He recalled an evening they had spent lying on the summer lawn of the park, looking out at the haze-dimmed stars. It had been shortly after Clara joined him in cutting down on the drugs, and the clear memory of their quiet laughter so captured his mind now that Bill almost tangled his car in the traffic. In memory he kissed her again and, as it had then, the newly cut grass mixed with the exciting fragrance of her skin. After the kiss they continued a mock discussion of the ancient word "sin." Bill pretended to be trying to explain the meaning of the word to her, sometimes with definitions that kept them laughing and sometimes with demonstrational kisses that stopped their laughter. He could remember Clara's face turned to him in the evening light with an outrageous parody of interest. He could hear himself saying, "You see, the ancients would say we are not _sinning_ because they would disagree with the medicops that you and Helen are two completely different people, or that Conrad and I are not the same person." Clara kissed him with an air of tentative experimentation. "Mmm, no. I can't say I care for that interpretation." "You'd rather be sinning?" "Definitely." "Well, if the ancients did agree with the medicops that we are distinct from our alters, Helen and Conrad, then they would say we are sinning--but not for the same reasons the Medicorps would give." "That," asserted Clara, "is where I get lost. If this sinning business is going to be worth anything at all, it has to be something you can identify." Bill cut his car out of the main stream of traffic and toward the park, without interrupting his memory. "Well, darling, I don't want to confuse you, but the medicops would say we are sinning only because you are my wife's hypoalter, and I am your husband's hyperalter--in other words, for the very reason the ancients would say we are _not_ sinning. Furthermore, if either of us were with anyone else, the medicops would think it was perfectly all right, and so would Conrad and Helen. Provided, of course, I took a hyperalter and you took a hypoalter only." "Of course," Clara said, and Bill hurried over the gloomy fact. "The ancients, on the other hand, would say we are sinning because we are making love to someone we are not married to." "But what's the matter with that? Everybody does it." "The ancient Moderns didn't. Or, that is, they often did, but...." Clara brought her full lips hungrily to his. "Darling, I think the ancient Moderns had the right idea, though I don't see how they ever arrived at it." Bill grinned. "It was just an invention of theirs, along with the wheel and atomic energy."