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little.”
    “What are the books?”
    “The thin one’s the poetic works of Fairweather, and the heavy one’s an anthology of nineteenth-century poetry.”
    “Oh,” he said, trying to hide his resentment of the books. He had almost forgotten the reason for their meeting, and the reminder was disappointing. It was as if she had brought little brother along.
    “We don’t have to talk about them in this cold,” he said, and explained to her about Malcolm’s apartment and how he had come to acquire it. He gave a verbatim report of his conversation with his roommate without editorializing on the motives behind his conversation.
    She thought the idea sensible.
    “You take the big book and walk north, and I’ll go back the way I came. If we’re being watched, whoever sees us will think we met for me to give you a textbook. Now handle the book with care, for it’s a family heirloom. I’ll delay for a few minutes before I go to the apartment.”
    “Dad didn’t care for your choice of subject, did you notice?”
    “I expected his reaction.”
    “How so?”
    “I’ll tell you at the apartment.”
    “You’re not frightened?”
    “I am, a little,” she confessed.
    “The risks are only as great as we make them.”
    “It’s not our meeting being reported that I fear. It’s something else, more important, that I’ve found in the books. Go now, but don’t look back.”
    He turned and strolled down the mall, whistling. To any casual onlooker he was merely a student who had borrowed a book from another student and gone about his business.
    He whistled to allay his own concern. On her face he had seen a deep-seated anxiety rather than a passing fear. Whatever it might be that she had found in the books, she was troubled.
    Helix was impressed by the Malcolm apartment.
    After she had taken off her coat and laid the books on the divan, she bubbled with comments. “Look at the gorgeous view!… Isn’t this carving adorable?… I thought you were supposed to dust!”
    He had not seen the apartment since his first inspection. He shrugged his shoulders. “It needs a woman’s touch, and so do I.”
    She was gazing out the window as he walked up behind her and put his arms about her. She turned to him, her face tilted.
    He kissed her.
    Heretofore, he had never particularly valued a kiss as a thing in itself. Mates and brothers and sisters kissed. The V kiss had not been one of the major weapons in his arsenal; in fact, he had deplored the ritual as unsanitary although he had bowed to the convention. Kissing this girl was definitely pleasant, and he was lingering to the point of procrastination when she pushed him back.
    To his chagrin and consternation, he saw that her face was set in the impersonal lines of formality, and her voice was flat as she recited: “As a female citizen bearing on my tunic the insignia of the professional, it is my duty to hold the seed within me sacred to the purposes of the state. I shall be feminine at all times but at no time womanly except in the presence of the mate selected for me by the Department of Genetics.”
    She paused, now, looking at him, rather than through him, and her eyes flicked downward for a split second. “We are not going to risk declassification. One of us has to be strong, and some instinct tells me it will not be you.”
    Standing before her, he knew his plans had gone awry, not so much by what she had said as by the way he felt. His reaction to her had been total.
    She was to the girls at Belle’s Place what a philharmonic orchestra was to a banjo, but an orchestra had a string section and in his response to the nuances and range of the emotions she aroused in him, he took pride rather than shame in the tremor which had frightened her. He desired her with self-admitted desire encompassed by a greater desire to guard her from harm. He would never permit the blithe lad he had been two months before to carry out his plan and endanger this girl.
    So he donned his mask