“Oh, that rhyme!” she said. “It’s silly.”

“It says you were in love with a hominid.”

“No,” she said. “I wasn’t.” Her green eyes, as beautiful as ever, stared deeply into his. Jestocost felt uncomfortable. This was getting personal. He liked political relationships; personal things made him uncomfortable.

The light in the room shifted and her cat eyes blazed at him, she looked like the magical fire-haired girl he had known.

“I wasn’t in love. You couldn’t call it that…”

Her heart cried out, It was you, it was you, it was you.

“But the rhyme,” insisted Jestocost, “says it was a hominid. It wasn’t that Prins van de Schemering?”

“Who was he?” C’mell asked the question quietly, but her emotions cried out, Darling, will you never, never know?

“The strong man.”

“Oh, him. I’ve forgotten him.”

Jestocost rose from the table. “You’ve had a good life, C’mell. You’ve been a citizen, a committee woman, a leader. And do you even know how many children you have had?”

“Seventy-three,” she snapped at him. “Just because they’re multiple doesn’t mean we don’t know them.”

His playfulness left him. His face was grave, his voice kindly. “I meant no harm, C’mell.”

He never knew that when he left she went back to the kitchen and cried for a while. It was Jestocost whom she had vainly loved ever since they had been comrades, many long years ago.

Even after she died, at the full age of five-score and three, he kept seeing her about the corridors and shafts of Earthport. Many of her great-granddaughters looked just like her and several of them practiced the girly-girl business with huge success.

They were not half-slaves. They were citizens (reserved grade) and they had photopasses which protected their property, their identity and their rights. Jestocost.was the godfather to them all; he was often embarrassed when the most voluptuous creatures in the universe threw playful kisses at him. All he asked was fulfillment of his political passions, not his personal ones. He had always been in love, madly in love—

With justice itself.

At last, his own time came, and he knew that he was dying, and he was not sorry. He had had a wife, hundreds of years ago, and had loved her well; their children had passed into the generations of man.

In the ending, he wanted to know something, and he called to a nameless one (or to his successor) far beneath the ground. He called with his mind till it was a scream.

I have helped your people.

“Yes,” came back the faintest of faraway whispers, inside his head.

I am dying. I must know. Did she love me?

“She went on without you, so much did she love you. She let you go, for your sake, not for hers. She really loved you. More than death. More than life. More than time. You will never be apart.”

Never apart?

“No, not in the memory of man,” said the voice, and was then still.

Jestocost lay back on his pillow and waited for the day to end.

BABY IS THREE

by Theodore Sturgeon

I finally got in to see this Stern. He wasn’t an old man at all. He looked up from his desk, flicked his eyes over me once, and picked up a pencil. “Sit over there, Sonny.”

I stood where I was until he looked up again. Then I said, “Look, if a midget walks in here, what do you say—sit over there, Shorty?”

He put the pencil down again and stood up. He smiled. His smile was as quick and sharp as his eyes. “I was wrong,” he said, “but how am I supposed to know you don’t want to be called Sonny?”

That was better, but I was still mad. “I’m fifteen and I don’t have to like it. Don’t rub my nose in it.”

He smiled again and said okay, and I went and sat down.

“What’s your name?”

“Gerard.”

“First or last?”

“Both,” I said.

“Is that the truth?”

I said, “No. And don’t ask me where I live either.”

He put down his pencil. “We’re not going to get very far this way.”

“That’s up to you. What are you worried about? I got feelings of hostility? Well, sure I have. I got lots more things than that wrong with me or I wouldn’t be here. Are you going to let that stop you?”

“Well, no, but —”

“So what else is bothering you? How you’re going to get paid?” I took out a thousand-dollar bill and laid it on the desk. “That’s so you won’t have to bill me. You keep track of it. Tell me when it’s used up and I’ll give you more. So you don’t need my address. Wait,” I said, when he reached toward the money. “Let it lay there. I want to be sure you and I are going to get along.”

He folded his hands. “I don’t do business this way, Son—I mean, Gerard.”

“Gerry,” I told him. “You do, if you do business with me.”

“You make things difficult, don’t you? Where did you get a thousand dollars?”

“I won a contest. Twenty-five words or less about how much fun it is to do my daintier underthings with Sudso.” I leaned forward. “This time it’s the truth.”

“All right,” he said.

I was surprised. I think he knew it, but he didn’t say anything more. Just waited for me to go ahead.

“Before we start—if we start,” I said, “I got to know something. The things I say to you—what comes out while you’re working on me—is that just between us, like a priest or a lawyer?”