It was a rebuke. Carlo Bergozza redonned his spectacles and rose from the table. He said, "If you'll excuse me I have some business to attend to. I'm sure my daughter will see that you are properly entertained." He left the room with slow, old-man steps. Maria said fondly, "Poor darling, he gets so upset. He'll take a pill and go to sleep. Let's go to the bathroom, shall we?" * * * * * Though outwardly the Secretary General's mansion was hyper-gingerbread steamboat Gothic, inwardly it was entirely modern in plan. There was a living room, of course, for formal receptions, but as in all normal Earth-dwellings of the period the bathroom was the lived-in chamber. There and there only did people of the 2070's permit themselves to relax. This was a logical development of latter-day plumbing and air conditioning and the crowding of apartment and small-house life. Actual lavatory plumbing was concealed, in this instance, by an etched glass screen. Otherwise the room featured comfortable plastic lounge chairs and sofas around a fifteen-foot sunken tub and a small semicircular bar, fully equipped. On entering Maria unfastened her harness and coverall and stood before them, a sweet-bodied dark-eyed girl in her early twenties, clad in shorts and halter. "Lord!" she exclaimed, pushing dark hair back from her broad low forehead, "It feels good to relax. Zalen, I want to talk to you." "Delighted," said Lindsay, mildly surprised at the use of his Martian first name. "I've got something to tell him first," said Anderson, unhitching his own harness and emerging as a lean medium-sized man in good condition for his forty years. "I got word just before I flew up here tonight that your life may be in danger, Zalen." * * * * * Lindsay accepted the arrack-fizz Maria handed him, said "That makes warning number two, Senator. Du Fresne talked to me about it this afternoon." Maria paled visibly. She said, "It sounds impossible!" "It backs up the judgment of my own group," said Senator Anderson. "Du Fresne is just about the smartest computerman we have." He eyed Lindsay speculatively, added, "You don't seem much impressed by your danger, Zalen." "How can I be?" Lindsay countered. "After all, Earth is supposed to be much further advanced than Mars in civilization. And we have had no political murder on Mars in more than fifty years." Maria made a despairing gesture. "Oh, dear!" she exclaimed. "You _don't_ understand, Zalen. On Mars you have both room and time to settle your political conflicts. And you don't have computers." "We have some pretty sharp rows," Lindsay told her. "But we don't have anyone assassinated." He paused, looked at them both, added, "Do you have many of them here?" "Not many," said Anderson. "But there is a growing tendency to go along with computer verdicts, no matter how extreme."