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timidly referred to the wiles of the devil, the boy went further in his admissions and furtively revealed that Jaroslov had given him a magazine which had actually been printed on Earth. The magazine revealed people living in the sinful luxury they had all heard described but had never seen.
    Jaroslav, declared the boy who had met him, actually looked as happy as the people in the pictures–and to children accustomed to their sour-faced parents and teachers, that in itself was a minor miracle.
    Enni looked longingly at the pictures. How could such people be the vessels of evil? Evil, she felt instinctively, must be dark and cruel and filthy, whereas these people were bright and gay and clean, and spoke kindly to one another.
    She asked the boy who had the magazine to lend it to her, and because not even the iron discipline of Ymiran society had been able to destroy certain fundamental reactions, and because Enni had an appealing smile and blue eyes and fair hair and was nearly seventeen years old, the boy had given her the magazine.
    But she had made the mistake of hurrying to her room when she went home, to pore over the pages in private, and her father had come to see what she was up to. First he had tongue-lashed her; then he had torn precious pages to shreds and stamped on them; lastly he had made her take off her clothes and had left her for a night and a day and a night, naked, blue with cold, and without food or water, to impress the wickedness of her action on her.
    Many things had been frozen into Enni’s mind by those cold and lonely hours. Not least, her expression froze–into quiet obedience. Several times she heard her mothers footsteps approach, and hesitate outside the door as though she were going to ask how her daughter was. But every time she went away again without speaking. That too reinforced Enni’s decision.
    After it was all over, her father never mentioned what had happened. Certainly he would not have spoken about it to anyone outside the family; that would have been an admission of failure in his duty as a parent. A properly brought-up child should not even have felt the urge to commit such a sinful deed. Enni was glad of this, for she had to maintain an outward respect for her parents or be further punished. But behind her pale face her mind was very active.
    For some time afterwards she was a model of good behavior. When a year had gone by without another breach of propriety, her parents again began to take her word for what she did, and that was the chance Enni had been waiting for–the chance to lie, to deceive, to cheat her parents on the grandest possible scale. How could she offer lip service to people she no longer regarded as fit to live?
    In the meantime, in school and among her friends, there had been talk of Earth and the people of Earth, and also of Jaroslav Dubin, whose name was spoken in the hushed tones children of other worlds reserved for obscenities. Some of the children dared to voice the opinion that Jaroslav was right about the people of Earth and their parents were wrong; after all, they argued, Jaroslav had been to Earth and most people hadn’t.
    On the other hand, said the opposition, Jaroslav was the only one of many Ymirans who had been to Earth or to local planets who asserted an opinion contrary to the accepted one. Enni listened silently to this discussion; she already knew what she thought. She felt her skin itch, pent as it was inside two vests, two pairs of bloomers, sweater, heavy socks, clumsy, enormous shoes, parka, scarf, headwear, till she could barely walk for the weight of the load. And she bided her time.
    One night, when she had begged a friend to give her an alibi, she went to see Jaroslav Dubin. It was hardly a surprise to her to find four of her classmates already in Jaroslav’s home.
    Dearly as the elders of Ymir would have liked to see him ostracized, or better still dead and buried, they could not rid themselves of Jaroslav Dubin. Unrepentant,