"Nobody taught me."

"Not even your father?"

She said, "Do you know you're shorter than you look on television? Do they do that on purpose? Try to make you look bigger to impress people?"

To that, Dill said nothing. At his desk he had turned on a little machine; she saw lights flash.

"That's recording," she said.

Dill said, "Have you had a visit from your dad since his escape from Atlanta?"

"No," she said.

"Do you know what sort of place Atlanta is?"

"No," she said. But she did know. He stared at her, try­ing to see if she was lying, but she returned his stare. "It's a prison," she said at last. "Where they send men who speak their mind."

"No," Dill said. "It's a hospital. For mentally unbal­anced people. It's a place where they get well."

In a low, steady voice, she said, "You're a liar."

"It's a psychological therapy place," Dill said, "Your father was-upset. He imagined all sorts of things that weren't so. There evidently were pressures on him too strong for him to bear, and so like a lot of perfectly normal people he cracked under the pressure."

"Did you ever meet him?"

Dill admitted, "No. But I have his record here." He. showed her a great mass of documents that lay before him.

"They cured him at that place?" Marion asked.

"Yes," Dill said. But then he frowned. "No, I beg your pardon. He was too ill to be given therapy. And I see he managed to keep himself ill the entire two months he was there."

"So he isn't cured," she said. "He's still upset, isn't he?"

Dill said, "The Healers. What's your father's relation­ship to them?"

"I don't know."

Dill seated himself and leaned back in his chair, his hands behind his head. "Isn't it a little silly, those things you said? Overthrowing God... somebody has told you we were better off in the old days, before Unity, when we had war every twenty years." He pondered. "I wonder how the Healers got their name. Do you know?"