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She had been doing the new job for several weeks now, and on the whole she preferred the change. The work, which had to do with the collating and filing of governmental statistical records, was less exacting than press liaison, even if more monotonous. Sometimes she wondered why she had applied for the transfer, but it was always difficult to isolate a precise reason. At all events she had asked, and the government had obliged.

She had a friend called Valinia who worked in the same department as herself. Valinia was a lithe olive-skinned girl, not more than twenty-three, with a firm shapely body and a comprehensive fund of erotic knowledge that bewildered and fascinated Aubretia. By coincidence Valinia lived in the apartment immediately below Aubretia's and before long they spent most of their leisure time together. It wasn't a question of love—the emotional contact didn't go that deeply—but rather a matter of physical and emotional captivation. There were times when Aubretia suspected that her new friend's attitude was a little too calculating and predetermined, but the suspicion never survived the erotic impact of Valinia's alluring presence.

Life was very smooth and easy, not only for Aubretia herself but for womankind as a whole. Many of the more comprehensible statistics and computations that passed through her hands confirmed the general conditions of well-being and prosperity in which human affairs thrived. In a sense everything was tied to the industrial production program throughout the world. Vast factories turned out the requirements of civilization without staff, without workers, powered by atomic energy, controlled by automation, and remotely supervised by wired television units. The arteries of supply and provision were healthy and abundantly used. The labor program was, therefore, mainly concerned with the supervision of machines and the balancing of productivity against needs. For