"Maybe I'm going to wind up a lush," Pete said. And, with a possible life-span of two hundred and some years ... it could be pretty dreadful.

"I don't think so," Joe Schilling said. "You're too morose to become an alcoholic. I'm more afraid of—" He hesitated.

"Suicide."

Pete slid an ancient HMV record from a stack and examined the label. He did not look directly at Schilling; he avoided meeting the man's wise, blunt gaze.

"Would you be better off back with Freya?" Schilling inquired.

"Naw." Pete gestured. "I can't explain it, because on a rational basis we made a good pair. But something intangible didn't work. In my opinion, that's why she and I lost at the table; somehow we never could really pull together as a couple." He recalled his wife before Freya, Janice Marks, now Janice Remington. They had cooperated successfully; at least it had seemed so to him. But of course they had not had any luck.

As a matter of fact, Pete Garden had never had any luck; in all the world he had no progeny. The goddam Red Chinese, he said to himself ... he wrote it off with the customary envenomed phrase. And yet—

"Schilling," he said, "do you have any issue?"

"Yes," Schilling said. "I thought everyone knew. A boy,

eleven years old, in Florida. His mother was my—" He counted for a time. "My sixteenth wife. I only had two more wives before Luckman wiped me out."

"How much issue has Luckman exactly? I've heard it placed at nine or ten."

"About eleven, by now."

"Christ!" Pete said.

"We should face the fact," Joe Schilling said, "that Luck-man, in many ways, is the finest, most valuable human being alive today. The most direct issue, the greatest success in Bluff; his amelioration of the status of the non-Bs in his area."