r diamond evening bag!"

He sat down--hard. From the floor Maria whimpered, "What are you going
to do to me?"

Nina said, "I ought to kill you, you know, but it would cause too much
of a stink. So beat it and let us think. You'll be hearing from me
later. What you hear will depend on how you handle yourself from now on.
Understand?"

When she had slunk out Lindsay said, "What broke her up?"

Nina dropped the gun into her bag casually, said, "Now I know you're
lucky, you thin slob. You happened to stumble right onto her allergy.
She can't stand being thought of as a third-rate lover. That's why she's
always been jealous of me--because I have top-model rating and she could
never make it. She's too damned concerned with pleasing herself to
please anyone else. She flunked out at fourteen."

"Then why didn't _you_ pull it?" Lindsay asked her, astonished.

"Because," Nina said thoughtfully, "I'm not conditioned to think that
way. It's horribly rude here on Earth to stir up other people's
allergies. As you reminded me last night, you rat, we're all people in
glass houses."

"But I didn't even know...." muttered Lindsay.

"You hit it though," she reminded him. "And you're going to hit it again
out there in exactly five minutes."

* * * * *

Lindsay was extremely conscious of the eyes of the vidar cameras upon
him as President Giovannini, having finished his introductory speech,
led him to the alabaster stele in the center of Giac's great central
chamber and turned him over to du Fresne, whose official robe hung
unevenly from the hump of his harness.

Lindsay handed the Minister of Computation the question he had prepared
on paper, was brusquely told, "Read it please, Ambassador."

He cleared his throat and began.

"I am asking a question highly pertinent to the welfare and future amity
of the United Worlds," he said slowly. "More specifically to the future
amity of Earth and Mars. It is a simple question without involved
mathematical qualifications--but one that no computer and no man has
thus far been able to answer correctly.

"It is this continued failure of computers to come up with a logical
answer in the full frame of interplanetary conditions that has done much
to make the people of my planet feel that no computer is trustworthy to
make decisions involving human beings."

He paused, looked covertly at du Fresne, repressed a smile. The Minister
of Computation was already s