receiver. The fools! He wasn't going to talk, he lost no love on the Karadi. But there were others. There were neighbors, friends, brothers, even wives, there were the obvious quislings you shunned and the less obvious ones you didn't suspect until it was too late. One thing you never did was listen to the short-wave radio so defiantly its crackling could be heard not merely on the other side of the door but all the way out on the landing. The punishment was death.

Mr. Friedlander paused in front of his own door, where the odor of strong yellow turnips assailed his nostrils. It was so unsatisfyingly familiar, he almost gagged. The new generation hardly remembered the delightful old foods, but if Mr. Friedlander shut his eyes and thought, he could clearly smell steak and roast chicken and broiled lobster swimming in butter and a dry red wine to wash everything down slowly, so slowly he could taste every tiny morsel.

He pushed open the door and began to shrug off his worn coat. "I'm home," he said to the scabby walls, the gas range which had been converted to wood when the Karadi suspended all public utilities, to the bubbling pot which exuded the turnip smell, to the drab sofa, the two wooden chairs, the table he had constructed from two old saw horses and the planking he had found long ago after the Fourteenth Street Bomb.

From the small bedroom, he heard sobbing.

Mrs. Friedlander blinked red-rimmed eyes at him and squeezed his hand, wringing it as if it had been a wet rag. She was forty-four years old, six years younger than Mr. Friedlander, with a face which once had been comely but now was lined, gaunt and big-pored. She was even thinner than Mr. Friedlander, but looked shapeless in her thick woolen sweater and the baggy work trousers he had stolen from the quartermaster store of the plant where he worked.

"Try to tell me, Martha," he said. "It's good to talk."

She looked at him mutely, opening her mouth to talk but swallowing instead.

"You tell me, Martha. There now."

She managed to get the words out. "It's Freddie."

Mr. Friedlander placed a tired arm about her shoulder. The feeling had started in the pit of his stomach, like when their son George had died of pneumonia two years ago this month. The Karadi had outlawed all wonder drugs, all hospitals, all medical schools. Helpless, they had watched George die, his big 

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