between the murder of Khalid and the Thirty Day's War had been spaced
chronologically. Something of that had come to him, after the incident
in Modern History IV, and he had driven it from his consciousness.

* * * * *

He didn't dare go home where the reporters would be sure to find him.
He simply left the college, at the end of the school-day, and walked
without conscious direction until darkness gathered. This morning,
when he had seen the paper, he had said, and had actually believed,
that the news of the murder in Basra would put an end to the trouble
that had started a month ago in the Modern History class. It hadn't:
the trouble, it seemed, was only beginning. And with the newspapers,
and Whitburn, and Fitch, it could go on forever....

It was fully dark, now; his shadow fell ahead of him on the sidewalk,
lengthening as he passed under and beyond a street-light, vanishing as
he entered the stronger light of the one ahead. The windows of a cheap
cafe reminded him that he was hungry, and he entered, going to a table
and ordering something absently. There was a television screen over
the combination bar and lunch-counter. Some kind of a comedy
programme, at which an invisible studio-audience was laughing
immoderately and without apparent cause. The roughly dressed customers
along the counter didn't seem to see any more humor in it than he did.
Then his food arrived on the table and he began to eat without really
tasting it.

After a while, an alteration in the noises from the television
penetrated his consciousness; a news-program had come on, and he
raised his head. The screen showed a square in an Eastern city; the