Stewart Raley hit the seat hard. “That’s enough! Your mother said she and I will decide.”

“And besides,” Lisa went on defiantly, wiping her face with one hand, “besides, I don’t want to be a member of a three-child family. All my friends are four-child family girls. I’d have to go back to those poky old friends I used to have, and I—”

“Lisa!” Raley roared. “I’m still your father! Do you want me to prove it to you?”

Silence. Marian switched back to manual for the landing. She took the baby from the twelve-year-old and they all got out of the jetabout without looking at each other.

Raley took a moment before entering the house to adjust the handi-robot from “Gardening” to “Waiting on Tables.” Then he followed the whirring metal figure through the door.

The trouble was that Lisa was right. All other things being equal, the oldest child was the usual choice for outside adoption. For her, it was a much less traumatic experience. And the Family Planning Bureau would select the new parents carefully, from among the horde of applicants, and see to it that the transfer was made as smoothly and happily as possible. Child psychologists would make twice-weekly visits for the first few years, insuring the maximum adjustment to the new situation.

Who would the new parents be? Probably someone like Ed Greene’s brother-in-law, Paul, someone whose income had far outstripped the permissible family. That could be due to a variety of reasons: a lazy, unconventional wife, latent sterility in either partner to the marriage, a suddenly necessary hysterectomy. In any case, something that left them without the means of achieving the only kind of prestige that mattered.