"What do you deduce from all this?"

"What I deduce-what I've been sitting here all evening, deducing like a deduction machine-is that Joranum didn't come from Nishaya at all. In fact, I think he picked Nishaya as the place to pretend to come from, simply because it is so backwoodsy, so out-of-the-way, that no one would think of checking it. He must have made a thorough computer search to find the one world least likely to allow him to be caught in a lie."

"But that's ridiculous, Hari. Why should he want to pretend to be from a world he did not come from? It would mean a great deal of falsification of records."

"And that's precisely what he has probably done. He probably has enough followers in the civil service to make that possible. Probably no one person has done as much in the way of revision and all of his followers are too fanatical to talk about it."

"But still-Why?"

"Because I suspect Joranum doesn't want people to know where he really comes from."

"Why not? All worlds in the Empire are equal, both by laws and by custom."

"I don't know about that. These high-ideal theories are somehow never borne out in real life."

"Then where does he come from? Do you have any idea at all?"

"Yes. Which brings us back to this matter of hair."

"What about hair?"

"I sat there with Joranum, staring at him and feeling uneasy, without knowing why I was feeling uneasy. Then finally I realized that it was his hair that made me uneasy. There was something about it, a life, a gloss… a perfection to it that I've never seen before. And then I knew. His hair is artificial and carefully grown on a scalp that ought to be innocent of such things."