Mr. Sims brightened a little. He smiled modestly. "Too bad you had to come here at fifty-six," Mr. Hoode remarked. "Heaven knows what you might have done with those last nine years. Heart trouble, wasn't it?" "So I've been told," Mr. Sims said, slipping back into his former glum mood. He still did not believe he was a sick man, but perhaps this was because things had moved too fast and he had not been given enough time to get used to the idea. "It's a serious cardiac condition," Dr. Van Stoke had told him at the annual examination, "due to an over-active life. I'll have to recommend you for Sunnylands." And that had been the first mention of the subject. "But I never had heart trouble in my life!" "The graphs show the condition clearly. There's nothing anyone can do to remedy it. I'll have to submit your name." He had protested--threatened--pleaded. "Overpopulation! Elimination of needless suffering! Burden to society! Duty to humanity!" The cliches had tripped glibly off the doctor's tongue as he signed the form. "Will you please send in a member of the family? I'll give him the final instructions. Save you the trouble of worrying over little details during the final weeks." Since then, things had moved more swiftly behind the scenes and he had had to do nothing except prepare himself--or adopt a realistic attitude, as Mr. Hoode would have described it. But he had lived too much to allow him to get used to the idea of dying in two short weeks. He hadn't even started to get realistic about it, which was probably why he could sit talking so calmly about death at that moment. * * * * * "We could give your life a climax," the director was saying. "A man like you shouldn't just fade away in one of those little cubicles." He waved a hand in the direction of the shaded windows at the rear of the palace. "You should die magnificently!" "Magnificently?" Mr. Sims repeated. "What did you have in mind?" "It's what _you_ have in mind that counts. I can offer you a lot of advice, but the final choice is yours. For instance, a large number of men like to die in some sort of combat, with guns or swords, or even with animals. We had one man who fought a tiger. Another fulfilled a life-long ambition to play the role of bullfighter. Perhaps I should explain that the government allows each guest a generous sum of money to pay for his departure. As most people do not use one hundredth of this sum, we have a rather large fund at the disposal of those who want to use it. "The bullfighter was a good example," he went on. "We had a large ring built for him. He was given horses, uniforms, picadores, and a bull specially imported from Spain. It was a wonderful afternoon." He paused in contemplation of the memory, while Mr. Sims looked on, tactfully refraining from asking the outcome.