Chapter 1

The living room reflected wealth, position, good taste. In size it was a full ten feet by fourteen, with nearly an eight-foot ceiling. Light was furnished by glow panels precisely balanced in color to produce light’s most flattering tint for the woman who sat in a delicate chair of authentic, golden-veined blackwood.

The chair itself must have cost a fortune to ship from Tau Ceti Five. It was an ostentation in the eyes of the visitor, who viewed it as evidence of a self-indulgent attitude that would certainly make his job more difficult.

The air in the room was fresh and very faintly aromatic, pleasing. It came draftlessly refreshed at a temperature of seventy-six degrees and a relative humidity of fifty per cent and permitted the entry of no more than one foreign particle (dust) per cubic foot.

The coffee table was another ostentation, but for a different reason than the imported chair of blackwood. The coffee table was of mahogany—terrestrial mahogany—and therefore either antique, heirloom, or both, and in any combination of cases it was priceless. It gave the visitor some dark pleasure to sit before it with his comparison microscope parked on the polished mahogany surface, with the ease of one who always parked his tools on tables and stands made of treasure woods.

There were four persons. Paul Hanford swirled brandy in a snifter with a series of nervous gestures. Mrs. Hanford sat in the blackwood chair unhappily, despite the flattering glow of the wall-panels. Their daughter, Gloria, sat in such a way as to distract the visitor by presenting a target that his eyes could not avoid. Try as he would, his gaze kept straying to the slender, exposed bare ankle and the delicate, high-arched foot visible beneath the hem of the girl’s dress.

Norman Ross, GSch, was the visitor, and he subvocalized his tenth self-indictment as he tore his gaze away from Gloria Hanford’s ankle to look into Paul Hanford’s face. Ross was the Scholar of Genetics for the local division of the Department of Domestic Tranquility and he should have known all about such things, but he obviously did not.

He said, “You can hardly blame yourselves, you know,” although he did not really believe it.

“But what have we done wrong?” asked Mrs. Hanford in a plaintive voice.

Scholar Ross shook his head and caught his gaze in mid-stray before it returned all the way to that alluring ankle. “Genetics, my dear Mrs. Hanford, is a statistical science, not a precise science.” He waved vaguely at the comparison microscope. “There are your backgrounds for seven generations. No one—and I repeat, no one—could have foreseen the issue of a headstrong, difficult offspring from the mating of characteristics such as these. I checked most carefully, most minutely, just to be certain that some obscure but important conflict had not been overlooked by the signing doctor. Doctors, however, do make mistakes.”

Gloria Hanford dandled her calf provocatively and caused the hem of her skirt to rise another half-inch. The scholar’s eyes swung, clung, and were jerked away again.

“What’s wrong with me, Scholar Ross?” she asked in a throaty voice.

“You are headstrong, self-willed, wild, and—” his voice failed because he wanted to lash out at her for her brazen and deliberate display of her bare ankle; he struggled to find a drawing-room word for her that would not wholly offend the hapless parents and ultimately came up with—”meretricious.”

Gloria said, “I’m all that just because I enjoy a little fun?”

“You may call it fun to scare people to death by flying your aircar below roof level along the city streets, but the Department of Air Traffic says that it is both dangerous and illegal.”

“Pooh!”

Paul Hanford said, “Gloria, it isn’t that you don’t know better.”

Mrs. Hanford said, “Paul, how have we failed as parents?”

Scholar Ross shook his head. “You haven’t failed. You can’t help it if your daughter is a throwback—”

“Throwback!” exclaimed Gloria.

“—to an earlier, more violent age when uncontrolled groups of headstrong youths formed gangs of New York and conducted open warfare upon one another for the control of Tammany Hall. Those wild days were the result of unregistered, unrestricted, and uncontrolled matings. Since no attempt was made to prevent the unfit from mating with the unfit, there were many generations of wild ones—troublemakers. It is not surprising that, with such a human heritage, an occasional wild one is born today.”

The scholar took another surreptitious (he hoped) glance at the bare ankle and said, “No, you are not directly to blame. We know you wouldn’t spawn a troublemaker willfully and maliciously. It’s just an unfortunate accident. You must not despair over the past—but you must spend your efforts to calm the troubled future.”

“What should we do, Scholar Ross?” asked Paul Hanford.