"Compassion," Osden said. "Compassion. What do you know about compassion?"

She stared at him, but he would not look at her.

"Would you like me to verbalize your present emotional affect regarding myself?" he said. "I can do more precisely than you can. I'm trained to analyze such responses as I receive them. And I do receive them."

"But how can you expect me to feel kindly towards you when you behave as you do?"

"What does it matter how I behave, you stupid sow, do you mink it makes any difference? Do you think the aver­age human is a well of loving-kindness? My choice is to be hated or to be despised. Not being a woman or a coward, I prefer to be hated."

"That's rot Self-pity. Every man has—"

"But I am not a man," Osden said. "There are all of you. And there is myself. I am one."

Awed by that glimpse of abysmal solipsism, she kept silent a while; finally she said with neither spite nor pity, clinically, 'You could kill yourself, Osden."

"That's your way, Haito," he jeered. "I'm not depressive, and seppuku isn't my bit. What do you want me to do here?"

"Leave. Spare yourself and us. Take the aircarand a data-feeder and go do a species count In the forest; Harfex hasn't even started the forests yet Take a hundred-square-meter forested area, anywhere inside radio range. But out­side empathy range. Report in at 8 and 24 o'clock daily."

Osden went, and nothing was heard from him for five days but laconic all-well signals twice daily. The mood at base camp changed like a stage-set Eskwana stayed awake up to eighteen hours a day. Poswet To got her stellar lute and chanted the celestial harmonies (music had driven Osden into a frenzy). Mannon, Harfex, Jenny Chong and Tomiko all went off tranquilizers. Porlock distilled some-tiling in his laboratory and drank it all by himself. He had a hangover. Asnanifoil and Poswet To held an all-night Numerical Epiphany, that mystical orgy of higher mathe­matics which is the chief pleasure of the religious Cetian soul. Olleroo slept with everybody. Work went well.