so about it, is there? I tried to get him to take the Treatment then, but—well, after all, you can hardly expect an uncivilized Outlander to appreciate the advantages, can you?"

"No." Hal did not refer to the fact that the new element recently put into the standard CC Treatment was causing him to postpone taking it himself, but his father seemed to sense his thought.

"You won't mind it, son. Really you won't. The Treatment will take care of the whole thing. It's perfectly obvious that you are suffering from the effects of the delay right at this moment."

"Oh Chaos," Hal swore softly. "Why did they have to go and put that element in anyway?"

"Now Hal, you know better than that," his father chided him gently. "It was either include a marital inclination or else go in for a complete program of artificial insemination. The women have a vote too, you know, and they wouldn't hear of it. They don't object to carrying a child for a few months—that's always been in their conditioning for some reason or another. But they insisted that if they had to be mothers, the men would have to be fathers. And they insisted on a standard, civilized marriage contract to cover the situation."

"I know, I know. I've heard all the arguments. Racial suicide and all. Nonsense. We can always import Outlanders and force them to take the Treatment. Outlanders," he pointed out with suitable, mild, cultured disgust, "breed like animals."

"No son, that wouldn't do the job. We have to keep the blood line. Outlanders don't have it, you know. If they did, they would have permitted themselves to be civilized long ago."

Hal's fingers drummed nervously on the desk top, and his father again raised an eyebrow in mild concern. He shook his head thoughtfully.

Guiltily, Hal stopped his fingers from their satisfying tattoo. He bunched them into a fist instead, and then gazed at it with mild unbelief.

"All right," he finally whispered. "This is simply awful. And it looks as if in order to be cured, I'll have to get me a wife along with it. A pity, though. Everything was perfectly mild without one."

"You'll be mild with a wife, Hal," his father assured him softly. "You don't like the prospect now, because it means change. Change, of course, is always unpleasant. But the Treatment will take care of it all right. I know that I didn't expect things to work 

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