Zebatinsky turned and walked rapidly out of the place. Fifty dollars to change a letter! Fifty dollars for Sebatinsky! Lord, what a name! Worse than Zebatinsky.

It took another month before he could make up his mind to see a lawyer, and then he finally went.

He told himself he could always change the name back. Give it a chance, he told himself. Hell, there was no law against it.

Henry Brand looked through the folder page by page, with the practiced eye of one who had been in Security for fourteen years. He didn’t have to read every word. Anything peculiar would have leaped off the paper and punched him in the eye.

He said, “The man looks clean to me.” Henry Brand looked clean, too; with a soft, rounded paunch and a pink and freshly scrubbed complexion. It was as though continuous contact with all sorts of human failings, from possible ignorance to possible treason, had compelled him into frequent washings.

Lieutenant Albert Quincy, who had brought him the folder, was young and filled with the responsibility of being Security officer at the Hanford Station. “But why Sebatinsky?” he demanded.

“Why not?”

“Because it doesn’t make sense. Zebatinsky is a foreign name and I’d change it myself if I had it, but I’d change it to something Anglo-Saxon. If Zebatinsky had done that, it would make sense and I wouldn’t give it a second thought. But why change a Z to an S? I think we must find out what his reasons were.”

“Has anyone asked him directly?”

“Certainly. In ordinary conversation, of course. I was careful to arrange that. He won’t say anything more than that he’s tired of being last in the alphabet.”

“That could be, couldn’t it, Lieutenant?”

“It could, but why not change his name to Sands or Smith, if he wants an S? Or if he’s that tired of Z, why not go the whole way and change it to an A? Why not a name like—uh—Aarons?”