Last week, when Moddo had requested his views on problems of ceremony and protocol relative to today’s parade, the Servant of Education had commented smugly on the unusually high incidence of mob hysteria expected when his chief’s face was seen. And Garomma had voiced a curiosity he’d been feeling for a long time.

“What goes on in their minds when they see me, Moddo? I know they worship and get exhilarated and all that. But what precisely do you fellows call the emotion when you talk about it in the labs and places such as the Education Center?”

The tall man slid his hand across his forehead in the gesture that long years had made thoroughly familiar to Garomma.

“They are experiencing a trigger release,” he said slowly, staring over Garomma’s shoulder as if he were working out the answer from the electronically pinpointed world map on the back wall. “All the tensions these people accumulate in their daily round of niggling little prohibitions and steady coercions, all the frustrations of `don’t do this and don’t do this, do that’ have been organized by the Service of Education to be released explosively the moment they see your picture or hear your voice.”

“Trigger release. Hm! I’ve never thought of it quite that way.”

Moddo held up a hand in rigid earnestness. “After all, you’re the one man whose life is supposedly spent in an abject obedience beyond anything they’ve ever known. The man who holds the—the intricate strands of the world’s coordination in his patient, unwearying fingers; the ultimate and hardest-worked employee; the—the scapegoat of the multitudes!”

Garomma had grinned at Moddo’s scholarly eloquence. Now, however, as he observed his screaming folk from under submissive eyelids, he decided that the Servant of Education had been completely right.