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of effective operation lay through Storku. Therefore, Storku had to be placated and made to feel that Oliver T. Mead was one of the boys.
    Besides, it occurred to him as he began slipping out of his clothes, some of these girls looked real cute. They reminded him of the Septic Tank Convention at Des Moines back in July. If only they didn’t shave their heads!
    “All together, now,” the shriek leader sang out. “Let’s bunch up. All together in a tight little group, all bunched up and milling around.”
    Mr. Mead was pushed and jostled into the crowd. It surged forward, back, right, left, being maneuvered into a smaller and smaller group under the instructions and shoving of the shriek leader. Music sprang up around them—more noise than music, actually, since it had no discernible harmonic relationships and grew louder and louder until it was almost deafening.
    Someone striving for balance hit Mr. Mead in the stomach with an outflung arm. He said “Oof!” and then “Oof!” again as someone behind him piled into his back.
    “Watch
out!
” a girl near him moaned as he trod on her foot.
    “Sorry,” he told her, “I just couldn’t—” and then an elbow hit him in the eye and he went lurching away a few steps, until, the group changing its direction again, he was pushed forward.
    R ound and round he went on the grass, being pushed and pushing, the horrible noise almost tearing his eardrums apart. From what seemed a greater and greater distance, he could hear the shriek leader chanting: “Come on, this way, hurry up! No, that way, around that tree. Back into the bunch, you. Stay
together.
Now, backward, that’s right,
backward.
Faster,
faster.”
    They went backward, a great mass of people pushing on Mead, jamming him into the great mass of people immediately behind him. Then, abruptly, they went forward again, a dozen little crosscurrents of humanity at work against each other in the crowd, so that as well as moving forward, he was also being hurled a few feet to the right and then turned around and being yanked back diagonally to his left. Once or twice, he was shot to the outskirts of the group, but, much to his surprise, all he did was claw his way back into the jam-packed surging middle.
    It was as if he belonged nowhere else but in this mob of hurrying madmen. A shaved female head crashing into his chest, as the only hint that the group had changed its direction, was what he had come to expect. He threw himself back and disregarded the grunts and yelps he helped create. He was part of this—this—whatever it was. He was hysterical, bruised and slippery with sweat, but he no longer thought about anything but staying on his feet in the mob.
    He was part of it and that was all he knew.
    Suddenly, somewhere outside the maelstrom of running, jostling naked bodies, there was a yell. It was a long yell, in a powerful male voice, and it went on and on, almost drowning out the noise-music. A woman in front of Mr. Mead picked it up in a head-rattling scream. The man who had been yelling stopped, and, after a while, so did the woman.
    Then Mr. Mead heard the yell again, heard the woman join in, and was not even remotely astonished to hear his own voice add to the din. He threw all the frustration of the past two weeks into that yell, all the pounding, shoving and bruises of the past few minutes, all the frustrations and hatreds of his lifetime.
    All around him, others were joining it, too, until at last there was a steady, unanimous shriek from the tight mob that slipped and fell and chased itself all over the green meadow. Mr. Mead, in the back of his mind, experienced a childlike satisfaction in getting onto the rhythm they were working out—and in being part of working it out.
    It went pulse-beat, pulse-beat,
shriek-k-k-k
, pulse-beat, pulse-beat,
shriek-k-k-k.
    All together. All around him, all together. It was good!
    He was unable to figure out how long they had been running and yelling, when he noticed that