he thought. She
wouldn't care. She would probably think it a very huge joke that she had
been born with innards that made her different from everybody else. She
would be amused by the profound probings and mutterings of the learned
doctors trying to find an explanation for something that had no
explanation.

Mel drew the sheet tenderly over her face.

"You can do as you wish," he said to Dr. Winters. "It makes no
difference to us--to either of us."

* * * * *

The sedative Dr. Winters had given him, plus his own exhaustion, drove
Mel to sleep for a few hours during the afternoon, but by evening he was
awake again and knew that a night of sleeplessness lay ahead of him. He
couldn't stand to spend it in the house, with all its fresh reminders of
Alice.

He walked out into the street as it began to get dark. Walking was easy;
almost no one did it any more. The rush of private and commercial cars
swarmed overhead and rumbled in the ground beneath. He was an isolated
anachronism walking silently at the edge of the great city.

He was sick of it. He would have liked to have turned his back on the
city and left it forever. Alice had felt the same. But there was nowhere
to go. News reporting was the only thing he knew, and news occurred
only in the great, ugly cities of the world. The farmlands, such as he
and Alice had known when they were young, produced nothing of interest
to the satiated denizens of the towns and cities. Nothing except food,
and much of this was now being produced by great factories that
synthesized protein and carbohydrates. When fats could be synthesized
the day of the farmer would be over.

He wondered if there weren't some way out of it now. With Alice gone
there was only himself, and his needs were few. He didn't know, but
suddenly he wanted very much to see it all again. And, besides, he had
to tell her folks.

* * * * *

The ancient surface bus reached Central Valley at noon the next day. It
all looked very much as it had the last time Mel had seen it and it
looked very good indeed. The vast, open lands; the immense ripe fields.

The bus passed the high school where Mel and Alice had attended classes
together. He half expected to see her running across the campus lawn to
meet him. In the middle of town he got off the bus and there were
Alice's mother and father.

They were dry-eyed now but white and numb with shock. George D