He was already on his way to the bathroom. If he should see her again, her voice would be different, her hair would be different. She had no scars or physical aberrance that he could recognize her by. She was healthy, intelligent and normal, and therefore selected for breeding. So was he. Ask the geneticists. He had. In the bathroom, the clock told him to wash his face. Carefully he rubbed desensitizer on his mask, on the ten thousand artificial nerve endings that transcribed every motion of the living tissue it encased and magnified that motion a thousand times to the mightier motions of the machine. The desensitizer entered the porous material; the mask sagged and became transparent like a cellophane sack. He lifted it from his face. Two huge holes for eyes, a gaping rent of a mouth. He threw it with disgust into the depository. It would go back to the Neurological Division to be cleaned and repaired. He looked into the mirror with the interest of a man who sees his face on rare occasions. The nerves stood out like splintered cracks in glass. He fingered his face lovingly, unmindful of the agony caused by his touch, remembering the woman. He wondered in what manner her face would differ from his. The pain made him stop thinking about it and he closed his eyes to spray a weak solution of desensitizer on the burning flesh. Almost immediately the pain was gone; but it left him with a marble mask that wouldn't come to life again until the effects of the desensitizer wore off. He washed quickly in warm water, rubbed disinfectant on the atrophied area, rinsed it and stepped in front of the dryer. A thousand tongues of almost corporeal warmth licked over his skin. He had shaved and desensitized his body the night before, so it was only a matter of washing and disinfecting before he climbed into the overall casing and stepped clumsily into the sensitizing shower. The huge bag began to shrink and cloud, adhering to his body as though it were another layer of his skin. Since the casing acted as a magnifying extension of his nervous and muscular systems, his body, within the casing, felt nothing. There was no sense of contact as he walked across the floor and opened the bathroom door. As far as feeling went, he was without a body. He said "hello" experimentally, to see if the distorter was still on. It wasn't. The hard flatness of his voice surprised him. The rosy light was gone also. Something peculiar to women caused the filter to slide over the coldly glowing silver. No man could cause it. No warrior was supposed to want to. * * * * *