She left the living room, waving to the handi-robot, as she went, to refill Boettiger’ s empty glass. Her face was stiff with pain.

“I don’t see,” Stewart Raley exclaimed, “why the FPB has to be that rigid and meticulous in interpreting the birth-control statutes! Can’t they give a guy a little lee-way?”

“They do,” the lawyer reminded him as he put the papers carefully back in the briefcase. “They certainly do. After the child has been approved and conceived, you’ re allowed a drop in income up to nine hundred territs—a concession to the unexpected. But two thousand, a whole two thousand…”

“It’s unfair, though, it’s damned unfair! After you have a child and raise it, for it to be taken away by a minor bureau of the world government is—”

“Now, Raley, don’t be an ass!” Boettiger said sharply. “I’m your lawyer and I’ll help you to the limits of my professional competence, but I won’t sit here listening to you make noises that I know you don’t believe yourself. Either family planning on a world-wide basis makes sense, or it doesn’t. Either we make sure that each and every child is a wanted child, a valued child, with a solid chance for a decent, happy, fulfilled life, or we go back to the irresponsible, catch-as-catch-can childbearing methods of the previous centuries. We both know that intelligent family planning has made the world a far better place. Well, Form 36A is the symbol of family planning—and the Notice of Superfluity is just the reverse side of the coin. You cannot reasonably have one without the other.”

Raley bowed his head and spread his hands. “I don’t argue with that, Cleve. It’s just—it’s just—”

“It’s just that the shoe happens to pinch you right now. I’m sorry for that, deeply sorry. But the way I feel is this: If a client comes to me and tells me he absent-mindedly flew his jetabout over a restricted area, I’ll use all my legal education and every inch of my dirty mind to get him off with as low a fine as possible. When he goes further, though, and starts telling me that the traffic regulations are no good—then I get impatient and tell him to shut up. And that’s all the birth-control statutes are: a series of regulations to make the reproductive traffic of the human race flow more efficiently.”