"It's the news, straight news, all the news that's important enough to print, and written so it can be understood...." "By a washing-machine," Sara broke in. "Sterilized, deodorized, dehumanized news--and still it stinks." "Dehumanized! Certainly it's dehumanized! There's none," I said emphatically, "of that so-called 'human element' about it! Why, the whole point is to eliminate human error, human prejudice, human partiality, human ignorance!" Sara sat up suddenly, driving her rump right into the pit of my stomach. "Oh," she said, "I almost completely forgot. What do you want for Christmas?" Torn between pain and exasperation, I believe I kept myself in check admirably. From clenched teeth I informed her I was intelligent enough not to exchange unwanted gifts of equal value, moral enough to abhor Crimmus. All I could ever want, I said, was not to be bludgeoned in the belly with a butt. I asked her to please get up, and she did, cheerfully. III Driving down to Nork the next morning, I dropped off the feeder tramway onto the fast belt south. Hanging from the feeder hook, waiting for an open space in the line of cars, it occurred to me a lot of people were on the road, both Nork-bound and northbound to Montral. "Crimmus shopping," I said aloud, remembering, and swore mildly at the slip. While the day--tomorrow, it was--still meant something to some, it's not the kind of rational deformity you generally talk about. Sara would, of course. But I long ago faced the fact that Sara's a romantic. As neuroses go, that's a mild one, and didn't even call automatically for correction. All that it meant was that she was restricted to the C Population Zones that she wouldn't leave anyway, and a little outside special tutoring in the Realities for our children. It wouldn't even affect my job or Civil Service rating. Still, if Vermont were ever zoned Population B, there might be trouble. She wouldn't leave Milbry. Oho, I thought to myself, locking onto the Nork belt and double-checking the destination coordinates, I am lapsing into speculation--risky ground, for a Reporter. The code expressly forbids speculation, and with reason. Speculation uses an inadequate number of arbitrarily chosen half-truths to shape conflicting possibilities, all but one of which time must prove to be false. Truth is only what has already happened. Conjecture is a laboratory matter for trained scientists to dabble in, under laboratory controls. Judging from the scarcity of scientific news these days, conjecture wasn't working there either. Having neatly boxed myself into an uninformed generality, I grimaced, took a dozer and slept all the way to Nork.