"No," she said.

"Didn't your father tell you?"

"No."

"Maybe I can tell you; I'll be a sort of substitute father, for a while. A 'healer' is a person who comes along with no degree or professional medical training and declares he can cure you by some odd means when the licensed medi­cal profession has given you up. He's a quack, a crank, either an out-and-out nut or a cynical fake who wants to make some easy money and doesn't care how he goes about it. Like the cancer quacks-but you're too young; you wouldn't remember them." Leaning forward, he said, "But you may have heard of the radiation-sickness quacks. Do you remember ever seeing a man come by in an old car, with perhaps a sign mounted on top of it, selling bottles of medicine guaranteed to cure terrible radiation burns?"

She tried to recall. "I don't remember," she said. "I know I've seen men on television selling things that are supposed to cure all the ills of society."

Dill said, "No child would talk as you're talking. You've been trained to say this." His voice rose. "Haven't you?"

"Why are you so upset?" she said, genuinely surprised. I didn't say it was any Unity salesman."

"But you meant us," Dill said, still flushed. "You meant our informational discussions, our public relations pro­grams."

She said, "You're so suspicious. You see things that aren't there." That was something her father had said; she remembered that. He had said, They're paranoids. Suspic­ious even of each other. Any opposition is the work of the devil.

"The Healers," Dill was saying, "take advantage of the superstitions of the masses. The masses are ignorant, you see. They believe in crazy things: magic, gods and mira­cles, healing, the Touch. This cynical cult is playing on basic emotional hysterias familiar to all our sociologists, manipulating the masses like sheep, exploiting them to gain power."