Back in my stag cubicle at the dorm, I fingered my chin in what must have been pure atavism; it wasn't even close to time for a depilatory booster. Sara--Sara, Sara, Sara--once urged me to skip the pill some month and grow a beard, a mustache or something, like her Four-Great-Grandfather Isaac, Elias Witherill's son. The one that was a war major, in 1861. I told her it was an aberration for her to have our sort of relationship with a grandfather image, and besides a beard did mean body hair in general and that itched. She said, well, I could instead get a false beard, like Santa Claus, and then we had a really big argument about what sorts of vulgarity were amusing, and which were not. That broke off our second engagement, I think it was. Yes, the second. Now she was pregnant, on purpose, we were going to get wed, and I had just seven minutes to get to work. * * * * * My Scoop is in the usual sound-proofed, glass-walled isol-booth you'll see anywhere in Nork. The fact that it is in a plaza at the 75th level and thus under the open sky, a thing that bothers a lot of Nork people, is to me more than mitigated by the view from the vestibule. You can see, beyond the Liberty Statue International Memorial floating in New York Bay over the former site of Times Square, to the Long Island shore at Mineola and up into Conicut. Today there wasn't time to look around. I formally relieved Vern, the late-nightside Reporter, and had barely punched my ID against the time clock when the District Reporter's face came on the viewer for visual check. "Reporter One-C Ben Marli. US-6044-230 988 368GN 0800/24 Deck 2047," I said. The face nodded, faded. Vern was still there when the viewer went blank. Most of us punch in exactly on time and punch out exactly four hours later, to the minute. Vern always comes on early and leaves late because, I think, his father was convicted of advertising under the Edict, and Vern is still trying to clear the family number. "Quiet night, Ben. Just one accident," he said. I was leafing through the little pile of dupes--simultypes of the stories that had gone into the Scoop, with the ibems of the Source and his or her Second--and was seeing this for myself, so I just grunted. Then one, the accident he'd spoken of, brought me up sharp. On the face it was a straight item: the Source, Retailer Mark Neman, US2109-590-412 663CC, a visitor to Nork, had told of an accident involving one Housewife Ela Brand in a store on the 24th level, unnamed, of course. She fell on an antique glass bowl, which broke and cut her neck severely. The store's security guard substantiated the story, adding that the woman had nearly bled to death from a severed carotid artery before arrival of the store doctor. He had been delayed by the nearly unheard-of circumstance of the birth of twins in the store's infirmary. First aid by an unidentified passerby saved the accident victim's life, according to both Source and Second.