He came to his feet again to head for the teevee screen and demand an audit of the past twenty-four hours from Central Statistics. That'd show it up. Every penny expended. Something was crazy here. Someway that girl had pulled a fast one. She didn't seem the type. But something had happened to his twelve shares of Variable Basic, and he wasn't standing for it. It was his security, his defense against slipping back into the ranks of the cloddies, the poor demi-buttocked ranks of the average man, the desperately dull life of those who subsisted on the bounty of the Ultrawelfare State and the proceeds of ten shares of Inalienable Basic. He dialed Statistics and placed his card against the screen. His voice was strained now. "An audit of all expenditures for the past twenty-four hours." Then he sat and watched. His vacuum-tube trip to Manhattan was the first item. Two dollars and fifty cents. Next was his hotel suite. Fifty dollars. Well, he had known it was going to be expensive. A Slivovitz Sour at the Kudos Room, he found, went for three dollars a throw, and the Far out Coolers Natalie drank, four dollars. Absinthe was worse still, going for ten dollars a drink. He was impatient. All this didn't account for anything like a thousand dollars, not to speak of fifty thousand. The audit threw an item he didn't understand. A one dollar credit. And then, immediately afterward, a hundred dollar credit. Si scowled. And then slowly reached out and flicked the set off. For it had all come back to him. At first he had won. Won so that the other players had crowded around him, watching. Five thousand, ten thousand. Natalie had been jubilant. The others had cheered him on. He'd bet progressively higher, smaller wagers becoming meaningless and thousands being involved on single bets. A five thousand bet on odd had lost, and then another. The kibitzers had gone silent. When he had attempted to place another five thousand bet, the teevee screen robot voice had informed him dispassionately that his current cash credit balance was insufficient to cover that amount. Yes. He could remember now. He had needed no time to decide, had simply snapped, "Sell one share of Variable Basic at current market value." The other eleven shares had taken the route of the first. When it was finally all gone and he had looked around, it was to find that Natalie Paskov was gone as well. * * * * * Academician Lofting Gubelin, seated in his office, was being pontifical. His old friend Hans Girard-Perregaux had enough other things on his mind to let him get away with it, only half following the monologue. "I submit," Gubelin orated, "that there is evolution in society. But it is by fits and starts, and by no means a constant thing. Whole civilizations can go dormant, so far as progress is concerned, for millennia at a time." Girard-Perregaux said mildly, "Isn't that an exaggeration, Lofting?"