Lifting the microphone Nicholas said, addressing every cubby in the tank, "People, this is President St. James and I'm sorry but we've all got to be at Wheeling Hall in ten minutes. Come as you are; don't worry about that--a bathrobe is fine. It's grave news."

Nunes murmured, "Yancy'll speak. For sure; they told me."

"The Protector," Nicholas said into the mike, and heard his voice boom from each end of the deserted clinic corridor, as it was everywhere else in the great subsurface ant tank of fifteen hundred human souls, "is going to address us, I understand. And he'll accept questions."

He rang off, feeling defeated. It was not a reasonable time to give them bad news. And with Souza and the quota and the audit to come--

"I can't leave my patient," Carol said.

Upset, Nunes said, "But I was told to assemble everyone, Doctor."

"Then," Carol said, with that superlative intelligence that made Nicholas both fear and adore her, "Mr. Souza must get up and come, too. If the edict is to be fully obeyed."

It got through; Nunes, for all his bureaucratic rigidity, his almost neurotic determination to fulfill to the letter each order coaxed down to them--via him--nodded. "Okay, you stay here." To Nicholas he said, "Let's go." He started off, burdened by their mass consciences; his main task was to supervise their loyalty: Nunes was the tank's pol-com, its political commissioner.

Five minutes later Nicholas St. James sat stiffly, formally, in his President's chair, slightly elevated, in row one of Wheeling Hall; behind him they had all assembled, shifted and rustled, murmured and stirred, everyone, including himself, gazing at the floor-to-ceiling vidscreen. This was their window--their sole window--on the above world, and they took rather seriously what was received on its giant surface.

He wondered if Rita had heard the announcement or if she still blissfully loitered in the shower, calling a few remarks to him now and then.