Greetings! said the letter, delivered by 'stant mail. You have been selected out of millions of your friends and neighbors.

You are now a concomody.

It can't be, Surley G. Febbs thought as he reread the printed form. It was a meager document, size-wise, with his name and number Xeroxed in. It looked no more serious than a bill from his conapt building's utility committee asking him to vote on a rate-increase. And yet here it was in his possession, formal evidence which would admit him, incredibly, into Festung, Washington, D.C. and its subsurface kremlin, the most heavily guarded spot in Wes-bloc.

And not as a tourist.

They found me typical! he said to himself. Just thinking this he felt typical. He felt swell and powerful and slightly drunk, and he had difficulty standing. His legs wobbled and he walked unsteadily across his miniature living room and seated himself on his Ionian fnoolfur (imitation) couch.

"But I really know why they picked me," Febbs said aloud. "It's because I know all about weapons." An authority; that's what he was, due to all the hours—six or seven a night, because like everyone else his work had been recently cut from twenty to nineteen hours per week—that he spent scanning edutapes at the Boise, Idaho, main branch of the public library.

And not only an authority on weapons. He could remember with absolute clarity every fact he had ever learned—as for example on the manufacture of red-stained glass in France during the early thirteenth century. I know the exact part of the Byzantine Empire from which the mosaics of the Roman period which they melted down to form the cherished red glass came, he said to himself, and exulted.