“Usual stakes?” he asked, as he shuffled the cards. “Ten, twenty, thirty?”

They nodded, and Ed began to lay out a hand. He didn’t stop talking though.

“I was telling Stew,” he explained in a voice that must have carried clear to the pilot in his sealed-off cabin, “that real estate is good for the blood pressure, if not much else. My wife is all the time telling me to move into a more hotshot field. ‘I feel so ashamed,’ she says, ‘a woman of my age with only two children. Stewart Raley is ten years younger than you and already Marian has had her fourth baby. If you were half a man, you’d be ashamed, too. If you were half a man, you’d do something about it.’ You know what I tell her? ‘Sheila,’ I say, ‘the trouble with you is you’re 36A-happy.’ ”

Bruce Robertson looked up, puzzled. “36A?”

Ed Greene guffawed. “Oh, you lucky bachelor, you! Wait’ll you get married! You’ll find out what 36A is all right. You’ll eat, sleep and drink 36A.”

“Form 36A,” Frank Tyler explained to Bruce quietly as he raked in the pot, “is what you fill out when you make application to the FPB for permission to have another child.”

“Oh. Of course. I just didn’t know the number. But wait a minute, Ed. Economic status is only one of the factors. The Family Planning Bureau also considers health of the parents, heredity, home environment—”

“What did I tell you?” Ed crowed. “A bachelor! A wet-behind-the-ears, no-child bachelor!”

Bruce Robertson turned white. “I’ll be getting married one of these days, Ed Greene,” he said through tightly set teeth. “And when I do, I’ll have more children than you ever—”

“You’re right about economic status being only one of the factors,” Frank Tyler broke in hurriedly, peaceably. “But it’s the most important single factor, and if there already are a couple of children in the family, and they seem to be in pretty good shape, it’s the factor that the FPB considers to the exclusion of almost everything else in handing down its decision.”