During August Dick had labored in the alfalfa fields of Central
Washington, a harvest hand or "working stiff" among other migratory
agricultural workers. Among them, but not entirely of them. Recruited
from the lowest levels as men grade, gathered in at a slave market on
the coast, herded in bunk houses alive with vermin, fully but badly fed,
overflowing with blasphemy and filled with sullen hate for those above
them in the social scale, the "stiffs" regarded him with distrust from
the start.

In the beginning he accepted their sneers with a degree of philosophy.
His physical condition was poor. At night he ached intolerably,
collapsing into his wooden bunk to sleep the dreamless sleep of utter
exhaustion. There were times when he felt that it would be better
to return at once to Norada and surrender, for that he must do so
eventually he never doubted. It was as well perhaps that he had no time
for brooding, but he gained sleep at the cost of superhuman exertion all
day.

A feeling of unreality began to obsess him, so that at times he felt
like a ghost walking among sweating men, like a resurrection into life,
but without life. And more than once he tried to sink down to the level
of the others, to unite himself again with the crowd, to feel again the
touch of elbows, the sensation of fellowship. The primal instinct of the
herd asserted itself, the need of human companionship of any sort.