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next to me.”
    “You're just wearing that Streeling professorial garb.”
    “Appropriate to the occasion. I want to show that I'm still just a professor.”
    She worked on the dress some more and finally said, “You know, some husbands would enjoy
     watching their wives do this.”
    Hari looked up as she wriggled into the last of the clingy ensemble in amber and blue.
     “Surely you don't want to get me all excited and then have to endure the reception that
     way.”
    She smiled impishly. “That's exactly what I want.”
    He lounged back in his airchair and sighed theatrically. “Mathematics is a finer muse.
     Less demanding.”
    She tossed a shoe at him, missing by a precise centimeter.
    Hari grinned. “Careful, or the Specials will rush to defend me.”
    Dors began her finishing touches and then glanced at him, puzzled. “You are even more
     distracted than usual.”
    “As always, I fit my research into the nooks and crannies of life.”
    “The usual problem? What's important in history?”
    “I'd prefer to know what's not.”
    “I agree that the customary mega-history approach, economics and politics and the rest,
     isn't enough.”
    Hari looked up from his pad. “There are some historians who think that the little rules of
     a society have to be counted, to understand the big laws that make it work.”
    “I know that research.” Dors twisted her mouth doubtfully. “Small rules and big laws. How
     about simplifying? Maybe the laws are just all the rules, added up?”
    “Of course not.”
    “Example,” she persisted.
    He wanted to think, but she would not be put off. She poked him in the ribs. “Example!”
    “All right. Here's a rule: Whenever you find something you like, buy a lifetime supply,
     because they're sure to stop making it.”
    “That's ridiculous. A joke.”
    “Not much of a joke, but it's true.”
    “Well, do you follow this rule?”
    “Of course.”
    “How?”
    “Remember the first time you looked in my closet?”
    She blinked. He grinned, recalling. She had been subtly snooping, and slid aside the large
     but feather-light door. In a rectangular grid of shelves were clothes sorted by type, then
     color. Dors had gasped. “Six blue suits. At least a dozen padshoes, all black. And shirts!
     -- off-white, olive, a few red. At least fifty! So many, all alike.”
    “And exactly what I like,” he had said. “This also solves the problem of choosing what to
     wear in the morning. I just reach in at random.”
    “I thought you wore the same clothes day after day.”
    He had raised his eyebrows, aghast. “The same? You mean, dirty clothes?”
    “Well, when they didn't change ... ”
    “I change every day!” He chuckled, remembering, and said, “Then I usually put on the same
     outfit the next day, because I like it. And you will not find any of those available in
     the stores again.”
    “I'll say,” she said, fingering the weave on his shirts. “These are at least four seasons
     out of fashion.”
    “See? The rule works.”
    “To me, a week is twenty-one clothing opportunities. To you, it's a chore.”
    “You're ignoring the rule.”
    “How long did you dress that way?”
    “Since I noticed how much time I spent making decisions about what to wear. And that what
     I really liked to wear wasn't in the stores very often. I generalized a solution to both
     problems.”
    “You're amazing.”
    “I'm simply systematic.”
    “You're obsessional.”
    “You're judging, not diagnosing.”
    “You're a dear. Crazy, but a dear. Maybe they go together.”
    “Is that a rule, too?”
    She kissed him. “Yes, professor.”
    The inevitable Special screen formed about them the instant they left their apartment. By
     now he and Dors had trained the Specials to at least allow them the privacy of a single
     wedge in the drop tube.
    The grav drop was in fact no miracle of gravitational physics; it came from advanced
     electromagnetics. Each instant over a thousand