Raych was listening with an agonized¹ impatience² that he was trying not to show. He was sitting in an improvised³ cell, deep in the warrens of Billibotton, having been accompanied through alleys⁴ he no longer remembered. (He, who in the old days could have threaded those same alleys unerringly and lost any pursuer.)
    The man with him, clad in the green of the Joranumite Guard, was either a missionary⁵, a brainwasher, or a kind of theologian-manque. At any rate, he had announced his name to be Sander Nee and he was delivering a long message in a thick Dahlite accent that he had clearly learned by heart.
    "If the people of Dahl want to enjoy equality, they must show themselves worthy⁶ of it. Good rule, quiet behavior, seemly pleasures are all requirements. Aggressiveness and the bearing of knives are the accusations⁷ others make against us to justify⁸ their intolerance. We must be clean in word and-"
    Raych broke in. "I agree with you, Guardsman Nee, every word. But I must see Mr. Joranum."
    Slowly the guardsman shook his head. "You can't 'less you got some appointment, some permission."
    "Look, I'm the son of an important professor at Streeling University, a mathematics professor."
    "Don't know no professor. -I thought you said you was from Dahl."
    "Of course I am. Can't you tell the way I talk?"
    "And you got an old man who's a professor at a big University? That don't sound likely."
    "Well, he's my foster father."
    The guardsman absorbed that and shook his head. "You know anyone in Dahl?"
    "There's Mother Rittah. She'll know me." (She had been very old when she had known him. She might be senile by now-or dead.)

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