"He wouldn't lie, not about a thing like that."

"I know how you feel. I felt that way at first, too. Free and—well, relaxed for the first time in so long I can't remember. But then I got to thinking. What if he's senile? What if he imagined the whole thing? It would be a sin to celebrate, with Freddie dead."

"We could ask Mr. Peters, or the others. And Freddie's not dead!"

"That's what you want to believe. It's what I want to believe, too." Mr. Friedlander walked to the window again, where the pane was frosting over once more, giving a ghostlike quality to the street, the lamps, the facades of the other tenements, the snow-laden trees outside. He wanted to believe. But he had wanted to believe, in his youth, that the killing war would one day end. When it did, the Karadi had come, with talk of peace—although with their invincible weapons they had disarmed all the world's armies and, instead of rebuilding, had made a shambles of our civilization. Every day the Karadi told lies and told you to believe. And planted spies to see that you did. And visited you at unexpected moments to see that you conformed. And trained your children to fight against free people, free people who they said were your enemies. And gave extra clothing rations to a spy, to a believer, to a man in the Karadi image.

"We can't ask the others," Mr. Friedlander said. "What if Mr. Davidson was lying, or making it all up? You can't go around talking about short-waves and things. It isn't safe."

"We have to know!"

"Do you want to be turned in as an undesirable? Is that what you want? We already know. The Karadi told us." The more he spoke, the easier it was to convince himself. You couldn't live with doubt. The Karadi fostered doubt and taught you that: you had to avoid it. You had to know. This is so, this is not so—if this other thing may or may not be so, I don't want to talk about it. Alternative A or alternative B. Simple. Concise. What did old Mr. Davidson know, anyway, listening to his subversive radio? Why should the barbarians in the mountains tell the truth any more than the Karadi or their agents? The barbarians are our enemies. It's propaganda. Maybe Mr. Davidson is a saboteur for them.

"Is that clear?" Mr. Friedlander demanded. "Is that quite, quite clear? Cry if you want. Freddie is dead. Freddie is dead. Dead. You can't believe all the wild stories you hear."

Mrs. Friedlander was smiling at 

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