hips in voluptuous abandonment as they went about their appointed tasks.

The very word "seductive" had been to him an intellectual concept solely. Emotionally it had awakened no response in him, no real understanding of how a man could be drawn from his work by enticements of the flesh that were as coldly meaningless as a row of numerals set down at random on a blank sheet of paper.

Meaningless once, but now.... NOW.... Another woman passed him, her eyes downcast, her tightly-sheathed breasts burgeoning despite their bound state, breaking through the restraining, semi-translucent fabric. Like great tropical blooms the breasts of the women seemed, ensnared by clinging vines which were parasitic and wholly pernicious, a new growth introduced by Man in a jungle of his own cruel planting.

How cruel it was to select one woman out of fifty and say to her alone: "You may mate and bear children." How cruel to compel the rest to conceal their charms and pretend to be completely sexless!

Teleman drew in his breath sharply. What was happening to him? Why should he feel angry and resentful when he knew that only one woman in fifty could be stirred by the sight of a man, or respond to a man's love-making? Had not all other women been made virtually sexless in their mental processes by selective mating and other gene-altering techniques?

Surely a woman without physical desire had no need to appear seductive or to flaunt her charms. And surely a man without physical desire would not care at all if a woman lacked a mating look, and was just a human being more fragile than himself with contours that were softer and more rounded.

Am I going mad? he wondered. In all the books there was no reference to the possibility of a change in non-sex-privileged men and women. It could hardly occur biologically. How could it, when all desire had been bred out of the non-sex-privileged for four generations?

To every man his appointed task, his niche in the social fabric. And to every woman. The sex-privileged were naturally in the minority. How could it have been otherwise, when there was so great a need for trained specialists in an advanced technological society? How could a reasonable and thoughtful man fly in the face of what history had confirmed time and time again?

Had not three great societies gone down in flaming ruin because Man had permitted his animal instincts to block the road to 

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