“We know,” said Wolf. He took a file from his desk, thumbed through it. “Upon your fourteenth birthday You were fined one hundred Sirian guilders for expressing your opinion of an official, upon a wall, in letters twenty inches high. Your father apologised on your behalf and pleaded the impetuosity of youth. The Sirians were annoyed but let the matter drop.”

“Razaduth was a scheming, pot-bellied liar and I say it again.” Mowry eyed the file. “That my life-story you’ve got there?”

“Yes.”

“Nosey lot, aren’t you?”

“We have to be. Regard it as part of the price to be paid for survival” Shoving the file to one side, Wolf informed, “We’ve a punched card for every Terran in existence. In no time worth mentioning we can sort out electronically all those who have false teeth, or wear size eleven shoes, or had red-haired mothers, or can be relied upon to try dodge the draft. Without trouble we can extract any specified type of sheep from the general mass of sheep and goats.”

“And I am a specified sheep?”

“Speaking metaphorically, of course. No insult is intend.”

His face gave a craggy twitch that was the nearest it could come to a smile. “We first dug out about sixteen thousand completely fluent speakers of the several Sirian dialects. Eliminating the females and children brought the number down to nine thousand. Then, step by step, we cut out the elderly, the infirm, the weak, the untrustworthy, the temperamentally unsuitable, those too short, too tall, too fat, too thin, too stupid, too rash, too cautious, and so forth. We weren’t left with many among whom to seek for wasps.”

“What defines a wasp?”

“Several things—but mostly a shorty who can walk slightly bandy-legged with his ears pinned back and his face dyed purple. In other words, one who can play the part of a native-born Sirian and do it well enough to fool the Sirians.”

“Never!” exclaimed Mowry. “Never in a month of Sundays! I’m pink, I’ve got wisdom teeth and my ears stick out.”