he could even turn his head, much less look over his shoulder.
You could hear the gristle popping.
We took the hint and shut up.
"At United Bioengineers," the pitch went on, "we have no
doubt that, given twenty or thirty million years, Mother Nature
would have remedied some of these drawbacks. In fact," and here
he gave a smile that managed to be sly and aw-shucks at the
same time, "we wonder if the grand old lady might have settled
on this very System . . . that's how good we think it is.
"And how good is that? I hear you saying. There have been
a lot of improvements since the days of Christine Jorgensen.
What makes this one so special?"
"Christine who?" Cricket whispered, typing rapidly with
the fingers of her right hand on her left forearm.
"Jorgensen. First male-to-female sex change, not counting
opera singers. What are they teaching you in journalism school
these days?"
"Get the spin right, and the factoids will follow. Hell,
Hildy, I didn't realize you dated the lady."
"I've done worse since. If she hadn't kept trying to lead
on the dance floor . . . "
This time an arm--it had to be an arm, it grew out of his
shoulder, though I could have put both my legs into one of his
sleeves--hooked itself over the back of the chair in front of
me, and I was treated to the whole elephantine display, from
the crew-cut yellow hair to the jaw you could have used to plow
the south forty, to the neck wider than Cricket's hips. I held
up my hands placatingly, pantomimed locking up my lips and
throwing away the key. His brow beetled even more-- god help me
if he thought I was making fun of him-- then he turned back
around. I was left wondering where he got the tiny barbells he
must have used to get those forehead muscles properly pumped
up.
In a word, I was bored.
I'd seen the Sexual Millennium announced before. As
recently as the previous March, in fact, and quite regularly
before that. It was like end-of-the-world stories, or perpetual
motion machines. A journalist figured to encounter them every
few weeks as long as his career lasted. I suspect it was the
same when headlines were chiseled into stone tablets and the
Sunday Edition was tossed from the back of a woolly mammoth. I
had lost track of how many times I'd sat in audiences just like
this, listening to a glib young man/woman with more teeth than
God intended proclaim the Breakthrough of the Age. It was the
price a feature reporter had to pay.
It could have been worse. I could have had the political
beat.
" . . . tested on over two thousand volunteer subjects . .
. random sampling error of plus or minus one percent . . . "
I was having a bad feeling. That the story would not be
