going to help them out, just as they wanted to help him, etc. There is little need for further description of the methods of the vice-squad kind of mentality which will do anything in the name of virtue, so long as it is well paid.

John told all; all about himself: all about everyone else. It was a pretty sad performance, of course, but before you blame him too much just put yourself in his shoes. How well do you suppose you might have done? Likely you would not have swallowed the line they were feeding you, as did guileless John, but this would only have meant they would have switched their tactics and worn you down some other way.

Besides, John was pretty much in love at that time, so if they asked him about it he was proud to tell them. Why be ashamed of it, he thought. So he and the other guy, also an employee, went down the drain together, along with a whole crowd of the doctors and nurses and orderlies.

After it was all over the task force could proudly report a real "purified" hospital. Of course there weren't too many still working there for a while, except that it was a big place and John hadn't known many people over in some of the other departments. So they managed to keep the place open until replacements could be found for the gaps Senator McCarthy had opened up. And the veterans were safe once more.

There stood John in ONE's office, shaking as he told it all. Sometimes he cried, abysmally ashamed of himself, utterly debased at the thought of the disasters he had brought down upon so many others. At the same time he was choking with rage and contempt at those who had taken advantage of his honesty to entrap him, and with loathing for the Senator who was the apparent cause of it all. His beloved job was gone, the only

one

job he had ever really liked and given himself wholly to. Gone were all the happy associations there, and gone the opportunity to serve the sick whom he wanted to serve and who needed the help. It was a bitter, bitter pill.

Fortunately, there was was a little money in the bank, so he was not destitute. That is, at first. Down to the office he came nearly every day to volunteer his work. The floors were swept and mopped. Boxes were lifted. Errands run. Work was his therapy, work and talk, for he had to talk it all

out.

It was a long haul before he got back on his feet at all. Meanwhile he went down and down and down. The savings were gone. Hope seemed to be gone, for his consuming hope was to get that job back again-that he could somehow compel them to take him back. He tried and tried, quite without results, of course.

The time finally came when there was nothing to do but shock him out of these obsessions, to jolt him into more reasonable lines of thought. So he was told to get himself a job, any kind of a job, to stop whining over the past and not to return to ONE's office until he had done so. This was more of a sentence than John could put up with at the time for ONE had become in a way his only true home, a place where he could say what he thought and truly be himself.

It wasn't long before he phoned to say he had a job as bus boy in a restaurant somewhere. This meant he could eat properly and pay his room rent, and that he wouldn't have quite so much time for mourning over the past.

There is not space here to recount the many steps it took before he was all quieted down, or before he finally overcame the love affair. That took a deal of overcoming, for the love-object was a great hulking blond Adonis