grinding the cigarette into the ashtray. "It would be nice," he said, "if we could know one another."

She smiled. "Some day."

The clock gave warning, counting backwards through thirty seconds. Jord patted the woman's thigh in dismissal. "You may as well go now."

She slid from the bed, neither reluctant nor impatient. Her simple tunic lay on the crimson rug where she had dropped it nine hours before. "Goodbye, Soldier," she said.

He was already on his way to the bathroom. If he should see her again, her voice would be different, her hair would be different. She had no scars or physical aberrance that he could recognize her by. She was healthy, intelligent and normal, and therefore selected for breeding. So was he. Ask the geneticists. He had.

In the bathroom, the clock told him to wash his face. Carefully he rubbed desensitizer on his mask, on the ten thousand artificial nerve endings that transcribed every motion of the living tissue it encased and magnified that motion a thousand times to the mightier motions of the machine.

The desensitizer entered the porous material; the mask sagged and became transparent like a cellophane sack. He lifted it from his face.

Two huge holes for eyes, a gaping rent of a mouth. He threw it with disgust into the depository. It would go back to the Neurological Division to be cleaned and repaired.

He looked into the mirror with the interest of a man who sees his face on rare occasions. The nerves stood out like splintered cracks in glass. He fingered his face lovingly, unmindful of the agony caused by his touch, remembering the woman. He wondered in what manner her face would differ from his.

The pain made him stop thinking about it and he closed his eyes to spray a weak solution of desensitizer on the burning flesh. Almost immediately the pain was gone; but it left him with a marble mask that wouldn't come to life again until the effects of the desensitizer wore off.

He washed quickly in warm water, rubbed disinfectant on the atrophied area, rinsed it and stepped in front of the dryer. A thousand tongues of almost corporeal warmth licked over his skin.

He had shaved and desensitized his body the night before, so it was only a matter of washing and disinfecting before he climbed into the overall 

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