"Overpopulation! Elimination of needless suffering! Burden to society! Duty to humanity!" The cliches had tripped glibly off the doctor's tongue as he signed the form. "Will you please send in a member of the family? I'll give him the final instructions. Save you the trouble of worrying over little details during the final weeks."

Since then, things had moved more swiftly behind the scenes and he had had to do nothing except prepare himself—or adopt a realistic attitude, as Mr. Hoode would have described it. But he had lived too much to allow him to get used to the idea of dying in two short weeks. He hadn't even started to get realistic about it, which was probably why he could sit talking so calmly about death at that moment.

"We could give your life a climax," the director was saying. "A man like you shouldn't just fade away in one of those little cubicles." He waved a hand in the direction of the shaded windows at the rear of the palace. "You should die magnificently!"

"Magnificently?" Mr. Sims repeated. "What did you have in mind?"

"It's what you have in mind that counts. I can offer you a lot of advice, but the final choice is yours. For instance, a large number of men like to die in some sort of combat, with guns or swords, or even with animals. We had one man who fought a tiger. Another fulfilled a life-long ambition to play the role of bullfighter. Perhaps I should explain that the government allows each guest a generous sum of money to pay for his departure. As most people do not use one hundredth of this sum, we have a rather large fund at the disposal of those who want to use it.

"The bullfighter was a good example," he went on. "We had a large ring built for him. He was given horses, uniforms, picadores, and a bull specially imported from Spain. It was a wonderful afternoon." He paused in contemplation of the memory, while Mr. Sims looked on, tactfully refraining from asking the outcome.

"Another time, we had a group of old soldiers who wanted to die in battle," Mr. Hoode added. "We built them an old-fashioned concrete blockhouse, then gave them authentic uniforms, machine-guns, grenades and rifles, and had one group attacking and the other defending."

"Did they actually volunteer for that?" Mr. Sims asked.

"Of course, and I'll swear they enjoyed every minute of it. Right down to the last man. As a matter of fact, we're planning the same thing on a larger scale 

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