ONE:"Sergeant, didn't I do well?" asked Abel Waite, in the tone that he would have inquired of his teacher about a recitation. "I done just as you told me. I kep' my eye on the tall feller in front, who was wavin' his gun and yellin' at the rest to come on. I aimed just below his belt, an' he went down just like I've seen a beef when pap shot him."The Commons Room of the Third Building of City One was a large affair, whose three bare metal walls enclosed more space than any other single living-quarters room in the Building; but the presence of the fourth wall made it seem tiny. That wall was nearly all window, a non-shatterable clear plastic immensely superior to that laboratory material, glass. It displayed a single unbroken sweep of forty feet, and it looked down on the forests of Fruyling's World from a height of sixteen stories. Men new to the Third Building usually sat with their backs to that enormous window, and even the eldest inhabitants usually placed their chairs somehow out of line with it, and looked instead at the walls, at their companions, or at their own hands.
