Mudgett chewed on a pencil while he read the summary; a blocky, bulky man, as short as Carson and with hair as grey and close-cropped. A year ago, Carson would have told him that nobody in Re-Ed could afford to put stray objects in his mouth even once, let alone as a habit; now Carson just waited. There wasn't a man--or a woman or a child--of America's surviving thirty-five million "sane" people who didn't have some such tic. Not now, not after twenty-five years of underground life. "He knows it's impossible, doesn't he?" Mudgett demanded abruptly. "Of course he doesn't," Carson said impatiently. "He doesn't know any more about the real nature of the project than the people do. He thinks the 'educating' we do is in some sort of survival technique--That's what the papers think, too, as you can plainly see by the way they loaded that editorial." "Um. If we'd taken direct control of the papers in the first place--" Carson said nothing. Military control of every facet of civilian life was a fact, and Mudgett knew it. He also knew that an appearance of freedom to think is a necessity for the human mind--and that the appearance could not be maintained without a few shreds of the actuality. "Suppose we do this," Mudgett said at last. "Hamelin's position in the State Department makes it impossible for us to muzzle him. But it ought to be possible to explain to him that no unprotected human being can live on the surface, no matter how many Merit Badges he has for woodcraft and first aid. Maybe we could even take him on a little trip topside; I'll wager he's never seen it." "And what if he dies up there?" Carson said stonily. "We lose three-fifths of every topside party as it is--and Hamelin's an inexperienced--" "Might be the best thing, mightn't it?" "_No_," Carson said. "It would look like we'd planned it that way. The papers would have the populace boiling by the next morning." Mudgett groaned and nibbled another double row of indentations around the barrel of the pencil. "There must be something," he said. "There is." "Well?" "Bring the man here and show him just what we _are_ doing. Re-educate _him_, if necessary. Once we told the newspapers that he'd taken the course ... well, who knows, they just might resent it. Abusing his clearance privileges and so on." "We'd be violating our basic policy," Mudgett said slowly. "'Give the Earth back to the men who fight for it.' Still, the idea has some merits...." "Hamelin is out in the antechamber right now," Carson said. "Shall I bring him in?" * * * * *