Miss Hippiness sighed and went back to sit on her straight chair. It wasn't comfortable and it wasn't pretty. But it somehow fit whatever had been happening inside her the last year or two. She glanced at the faint shimmer inside the transmitter where Charley had been swupped. He was such a darling. Quiet, shy, adorable. If they had allowed her to have a son, instead of decreeing that she be a childless teacher, she said. But she couldn't finish the thought. * * * * * It was when the children went that she felt the growing anger and unrest and sickness inside her. It was terrible when the children left. She wondered how long it had been now since she had seen the real surface of the earth. She swupped back and forth, morning and night, from her sleeping room to her classroom. They were a thousand miles apart, actually, but an instant apart through the transmitter. And she had been swupping to that old library in the south of what had been France to browse in the forgotten ancient books there. But she never went outdoors. She never saw the sky anymore. "Why, it must be spring," she said aloud, "and I've not seen a creek or a river in--how long?" If she had been allowed to have a son, and that son had been Charley Tencharles, what fun it would have been to leave school every afternoon and be swupped to seashores, to brooks, to mountain peaks, to the moon, to the tiny parks that still remained occasionally in cities. She sat on her hard straight chair, uncomfortable but unmoving, for a half hour, deep in the reveries that so often beset her now. And then the beeper on the matter transmitter sounded. With a puzzled frown she got up to press the admittance button. Little Charley materialized and came out of the wire cage. "Charley," she cried. "Does your mama know you've come back?" He didn't answer. He went to stand in front of the straight chair and she followed him, sitting down and putting her hands on his shoulders. "Charley," she said in her fake stern voice, "you should always ask your mama before you--" Charley's lips came open but it wasn't Charley's little voice which came out. "Susan Fiftysusan," said a deep grownup voice, "this is Holmes Oneholmes. Remember? I was one of your pupils forty years or more ago." Miss Hippiness remembered instantly. She remembered Holmes as a child, but she knew what he was now. He headed the bureau known only by an electronic symbol. Too secret to name, it was said in high circles. * * * * * Miss Hippiness dropped her hands from little Charley's shoulders and covered her face. Things twitched and twirked like little knives somewhere deep inside her. Fear? Horror? "You were my greatest, my very best teacher," said Holmes Oneholmes on the recording coming through little Charley's open lips. "And I have treasured your memory. So you know how hateful is my task this afternoon."