"Experience directs that any assurance, at any time, that there is nothing wrong or that everything is all right, be regarded with suspicion. Certainly doctors often encounter patients who are ignorant of the nature of their trouble and its cause, and in addition have had their symptoms appear so slowly and so gradually that they were never noticed and still are not realized...."

Manual, Interstellar Medical Service. P. 68.

It was a very singular society on Canis III. After long and markedly irrelevant argument by spacephone, the Med ship went down to ground in the grip of the Canopolis landing-grid. This was managed with a deftness amounting to artistry. Whoever handled the controls did so with that impassioned perfection with which a young man can handle a mechanism he understands and worships. But it did not follow that so accomplished an operator would think beyond the perfection of performance. He came out and grinned proudly at the Med ship when it rested, light as a feather, on the clear, grassy space in the center of the city's landing-grid. He was a gangling seventeen or eighteen.

A gang—not a guard—of similar age came swaggering to interview the two in the landed spacecraft. Fredericks named where he'd been working and what he'd been doing and how he'd been taken prisoner. Nobody bothered to check his statements. But his age was almost a guarantee that he belonged on Canis. When he began his experiences as a prisoner among their enemies, all pretense of suspicion dropped away. The gang at the spaceport interjected questions, and whooped at some of his answers, and slapped each other and themselves ecstatically when he related some of the things he'd said and done in enemy hands, and talked loudly and boastfully of what they would do if the old folks tried to carry out their threats. But Calhoun observed no real preparations beyond the perfect working condition of the grid itself. Still, that ought to defend the planet adequately—except against such a mobile spaceport as he'd been captured by, himself.

When they turned to him for added reasons to despise the older generation, Calhoun said coldly:

"If you ask me, they can take over any time they're willing to kill a few of you to clear the way. Certainly if the way you're running this particular job is a sample!"

They bristled. And Calhoun marveled at the tribal organization which had sprung up among them. What Fredericks had said in the ship began to fit neatly into place with what once had been 

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