as in the old
days. We've learned to be psychologically flexible."

Littlejohn smiled. "Then that _is_ the solution?" he asked.

"Yes. Eliminating the Leffingwell injections will give us a good
proportion of normal children again. _But where do we find the normal
women to bear them?_"

"Normal women?"

Thurmon sighed, then reached over and placed a scroll in the scanner.
"I have already gone into that question with research technicians," he
said. "And I have the figures here." He switched on the scanner and
began to read.

"The average nubile female, aged thirteen to twenty-one, is two feet,
ten inches high and weighs forty-eight pounds." Thurmon flicked the
switch again and peered up. "I don't think I'll bother with pelvic
measurements," he said. "You can already see that giving birth to a
six or seven-pound infant is a physical impossibility under the
circumstances. It cannot be done."

"But surely there must be _some_ larger females! Perhaps a system of
selective breeding, on a gradual basis--"

"You're talking in terms of generations. We haven't got that much
time." Thurmon shook his head. "No, we're stopped right here. We can't
get normal babies without normal women, and the only normal women are
those who began life as normal babies."

"Which comes first?" Littlejohn murmured. "The chicken or the egg?"

"What's that?"

"Nothing. Just an old saying. From history."

Thurmon frowned. "Apparently, then, that's all you can offer in your
professional capacity as an historian. Just some old sayings." He
sighed. "Too bad you don't know some old prayers. Because we need them
now."

He bowed his head, signifying the end of the interview.

Littlejohn rolled out of the room.

His 'copter took him back to his own dwelling, back across the
rooftops of New Chicagee. Ordinarily, Littlejohn avoided looking down.
He dreaded heights, and the immensity of the city itself was somehow
appalling. But now he gazed upon the capital and center of
civilization with a certain morbid affection.

New Chicagee had risen on the ashes of the old, after the war's end.
Use of thermo-nucs had been limited, fortunately, so radioactivity did
not linger, and the vast craters hollowed out by ordinary warheads had
been partially filled by rubble and debris. Artificial fill had done
the rest of the job, so that now New Chicagee was merely a flat
prairie as it must have been hundreds of years ago--a flat prairie on
which the city had b