At that instant a huge, heavy hand fell on the fat boy's shoulder. The two boys by the wall had been so intently absorbed that they had failed to see or hear anyone approaching. Hendley stared up in fright at a broad, towering figure in a beige uniform with a small emblem on one shoulder. A big hand seized him by the arm and effortlessly pulled him free of the bars.... * * * * * They were taken to a white building, where they were separately questioned. Hendley had vowed to himself that he would say nothing about the day's events, but he found himself at first frightened and then awed by the huge, gray-haired man who talked to him. The man spoke gently, reassuringly, and after a while Hendley was blurting out the whole story, trembling and stammering, moved at last to tears by the mystery of his small friend's fate. The following day he and the fat, blond boy were taken back to their school. Oddly enough, Hendley could not now remember what their punishment had been. A week deprived of recreation hours, he supposed. It couldn't have been very bad or he would remember. Stranger still, the black-haired boy who had vanished behind the wall did not return to school. Hendley never saw or heard of him again. * * * * * A door opened into the white room where Hendley sat on the cold bench. A nurse entered. She glanced at him with clinical objectivity. In one hand she carried a small vial and a hypodermic needle. "What's that?" Hendley asked sharply. "Protective inoculation," the woman said with brisk indifference. "Hold out your arm." Conditioned from childhood to frequent inoculations, Hendley raised his arm. The nurse was as efficient as her manner. He hardly felt the prick of the needle. "Now you will follow me," she said, after deftly removing and discarding the detachable needle. The room to which she led him turned out to be a large office, facing the typical open courtyard around which all of the central building towers were constructed. Drapes were drawn back over a broad window. Pale moonlight filtered through the courtyard from the invisible sky above. A large white desk dominated the room. Behind it sat the Morale Investigator who had come to Hendley's room. The door closed and Hendley was alone with the Investigator, who gestured toward a comfortably upholstered, backless couch to the left of the desk. "Sit down," the big man said. And then, solicitously, "Are you cold? I can raise the heat level." "No," Hendley said stiffly. "I'm not cold."