This Haendl--what to make of him? He should have been disgusting, nasty, an abomination. He had no manners whatever. He didn't know, or at least didn't use, the Seventeen Conventional Gestures. He wouldn't let Tropile walk behind him and to his left, though he was easily five years Tropile's senior. When he ate, he _ate_. The Sip of Appreciation, the Pause of First Surfeit, the Thrice Proffered Share meant nothing to him. He laughed when Tropile tried to give him the Elder's Portion. Cheerfully patronizing, this man Haendl said to Tropile: "That stuffs all right when you don't have anything better to do with your time. Those poor mutts don't. They'd die of boredom without their inky-pinky cults and they don't have the resources to do anything bigger. Yes, I do know the Gestures. Seventeen delicate ways of communicating emotions too refined for words. The hell with them, Tropile. I've got words. You'll learn them, too." Tropile ate silently, trying to think. A man arrived, threw himself in a chair, glanced curiously at Tropile and said: "Haendl, the Somerville Road. The creek backed up when it froze. Flooded bad. Ruined everything." Tropile ventured: "The flood ruined the road?" "The road? No. Say, you must be the fellow Haendl went after. Tropile, that the name?" He leaned across the table, pumped Tropile's hand. "We had the road nicely blocked," he explained. "The flood washed it clean. Now we have to block it again." Haendl said: "Take the tractor if you need it." The man nodded and left. Haendl said: "Eat up. We're wasting time. About that road--we keep all entrances blocked up, see? Why let a lot of sheep in and out?" "Sheep?" "The opposite," said Haendl, "of Wolves." * * * * * Take ten billion people and say that, out of every million of them, one--just one--is different. He has a talent for survival; call him Wolf. Ten thousand of him in a world of ten billion. Squeeze them, freeze them, cut them down. Let old Rejoice in Messias loom in the terrifying sky and so abduct the Earth that the human race is decimated, fractionated, reduced to what is in comparison a bare handful of chilled, stunned survivors. There aren't ten billion people in the world any more. No, not by a factor of a thousand. Maybe there are as many as ten million, more or less, rattling around in the space their enormous Elder Generations made for them. And of these ten million, how many are Wolf? Ten thousand. "You understand, Tropile?" said Haendl. "We survive. I don't care what you call us. The sheep call us Wolves. Me, I kind of call us Supermen. We have a talent for survival." Tropile nodded, beginning to understand. "The way I survived the House of the Five Regulations." Haendl gave him a pitying look. "The way you survived thirty years of Sheephood before that. Come on."