* * * * * And now I had yet another grudge against this blasted spy. Which reminded me again of Linda. From the looks of things, I wasn't _ever_ going to get to her place. By now she was probably in mourning for me and might even have the Sanitation Staff searching for my remains. As I made the chico, he asked me questions. My name first, and then, "What do you do for a living?" I thought fast. "I'm an ore-sled dispatcher," I said. That was a lie, of course, but I'd heard enough about ore-sled dispatching from Linda to be able to maintain the fiction should he question me further about it. Actually, I was a gymnast instructor. The subjects I taught included wrestling, judo and karati--talents I would prefer to disclose to him in my own fashion, when the time came. He was quiet for a moment. "What about radiation level on the ore-sleds?" I had no idea what he was talking about, and admitted as much. "When they come back," he said. "How much radiation do they pick up? Don't you people ever test them?" "Of course not," I told him. I was on secure ground now, with Linda's information to guide me. "All radiation is cleared from the sleds and their cargo before they're brought into the building." "I know that," he said impatiently. "But don't you ever check them before de-radiating them?" "No. Why should we?" "To find out how far the radiation level outside has dropped." "For what? Who cares about that?" He frowned bitterly. "The same answer," he muttered, more to himself than to me. "The same answer every time. You people have crawled into your caves and you're ready to stay in them forever." I looked around at my apartment. "Rather a well-appointed cave," I told him. "But a cave nevertheless." He leaned toward me, his eyes gleaming with a fanatical flame. "Don't you ever wish to get Outside?" Incredible! I nearly poured boiling water all over myself. "Outside? Of course not!" "The same thing," he grumbled, "over and over again. Always the same stupidity. Listen, you! Do you realize how long it took man to get out of the caves? The long slow painful creep of progress, for millennia, before he ever made that first step from the cave?" "I have no idea," I told him.