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hand moved on, sliding past boundaries he had hardly dared imagine before. Abruptly it met the junction of her thighs. The soft down told him that she wore no underclothing here, either. Shivering with tension and excitement, he explored farther—and found a thick moisture.
    Blood! he thought, shocked. I have trespassed and I have hurt her and now she is bleeding!
    He snatched his hand away and lay beside her with the drumbeat of his heart filling the hideout. What have I done! he thought.
    Visions of consequence obsessed his mind. The outrage of Eighty-One, the shame of Five. “Why did you do it, you lecherous juvenile!” they would say. “Don’t you know you must never never never touch a girl there ?” Would they have to take her to a hospital? How would he ever get her back to her room?
    The passion in him died, blasted away by his crime. His eyes stared into the faint cross-lace of branching shrubbery above, limned against the starry sky—a sky not one whit colder than the clutching terror in his heart. What have I—what—she’s only thirteen!
    Jill’s hand touched his arm. “Aton?”
    He jumped. “Believe me, I never meant to—”
    “What’s the matter with you, all of a sudden?” she demanded, rolling over to peer into his face.
    Didn’t she know ? “The blood. There’s blood.”
    She stared. “ Blood ? What are you talking about?”
    “Down—between—I felt it. I never—”
    “You’re crazy. It’s not the time of the—” Suddenly she giggled. “Blood? You mean you thought that was—? Haven’t you ever done this before?”
    He lifted his head, finding her hot breasts close under his chin. “Before?”
    “You don’t know!” she exclaimed, the thoughtless child in her ascendant over the dawning woman. “You really don’t! And here all the time I was looking up to you, waiting for you. I thought you were the big boy.”
    Aton cowered behind his raging shame, unable to reply.
    Abruptly she was the woman again. “I’m sorry, Aton. I guess you don’t get out much. Here—I’ll show you how—”
    But he was on his hands and knees, scrambling away from her, barging out, finding the open night and running, sick with shock and embarrassment.
     
    Three
    Aton became a handsome, outwardly confident young man of twenty. He never spoke of his plans; on Hvee it was taken for granted that the son of high Family would advance to his father’s fields. At last he received the summons he had known would come.
    The living room of the house of Aurelius was generous and comfortable. A substantial hard-backed wooden chair, almost a throne, sat in a corner, parallel to the entrance; no one could exit without passing under the survey of that grim relic. A plush full-length couch lay against the far wall, seldom used. Above it, placed on the wall so that it faced Aurelius’s chair, was a color photograph of a handsome young woman: Dolores Ten, dead these twenty years and more, in childbirth. Aton had never been able to face that picture without experiencing a deep and painful guilt, compounded by another and rather different emotion that never found conscious expression.
    Aurelius Five was old, far nearer to death than his chronological age required. In health he would have been a powerful man, competent, determined, and scheduled to live another fifty years at least; but he was not in health, and only the power of his mind remained. He had exposed his body to the foul spring swamp (‘spring’ by convention only, on seasonless Hvee) too many years, and the incurable—locally—blight had taken hold. Aurelius, being what he was, had refused to spend a long convalescence on far-distant Earth, away from his farm. He had left the planet once, only once, and vowed never to do so again, and now he was in the process of dying for that vow. Aton, knowing something of the prior circumstance, agreed with the principle, though he never took it upon himself to tell his father so. They were not that