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cylindrical featureless objects with the blunt snouts and the flared portion that rested against the tan of the floor. As he watched he saw movement. A bit of the floor came alive, lifted up into a tall whirling column. He could not understand why it did this thing. He watched it move, still whirling, toward the high rough mounds. Soon he could see it no more. He touched his mouth to the hard surface of the transparent substance and drew back with startled speed. In a world where everything was warmed, the surface had a strange chill.
    The gnawing of hunger at last took him away from the picture which he later found was called a “window.” He went all the way back down to the deep familiar levels. He spoke to no one of what he had seen. He walked in a daze, feeling shrunken and small against the enormities of what lay outside the known world. He ate and slept and bathed and walked alone, seeking always the chance to slip away, to return to his window that looked out on another world which dwarfed his own.
    Once, full of the importance of new knowledge, he had tried to tell one of the old ones about what he had seen. Wrath exploded and Raul Kinson picked himself up off the floor, with bleeding mouth, determined to speak no more.
    With Leesa, of course, it was a different thing. As his sister, she shared, to some extent, that wry biological joke which had given him a deep chest, broad shoulders, strong column of neck, muscle-bulge of thigh and calf in a world where physical strength was useless.
    He remembered that he had been twelve and she wasten when he took her up to the window. At ten she was taller and stronger than the other girl children of the same age. Like Raul, her hair was blue-black and abundant. It set them apart in a world where hair was thin, dry and brown, lasting usually until the age of twenty, seldom beyond.
    They had talked, and he knew that Leesa shared his vague feeling of disquiet, his aimless discontent—but her releases took a different form. Whereas he strove constantly to learn more, to understand more, she made a fetish of wildness and childish abandon.
    He was proud of the way she refused to show her fear. They stood at the window. He said, proud of his new words, “That is ‘outside.’ All of our world and all the levels are inside of what is called a ‘building.’ It is cold out there. That red round light is a sun. It moves across the ceiling, but never goes completely out of sight. I have watched it. It travels in a circle.”
    Leesa looked at it calmly enough. “It is better inside.”
    “Of course. But it is a good thing to know—that there is an outside.”
    “Is it? Why is it good just to know things? I would say it is good to dance and sing and be warm—to take the long baths and find the foods that taste best.”
    “You won’t tell anyone about this?”
    “And be punished? I am not that stupid, Raul.”
    “Come, then. And I will show you other things.”
    He took her down several levels to a series of small rooms. He took her to one room where ten chairs faced the end of the room. He made her sit in one while he went to the machine which had taken him so many months to understand. He had broken four of them before he at last found the purpose.
    Leesa gasped as the light dimmed and the pictures appeared, by magic, on the wall at the end of the room, the end that they faced.
    Raul said quietly, “I believe it was intended that all children should be brought to these rooms to watch the images. But somehow, a long time ago, it was given up.Those marks under each picture mean nothing to you, Leesa. But I have learned that they are writing. Each thing has a word, as you know. But those marks can mean the word. With those marks, if you could read, I could tell you something without talking.”
    “Why would you want to do that?” Her tone was full of wonder.
    “I could leave a message for you. I can read the writing under the pictures. There is an uncountable number of these