I salute you, Bernhardt Hinkel, he thought caustically. The humane inventor of the ultimate in painless weapons... no, it hadn't hurt; you were correct. We felt nothing, didn't even know. And then-Removal of the Hynes Gland in as many people as possible had been instigated, and it hadn't been a waste of effort; because of it there were people alive today. And certain combinations of male and female -were not sterile; it was not an absolute condition but rather a relative one. We can, in theory, have children; in fact, a few of us do.

The children outside his window, for instance... Along the street a homeostatic maintenance vehicle swished collecting trash and checking on the growth of lawns, first on one side of the street and then on the other. The

steady whirring of the machine rose above the children's voices.

The empty city is kept tidy, Pete said to himself as the machine halted to send out pseudopodia to grope peevishly at a camellia bush. Or rather, virtually empty city—a dozen or so non-B people lived here, at least according to the census he had last been shown.

Behind the maintenance vehicle came a second construct, this one even more elaborate; like a great twenty-legged bug it propelled itself down a driveway, hot on the scent of decay. The repair vehicle would rebuild whatever had fallen into ruin, Pete knew; it would bind up the wounds of the city, halt deterioration before it began. And for what? For whom? Good questions. Perhaps the vugs liked to look down from their observation satellites and see an intact civilization, rather than mere ruins.

Putting out his cigarette, Pete went into the kitchen, hoping to find food for breakfast. He had not inhabited this apartment for several years, but nonetheless he opened the vacuum-sealed refrigerator and found in it bacon and milk and eggs, bread and jam, all in good shape, everything he needed for breakfast. Antonio Nardi had been Bindman in Residence here before Pete; undoubtedly he had left these, not knowing that he was going to lose his title in The Game, would never be coming back.