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health, security and well-being. We have abolished hunger, though the backwoods orphan would still rather receive a package of food concentrates from a human being who cares for him than to obtain a warm meal from an automat unit in the middle of the jungle.
    “Physical welfare is now every man’s right, in excess. The reaction to this has occurred in the area of mental health. Thanks to technology, the reasons for many of the old social problems have passed, and along with them went many of the reasons for psychic distress. But between the black of yesterday and the white of tomorrow is the great gray of today, filled with nostalgia and fear of the future, which cannot be expressed on a purely material plane, is now being represented by a willful seeking after historical anxiety-modes…”
    The phone-box buzzed briefly. Render did not hear it over the Eighth.
    “We are afraid of what we do not know,” he continued, “and tomorrow is a very great unknown. My own specialized area of psychiatry did not even exist thirty years ago. Science is capable of advancing itself so rapidly now that there is a genuine public uneasiness—I might even say ‘distress’—as to the logical outcome: the total mechanization of everything in the world…”
    He passed near the desk as the phone buzzed again. He switched off his microphone and softened the Eighth.
    “Hello?”
    “Saint Moritz,” she said.
    “Davos,” he replied firmly.
    “Charlie, you are most exasperating!”
    “Jill, dear—so are you.”
    “Shall we discuss it tonight?”
    “There is nothing to discuss!”
    “You’ll pick me up at five, though?”
    He hesitated, then;
    “Yes, at five. How come the screen is blank?”
    “I’ve had my hair fixed. I’m going to surprise you again.”
    He suppressed an idiot chuckle, said, “Pleasantly, I hope. Okay, see you then,” waited for her “good-bye,” and broke the connection.
    He transpared the windows, turned off the light on his desk, and looked outside.
    Gray again overhead, and many slow flakes of snow—wandering, not being blown about much—moving downward—and then losing themselves in the tumult…
    He also saw, when he opened the window and leaned out, the place off to the left where Irizarry had left his next-to-last mark on the world.
    He closed the window and listened to the rest of the symphony. It had been a week since he had gone blindspinning with Eileen. Her appointment was for one o’clock.
    He remembered her fingertips brushing over his face, like leaves or the bodies of insects, learning his appearance in the ancient manner of the blind. The memory was not altogether pleasant. He wondered why.
    Far below, a patch of hosed pavement was blank once again; under a thin, fresh shroud of white, it was slippery as glass. A building custodian hurried outside and spread salt on it, before someone slipped and hurt himself.
    Sigmund was the myth of the Fenris come alive. After Render had instructed Mrs. Hedges, “Show them in,” the door had begun to open, was suddenly pushed wider, and a pair of smoky-yellow eyes stared in at him. The eyes were set in a strangely misshapen dog-skull.
    Sigmund’s was not a low canine brow, slanting up slightly from the muzzle; it was a high, shaggy cranium, making the eyes appear even more deep-set than they actually were. Render shivered slightly at the size and aspect of that head. The muties he had seen had all been puppies. Sigmund was full grown, and his gray-black fur had a tendency to bristle, which made him appear somewhat larger than a normal specimen of the breed.
    He stared in at Render in a very un-doglike way and made a growling noise which sounded too much like, “Hello, Doctor,” to have been an accident.
    Render nodded and stood.
    “Hello, Sigmund,” he said. “Come in.”
    The dog turned his head, sniffing the air of the room—as though deciding whether or not to trust his ward within its confines. Then he returned his stare to Render,