tobacco. All we Lapins need to keep us happy is a good solid vice like smoking." I looked at the Chief. "Why'd you follow me here, Dr. McQueen? I know I've been naughty."

"Self-pity doesn't become a man, Johnny," he said.

"And why the hell not?" I demanded, my blood-pressure ready to challenge any manometer in sight. "If I can feel compassion for some poor joker on TV, why can't I hurt a little for myself—for John Bogardus, swaddled from his darling by a damned plastic diving-suit? I was—I am—in love with Anne, Doctor."

"Your marriage-night would kill you, John," he said.

I jumped up with ready-made fists, then flopped down onto the grass, laughing at the picture I saw. Battle of the Century. In this corner, wearing helmet, chastity-suit, and thirty-five feet of air-hose Roy McQueen, Ph. D. In the far corner, clad only in brown trunks (grass-stained on the seat, folks), John Bogardus, M.D. "It makes a grand old dirty joke, doesn't it?"

"It makes a painful reality," Dr. McQueen said. "I know how you must lie awake nights, thinking about gradually acclimatizing yourself to the contaminated world in which Anne lives. You know, though, that the death-rate with the lower animals who've tried this acclimatization is steep. Even the survivors don't survive very long, because of their low gut-tone and their tardy antibody response. I suppose, though, that the imminence of death is as helpless before love as the locksmith." Dr. McQueen sighed. "If it's what you want, Johnny, I'll ignore everything we both know about the probable consequences and help you break out of here.... Think how embarrassed you'd feel, though, if you died of a B. subtilis septicemia or a fulminant chicken-pox the day before the wedding."

"I could have married Anne, and made her either an unkissed bride or an early widow," I said. "Neither of these alternatives struck me as an attractive career for the woman I love, so I left her. It's so logical it's practically simple arithmetic. Anne put up a fight to keep me, Chief; it was most warming to my amour-propre. Women aren't logical like us men of science. What a stinking situation!"

"It is," Dr. McQueen said. "But remember, John, lovers outside the Big Tank often get just as star-crossed as you and Anne."

"And they have dental caries to contend with, which we don't," I said. "Somehow, Chief, we'll get this experiment into its second generation, past the 

 Prev. P 9/32 next