But he was glowing and the fever was contagious. Tropile felt his own blood begin to pound. Haendl hadn't finished his "and then--" but he didn't have to. The "and then" was obvious: And then the world takes up again from the day the wandering planet first came into view. And then we go back to our own solar system and an end to the five-year cycle of frost and hunger. And then the Wolves can rule a world worth ruling. It was a meretricious appeal, perhaps, but it could not be refused. Tropile was lost. He said: "You can put away the gun, Haendl. You've signed me up." VII The way to Mount Everest, Tropile glumly found, lay through supervising the colony's nursery school. It wasn't what he had expected, but it had the advantages that while his charges were learning, he was learning, too. One jump ahead of the three-year-olds, he found that the "wolves," far from being predators on the "sheep," existed with them in a far more complicated ecological relationship. There were Wolves all through sheepdom; they leavened the dough of society. In barbarously simple prose, a primer said: "The Sons of the Wolf are good at numbers and money. You and your friends play money games almost as soon as you can talk, and you can think in percentages and compound interest when you want to. Most people are not able to do this." True, thought Tropile subvocally, reading aloud to the tots. That was how it had been with him. "Sheep are afraid of the Sons of the Wolf. Those of us who live among them are in constant danger of detection and death--although ordinarily a Wolf can take care of himself against any number of sheep." True, too. "It is one of the most dangerous assignments a Wolf can be given to live among the sheep. Yet it is essential. Without us, they would die--of stagnation, of rot, eventually of hunger." It didn't have to be spelled out any further. Sheep can't mend their own fences. The prose was horrifyingly bald and the children were horrifyingly--he choked on the word, but managed to form it in his mind--_competitive_. The verbal taboos lingered, he found, after he had broken through the barriers of behavior. But it was distressing, in a way. At an age when future Citizens would have been learning their Little Pitcher Ways, these children were learning to fight. The perennial argument about who would get to be Big Bill Zeckendorf when they played a strange game called "Zeckendorf and Hilton" sometimes ended in bloody noses. And nobody--nobody at all--meditated on Connectivity. Tropile was warned not to do it himself. Haendl said grimly: "We don't understand it and we don't like what we don't understand. We're suspicious animals, Tropile. As the children grow older, we give them just enough practice so they can go into one meditation and get the feel of it--or pretend to, at any rate. If they have to pass as Citizens, they'll need that much. But more than that we do not allow."