"Don't!" she said, surprised, pulling away. She look around. Her husband. Gust dropped his arms at once, stepping back from her.
"You don't have to get angry," he said. "We're married you know, and no one is watching."
"It's not your pawing me I don't like. But I'm working, can't you see that?"
Leatha turned to face him, angry at his physical touch despite her words. He stood dumbly before her, a solid black-haired and dark-complexioned man with slightly protruding lower lip that made him look, now, as though he were pouting.
"You needn't look so put out. It's work time, not play time."
"Damn little playtime anymore." He glanced quickly around to see if anyone was within earshot. "Not the way it was when we were first married. You were pretty affectionate then." He reached out a slow finger and pressed it to his midriff.
"Don't do that." She drew away, raising her hands to cover herself. "It's been absolute hell here today. A defective valve in one of the hormone feed lines, discovered too late. We lost seventeen bottles. In an early stage, luckily."
"So what's the loss? There must be a couple of billion sperm and ova in the freezers. They'll pair some more and put you back in business."
"Think of the work and labor in gene-matching, all wasted."
"That's what technicians are paid for. It will give them something to do. Look, can we forget work for a while, take off an evening? Go to Old Town. There's a place there I heard about, Sharm's. They have real cult cooking and entertainment."
"Can't we talk about it later? This really isn't the time…."
"By Christ, it never is. I'll be back here at seventeen thirty. See if you can't possibly make your mind up by then."
He pushed angrily out of the door, but the automatic closing mechanism prevented him from slamming it behind him. Something had gone out of life, he wasn't sure just what. He loved Leatha and she loved him, he was sure of that, but something was missing. They both had their work to do, but it had never caused trouble before. They were used to it, even staying up all night sometimes, working in the same room in quiet companionship. Then coffee, perhaps as dawn was breaking, a drowsy pleasant fatigue, falling into bed, making love.
It just wasn't that way anymore and he couldn't think why. At the elevators he entered the nearest and called out, "Fifty." The doors closed, and the car fell smoothly away. They would go out tonight: he was resolved that this evening would be different.
Only after he had emerged from the elevator did he realize that it had stopped at the wrong floor. Fifteen, not fifty; the number analyzer in the elevator computer always seemed to have trouble with those two. Before he could turn, the doors shut behind him, and he noticed the two old men frowning in his direction. He was on one of the eldster floors. Instead of waiting for another car, he turned away from their angry looks and hurried down the hall. There were other old people about, some shuffling along, others riding powered chairs, and he looked straight ahead so he wouldn't catch their eyes. They resented youngsters coming here.
Well, he resented them occupying his brand-new building. That wasn't a nice thought, and he was sorry at once for even thinking a thing like that. This wasn't his building; he was just one of the men on the design team who had stayed on for construction. The eldsters had as much right here as he did, more so, since this was their home. And a pleasant compromise it had been, too. This building, New Town, was designed for the future, but the future was rather slow coming, since you could accelerate almost everything in the world except fetal growth. Nine months from conception to birth, in either bottle or womb. Then the slow years of childhood, the quick years of puberty. It would be wasteful for the city to stay vacant all those years.
That was where the eldsters came in, the leftover debris of an overpopulated world. Geriatrics propped them up and kept them going. They were growing older together, the last survivors of the greedy generations. They were the parents who had fewer children and even fewer grandchildren as the realities of famine, disease, and the general unwholesomeness of life were driven home to them. Not that they had done this voluntarily. Left alone they would have responded as every other generation of mankind had done: selfishly. If the world is going to be overpopulated — it is going to be overpopulated with my kids. But the breakthrough in geriatric treatment and drugs came along at that moment and provided a far better carrot than had ever been held in front of the human donkey before. The fewer children you had the more treatment you received. The birthrate dived to zero almost overnight. The indifferent over-populators had decided to overpopulate with themselves instead of their children. If life was being granted, they preferred to have granted to them.
