundred of the ghetto's inhabitants had left quietly, during the night, when word had gone around that the "New Earth" transport was waiting. Villaneuva had gone, with his family; so had Martin Paz; and Ferguson had gone earlier with all his crew. Today, two weeks later, Cudyk had spent the morning wandering the City. It was a thing he had done often in his first years on the planet, before the restless drive of his youth had seeped away, leaving nothing but momentum, and memory, and a few vestiges that reminded him of the man he had been. He had spent whole days in the City, then, looking into this building and that, talking to the natives, asking questions, observing. He had seen the City as part of a colossal jigsaw puzzle from which, if you were patient and perceptive, you might extract the nexus, the inner pattern that made the essential difference between Niori and men. For the Niori, like nearly all the intelligent races of the galaxy, had one survival factor that men had always lacked. There was no word for it in any human language; you could only talk around it in negatives. The Niori did not kill; they did not lie; they did not steal, intrigue, exploit each other, hate, make war. For men, "the fittest" had always been the man, or nation, or race, that survived by exterminating its rivals. Somehow, the Niori had found another way. There was no word for it. But perhaps you could find it, if you looked long enough. He had studied their architecture, and pondered long on the arrangement of the City's great hive-buildings: a peculiar, staggered arrangement which was neither concentric nor radial; which created no endless vistas, only islands of buildings or lakes of parkland. He had tried to see into that arrangement and through it to the soul of the race, as other scholars had peered into the city-plans of Athens and New York, reading inwardness into one and outwardness into the other.