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“One’s a boy and he’s in the police youth, and your girl Joan is in the girls’ army school in Boston. I read about it in a magazine they give us at school to read.”
    “Oh, yes,” Dill murmured. “
World Today.
Do you like to read it?”
    “No,” she said. “It tells more lies even than you.”
    After that, the man said nothing; he concerned himself with papers on his desk, and left her to stand by herself.
    “I’m sorry you don’t like our magazine,” he said finally, in a preoccupied voice. “Unity goes to a great deal of trouble to put it out. By the way, who told you to say that about Unity? Who taught you?”
    “Nobody taught me.”
    “Not even your father?”
    She said, “Do you know you’re shorter than you look on television? Do they do that on purpose? Try to make you look bigger to impress people?”
    To that, Dill said nothing. At his desk he had turned on a little machine; she saw lights flash.
    “That’s recording,” she said.
    Dill said, “Have you had a visit from your dad since his escape from Atlanta?”
    “No,” she said.
    “Do you know what sort of place Atlanta is?”
    “No,” she said. But she did know. He stared at her, trying to see if she was lying, but she returned his stare. “It’s a prison,” she said at last. “Where they send men who speak their mind.”
    “No,” Dill said. “It’s a hospital. For mentally unbalanced people. It’s a place where they get well.”
    In a low, steady voice, she said, “You’re a liar.”
    “It’s a psychological therapy place,” Dill said. “Your father was—upset. He imagined all sorts of things that weren’t so. There evidently were pressures on him too strong for him to bear, and so like a lot of perfectly normal people he cracked under the pressure.”
    “Did you ever meet him?”
    Dill admitted, “No. But I have his record here.” He showed her a great mass of documents that lay before him.
    “They cured him at that place?” Marion asked.
    “Yes,” Dill said. But then he frowned. “No, I beg your pardon. He was too ill to be given therapy. And I see he managed to keep himself ill the entire two months he was there.”
    “So he isn’t cured,” she said. “He’s still upset, isn’t he?”
    Dill said, “The Healers. What’s your father’s relationship to them?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Dill seated himself and leaned back in his chair, his hands behind his head. “Isn’t it a little silly, those things you said? Overthrowing God . . . somebody has told you we were better off in the old days, before Unity, when we had war every twenty years.” He pondered. “I wonder how the Healers got their name. Do you know?”
    “No,” she said.
    “Didn’t your father tell you?”
    “No.”
    “Maybe I can tell you; I’ll be a sort of substitute father, for a while. A ‘healer’ is a person who comes along with no degree or professional medical training and declares he can cure you by some odd means when the licensed medical profession has given you up. He’s a quack, a crank, either an out-and-out nut or a cynical fake who wants to make some easy money and doesn’t care how he goes about it. Like the cancer quacks— but you’re too young; you wouldn’t remember them.” Leaning forward, he said, “But you may have heard of the radiation-sickness quacks. Do you remember ever seeing a man come by in an old car, with perhaps a sign mounted on top of it, selling bottles of medicine guaranteed to cure terrible radiation burns?”
    She tried to recall. “I don’t remember,” she said. “I know I’ve seen men on television selling things that are supposed to cure all the ills of society.”
    Dill said, “No child would talk as you’re talking. You’ve been trained to say this.” His voice rose. “Haven’t you?”
    “Why are you so upset?” she said, genuinely surprised. “I didn’t say it was any Unity salesman.”
    “But you meant us,” Dill said, still flushed. “You meant our