Jobs were scarce; he was glad to get it. Like other young men intellectually sympathetic to Hoff's Relativism, he had applied for the government service. Fedgov's apparatus offered a chance to become involved in the task of Reconstruction; as he was earning a salary—paid in stable silver—he was helping mankind.

In those days he had been idealistic.

Specifically, he had been assigned to the Interior Department. At the Baltimore Antipol center he had taken political training and then approached Secpol: the Security arm. But the task of suppressing extremist political and religious sentiment had, in 1995, seemed merely bureaucratic. Nobody took it seriously; with world-wide food rationing, the panic was over. Everybody could be sure of basic subsistence. War-time fanaticism had dwindled out of existence as rational control regained its pre-inflation position.

Before him, spread out like a sheet of tin, the carnival sat assembled. Ten metal buildings, displaying bright neon signs, were the main structures. A central lane led to the hub: a cone within which seats had been erected. There, the basic acts would take place.

Already, he could see the first familiar spectacle. Pushing ahead, Cussick made his way among the densely-packed mass of people. The odor of sweat and tobacco rose around him, an exciting smell. Sliding past a family of grimy field laborers, he reached the railing of the first freak exhibit, and gazed up.

The war, with its hard radiation and elaborate diseases, had produced countless sports, oddities, freaks. Here, in this one minor carnival, a vast variety had been collected.

Directly above him sat a multi-man, a tangled mass of flesh and organs. Heads, arms, legs, wobbled dully; the creature was feeble-minded and helpless. Fortunately, his offspring would be normal; the multi-organisms were not true mutants.

"Golly," a portly, curly-headed citizen behind him said, horrified. "Isn't that awful?"