ring tomorrow, but it's
getting later than you think."

Again he pressed the dial. "Get me Leah Hachovnik. Leah? I've got some
new stuff to dictate. Be a good girl and come along right away."

Breaking the connection, he drew out his notebook and opened it.

David Wong was a big man, tall, well-muscled, compact, and he might have
been handsome but for a vague something in his appearance. His lean face
and upcurving mouth were those of a young man; his hair was a glossy
black, too thick to be disciplined into neatness; and he was
well-dressed, except for the unfashionable bulging of his jacket pocket,
where he carried a bulky leather case of everfeed pens and notebooks.
But it was his eyes that were disconcerting--an intense blue, brilliant
and direct, they had a wisdom and a comprehension that seemed
incongruous in so young a face.

A worried frown creased his forehead as he turned back to one of the
first pages, studying the symbols he had recorded there, but he looked
up without expression on hearing the tapping of slender heels.

"Quick work, Leah. How are you this morning?"

"As if anybody cared!" Leah Hachovnik settled down before the compact
stenograph machine, her shoulders slumped, her thin mouth drooping at
the corners.

"Feel like working?" said David.

"As much as I ever do, I guess. Sometimes I wonder if the traitors in
the granite quarries have it any worse than I do. Sometimes I wish I'd
been born into some other Category. Other people have all the luck. I
don't know what it is, Dr. Wong, but I just don't seem to have the pep I
used to have. Do you think it could be the climate here in New York?"

"People do grow older, Leah," he reminded her gently.

"I know. But Tanya--you remember my twin sister Tanya, the one that got
so sick that time, ten years ago, when you did that experiment with Blue
Martian Fever, and she had to be sent out to Arizona? Of course I
haven't ever seen her since then--people in Office Category never get
permission for that kind of travel--but she writes me that ever since
she got well again she feels just like a kid, and works as hard as she
ever did, and she still seems to enjoy life. Why, she's had three
proposals of marriage this past year alone, she says, and yet she's
thirty-five, just the same age as I am--being twins, you know?--and
nobody's proposed to me in ages. Well, I'm certainly going to try to
find out what her method is. She's coming back tomorrow."

"She