only degenerated man, but so degenerated him that he could not live without them.

"And so the present system of credits for the amount of work done by each person in his own line has come into being. It has not changed the situation. Man still has no excuse for living, only for existing.

"The frenzied, maddened search for some purpose, some reason for being, that has taken place since—I need not go into. It is a rather horrible thing to think about. And in the last twenty-five years it has resulted in a revolt against convention and the accepted decencies in life. That has led, in turn, to orgies, to abandoned pleasure-seeking that has no parallel in our written history. The frustrated creative genius of our time has found outlet shocking to more ordinary people—if any person can be called ordinary in this time and age. I do not believe there is such a person. I believe that we have all gone mad in our despair and in our lack of any intelligent goal."

The voice of Parker cut across the spell in the room like the explosion of a shell in a country graveyard.

"He's just made the world's biggest understatement. By the God of the ancients, he should see some of the human wrecks that come to us, that pack our offices, and practically hang from the fluorescent. Day after day, hundreds and hundreds of them. And we can only tell them what is wrong with them—not what to do about it. A noble profession ours, gentlemen. Hah! It's hollow. Hollow and futile. Like the mobs that visit us here at Science Hall and go away uncomforted, to wait until they go completely mad and are taken away to a mechanical madhouse presided over by the same magnificently futile psychologists. A noble profession indeed."

"We can't claim immunity from it, either, you know," said Vaine. "We're all too old to join the orgies, but we try to compensate for our helplessness, our uselessness, in other ways. You, Parker," he smiled at the chubby psychologist, "are a faddist who follows every single mad-eyed craze that crops up. You have no idea how strange you look right now without any hair at all on your face; no eyebrows, no eyelashes, a bald dome. You're a remarkable sight."

Parker colored. This turned him oddly red from his smooth chin to his bald pate, so that he rather resembled a beet carved into the form of a face.

"It's not a fad. It's a hygienic movement that I highly approve of."

Vaine's laugh left 

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