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a traffic law – anything to get her behind in her relationship to the police. If we caught her jaywalking we could make it stick; she could resist arrest, use foul and obscene language in public, be a public menace by virtue of the fact that she had deliberately flouted the law… and, he thought, if only Barnes’ people could catch her on a felony rap; for example buying and/or drinking alcohol. Then (his own attorneys had explained this) we could hit her with an unfit mother suit, take the children, put the blame on her in a true divorce action – which, under those circumstances, we could make public.
    But, as it stood, Irma had too many things on him. A contested divorce would make him look bad indeed, what with what Irma could scrape together out of the gutter.
    Picking up his line-one fone he said, ‘Barnes, I want you to get hold of that cop dame, that Alice Noyes, and send her in here. Maybe you should come along, too.’
    Police occifer Noyes headed the team which had been trying, for almost three months, to get something on Irma. Twenty-four hours a day, his wife was monitored by police video and audio gadgetry… without her knowledge, of course. In fact, one video camera scanned the happenings in Irma’s bathroom, which unfortunately had not turned up anything to speak of, Everything Irma said, did, everyoneshe saw, every place she went – all on reels of tape at PSS Central in Denver. And it added up to nothing.
    She’s got her own police, he realized gloomily. ExPSS flatheads who roamed about with her when she went shopping or to a party or to Dr. Radcliff, her dentist. I’ve got to get rid of her, he said to himself. I should never have married an Old Man wife. But it had happened long ago, when he did not hold the high position which had become his later on. Every Unusual and every New Man sneered at him in private, and he did not like it; he read thoughts, lots of them, emanating from many, many people, and buried there somewhere lay the contempt.
    It was exceptionally great among the New Men.
    While he lay waiting for Director Barnes and occifer Noyes, he examined the
Times
once again, opening it at random to one of its three hundred pages.
    And found himself confronted by an article on the Great Ear project… an article which called the byline of Amos Ild, a very well-placed New Man: someone Gram could not touch.
    Well, the Great Ear experiment is just rolling merrily along, he thought sardonically as he read.
    Thought to be beyond the scope of probability, work on the first purely electronic telepathic listening device advances at a reassuring rate, officials of McMally Corporation, the designer and builder of Great Ear, as it has come to be called, said today in a press conference attended by many skeptical observers. ‘When Great Ear goes into operation,’ Munro Capp opined, ‘it will be capable of telepathically monitoring the thought-waves of tens of thousands of persons, and with the ability – not found among Unusuals – to unscramble these enormous flood-tides of…
    He tossed the newspaper away; it fell with a noisy thump to the deep pile of the carpeted floor. Those New Men bastards, he said savagely to himself, his teeth grinding impotently. They’ll pour billions of pops into it, and after GreatEar they’ll build a device which can replace precog Unusuals, then all the rest, one by one. There’ll be poltergeist machines rolling along the streets and buzzing through the air.
We won’t be needed.
    And… instead of the strong and stable two-party government which they now had, there would be a one-party system, a monolithic monster with New Men holding all key posts, at all levels. Goodbye to Civil Service – except to tests for New Man cortical activity, that double-domed neutrologics with such postulates as, A thing is equal to its opposite and the greater the discrepancy, the greater the congruity. Christ!
    Maybe, he thought, the whole structure of New Man thought is a