The Firebird was managing to stay quite close to me, though technically remaining on her own side of the table, eating and talking and now and then flashing me such a glance of yearning that I was pierced by the sight of her and by a remembered line of e. e. cummings's: "... your slightest look easily will unclose me though I have closed myself as fingers...." Just as suddenly, I realized that mine was a highly pathological state of mind, the rinse-phase of the brain-wash. Autism can be produced as surely by loneliness or unrequitable love as by injections of LSD-25. So I turned my attention to my environment, consciously flexing my muscles of mental health. I answered the Firebird's sallies with automatic flippancy. I ate my steak, savoring its flavor. And I looked about the dining-room, examining it as though I'd never eaten there before. The Lapins' dining-room in the Big Tank is about the size of a railroad restaurant car. (Not that I've ever been aboard a train to make the comparison. The stringencies of the sterility-suit tie such of us to the Big Tank on a short leash: the most sanitary of outside washrooms would prove a pesthole to a Lapin.) The kitchen, which was under the supervision of the Firebird, our dietitian, could have been squeezed into a telephone booth. It served chiefly as receiving-station for the autoclave and the radar-room, through which all our food came. With its ten little four-place tables, each covered with a gypsy red-checkerboard cloth, set with a green glass vase of Tank-grown daisies, our dining-room was friendly enough. The Tank-ness of it, though, was emphasized by a mural along one wall, a fantasy of stars and men and microbes that half a dozen of us had planned and painted one week. Where the mural was now had once been a picture window, overlooking a green stretch of Central campus, a source of comfort to us all. An Air Force jet, though, pulling out of a dive invisibly above us, had sonic-boomed a crack in both panes of the double glass of the window, causing a general alert as we realized that some airborne _Proteus_ or fortunate _Staphylococcus_ or lonely _Aspergillis_ might have invaded our fortress through this almost microscopic breach in our walls. Careful decontamination had saved our sterility, but now the Big Tank had no window. "I was saying...." the Firebird said, in a firm voice. "Sorry, doll. You were saying?" "That Mary deWitte isn't here. Do you suppose she's still outside? She checked out her sterility-suit about the same time you did." "That's a good nine hours ago," I said, glancing at the clock set over Saturn on our mural. "Either Mary has been on a restricted-fluids diet, or True Love has made her careless of visceral discomfort." "Don't be coarse, Johnny." "The demands of the kidney are as exigent as those of the heart, Firebird," I said. "I think I'd better call Dr. McQueen." "You'll only cause trouble for her and Lofting," Firebird said.