"I'm all right, Mother Weedon," she said. She felt a pang of fear that stirred the discomfort between her temples. If she were really sick, mentally or physically, Mother Weedon might recommend that she be dropped from the team. After therapy she would be reassigned to some other group--and the thought was insupportable. "Don't worry about our Lynne." Janet's tone bore a basis of mockery. "She has the stamina of a Messalina." Damn Janet! Lynne regarded the other third of the team with resentment. Trust her to bring a name like Messalina into it. Even Ray caught the implied meaning and blushed beneath his tan. Mother Weedon looked at Lynne suspiciously. "Better take things a bit easier," Mother Weedon suggested tolerantly. "After all, the team comes first." "I know," Lynne said listlessly. She pushed her food away from her and waited sullenly while the others finished theirs. Unable to face the possibility of mental illness, she concentrated on Janet, wondered what the girl was trying to do. There was always danger of conflict, she supposed, when two young women and a young man were set up as a team. Usually the members were balanced the other way or were all of one sex. But mentally at any rate Lynne and Janet meshed perfectly with Ray. So they had been assigned to live and work together on the group-machine under Mother Weedon's watchful eye. They had been together now for eleven months. The trouble with Janet, Lynne thought, was that she wasn't the sort of girl who registered on men at first sight. She was tall, her lack of curves concealed by astute willowiness of movement, her half-homely face given second-glance allure by a deliberately and suggestively functional use of lips and eyes. Janet was competitively sexy. Lynne, who was as casually aware of her own blond loveliness as any well-conditioned and comely young woman, had not considered Janet seriously as a rival when she had fallen in love with Ray Cornell. Now, rubbed almost raw by the discomfort of her headache, Lynne decided she had underrated Janet. She was either going to have to get Ray back in line or turn him over to the other third of their team. Either way promised complications for the future.... The three of them walked the thousand meters to the brain-station, avoiding the moving sidewalk strips that would have sped them there in three minutes instead of fifteen. Lynne, who usually enjoyed the stroll through the carefully landscaped urban scenery, found herself resenting its familiarity. Besides, her head still ached. As they moved past the bazaar-block, halfway to their destination, Lynne found herself wincing at the brightness of the window-displays. Usually she found the fluorescent tri-di shows stimulating--but not today. Nor was her mood helped when Janet, nodding toward the plasti-fur coats in one of them said, "I wish I'd lived a century ago, when a girl really had to work to win herself a mink coat."