"Yes, sir. Since 1955." "Your business is real estate and general insurance?" "Yes, sir." Judd spoke breathily on a while about that. Overweight, poor and changeable color, slow motions when his body's natural habit should have been a jerky aggressiveness--maybe what he feared was not only laughter. Jack, with his comprehensive doctor's glance, might have seen Nathaniel Judd as a candidate for a coronary, if the man hadn't already suffered one. Judd was telling how his only son, killed in action in Korea, had been a close friend of James Doherty's overseas. Doherty had written when the boy died, and had looked up Judd after his discharge. "Much as anyone could," said short-breathed Judd, "he's been like another son to me. Took him into the firm, 1955. Fine head for business. Good boy. Sixty-one myself, not too active nowadays." "Did you meet Mrs. Doherty also that year--1955?" "Yes, sir, soon after they settled in Shanesville, they invited my wife and me to dinner. Very nice. Met her then. Played bridge." "Did you meet the Chalmers family then too? And Miss Blake?" "That summer anyhow. Miss Blake was fifteen." For a lumpily modeled face, Judd's was expressive. When he mentioned her, the blobby features sagged. "You went to a picnic at the Chalmerses', 7th of August, this year?" "Yes. Can't add anything to what Ella Jason testified." But Hunter fussed at it a while. Mann's attention wandered. No individual like another, no one replaceable, not vague soft Judd for instance or any other. A commonplace: why go on worrying at it, insisting that no one is expendable? _Expendable_--the stink of that word lingered from a war already part forgotten, obscured by a more vast and quiet terror. Under the new terror the politics of 1959 had been squirming in a fantastic display of the passions of a disturbed ant hill. _Expendable_: well, the first to express this obscenity must have been some thick-browed operator of prehistory, who found his fellows could be manipulated by appropriate grunts and chest-thumpings into doing a concerted job of skull-busting and rape on those Bad People with a better campsite and interesting females. As the original inventor of advertising was the one (man or woman?) who first got the idea of tying a rag on the genitals. Mann remembered how in the war years most people, having gagged a bit at the gnat of that word _expendable_, had then swallowed the camel of the fact with no great strain. _How does it happen that a man who transferred to the Medics mostly out of distaste for carrying a rifle is now a judge of General Sessions, in a state that keeps the death penalty on the books?_ "Have you met Miss Blake often since she moved to Winchester?" "No, sir, hardly at all. We--hadn't much in common." "I see. No ill feeling between you, was there?"