Afram girl seeks lodg’g. Versatile. Box NRT5
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“This is Laura. Natural blonde, of course—honey, slip ’em down and demonstrate. Ah—the sharing bit is understood, presumably?”
“I hope so.”
“So do I.”
Laura giggled.
Jettex is practical as well as luxy—ask the folk from the Mountain States who can hold down city-centre jobs thanks to our five-minutely crush-hour service!
“Just a formality, if you don’t mind. Young lady, hold out your hand … Thanks. It’ll take five minutes. Hang on … Sorry, we can only give you a transient’s pass for this state. Congratulations, though—hope it’s a baby.”
WHEN THE PRESSURE GETS TO THE BLOWOFF POINT YOU’LL BE GRATEFUL FOR GT’S KEYS TO EASIER LIVING. TRANKS, PROPHYLACTICS, ARE ONLY THE START OF THE STORY. OUR AIDS TO NORMAL FEMALE BIOLOGICAL FUNCTIONING ARE APPROVED BY ALL STATE CODES.
“Prophet’s beard, Donald, if I’d known you had a thing about dark meat I could have had my pick of—”
“Then why don’t you try a brunette some time, say an Italian type? Someone who’s fed nothing but stark white sliced-and-wrapped is apt to want some wholemeal granary now and then!”
But in any household problems like this are bound to arise.
Olive Almeiro Agency offers you the chance of a lifetime. We have a wider range of good-heredity adoptables than any other agency in our field. Offer not good in following states: New York, Illinois, California …
BE IT ENACTED THAT: carriage of the genes listed in Appendix A below shall ipso facto be grounds for abortion upon presentation of the mother at any Eugenics Processing Board in the following …
“Who are you going to get in to replace Lucille?”
“Don’t know. Haven’t thought about it yet.”
POPULATION STRETCHING TO LIMIT. Reports today from official sources hint that immigrants to this state with residents’ qualifications more recent than 30th March last will be given choice of sterilisation or removal.
We’ve celebrated our twenty-first. Have you? Liberal association seeks broadminded couples, triples, to enlarge the scope of our activities. We have FOURTEEN children in the group already!
“Prophet’s beard, Donald…!”
“I’m sorry, I’ve said I’m sorry! But can I help getting bored with your line of shiggies? Laura was Scandahoovian, Bridget was Scandahoovian, Hortense was and Rita was and Moppet was and Corinne was. I think you’re in a rut, to be frank.”
Reliable couple seek babyminding opportunities, one or several days p.w. (Certificates avlble. Webtoe only drawback) Box NPP2
BE IT ENACTED THAT: carriage of the genes listed in Appendix B below shall ipso facto be grounds for sterilisation of any male child achieving the age of puberty after …
“Ah, go to hell!”
“That’s a remarkably Christian attitude, Donald. Both meaningless and barbaric.”
“Stop trying to play on my WASP guilt feelings. Sometimes I wonder how you’d make out in a genuinely nonracial society.”
“There aren’t any. Give you another generation, you’ll add the genes for dark skin-pigment to the list of—”
Leo Branksome! Come home! Being sterilised isn’t going to make us love you any the less! You’re our boy, our only son, and running away was a stupid thing to do! And you’re only fourteen, remember! Your adoring but miserable parents.
“Thirty-four? And you have a clean genotype? My God, I ought to push this glass in your face! All we’ve got is a suspicion, not even proof but a suspicion, that Harold’s mother had sickle-cell anaemia and I’d give my right arm for children and you smug bastard can stand there and—”
tracking with closeups (4)
MASKER AID
Conscious that she was a walking advertisement for her own processes, conscious that not even the brilliant lights of the video technicians would reveal a flaw in her cosmetic garb, conscious with particular pleasure of the fact that the woman they had sent to interview her was conspicuously less well turned-out, Guinevere Steel cooed at the microphone.
“Why, the success of my Beautiques is due to two factors: the ability of my customers to recognise who does and who doesn’t keep that quantum-jump ahead of transient fashions, and equally their ability to judge what does and what does not offer real value for money!”
She preened.
Indeterminably aged, she wore a bluzette of shimmering yellow because her complexion was in the Goyaesque-tan range; it moulded her bosom into almost perfect cycloidal curves, peaked on either side with a pair of her own remote-controlled Nipicaps—activated at the moment because they would show to excellent advantage on a video screen. They were always at the wearer’s disposal; should she be interested in the man—or woman—she was talking to, she could dilate them without doing more than press her arm to her side; conversely she could deflate them, and there were few more ego-undermining things a woman could do to a block than let it be seen how her erogenous tissue lost interest.
She wore a skirtlet that was no more than an overgrown belt because she had extremely graceful legs. They tapered to jewelled slippers because she had high, springy arches, but not to bare feet because those arches had been reconstructed and on the left foot one of the scars still showed.
She had her hair in four parallel rolls, dyed silver; her finger- and toe-nails were chromed more brilliantly than mirrors and flashed back the light of the lamps at the camera’s lens.
About seventy per cent of her skin was revealed, but none of it was bare except perhaps among the roots of her hair. Apart from the pearly masking on her face, she wore whole-body matting, a personal blend of her own Beautique’s skin tinter, and altogether nearly thirty other products which left a detectable deposit on the epidermis. As a final touch her surface veins had been delicately traced in blue.
“Why, I think it’s contemporary in the way it ought to be,” she told the microphone. “We don’t live in the world of our ancestors, where dirt, and disease, and—and what one might call general randomness dictated how we lived. No, we have taken control of our entire environment, and what we choose by way of fashion and cosmetics matches that achievement.”
“But the current trend towards a more—more natural look,” the interviewer ventured.
“What counts is how the person looking at you is affected,” Guinevere said complacently. “It affects you, too, of course—to be totally confident, as we make our clients, of the impression you’re going to create is the only thing that really matters.”
“Thank you, Miss Steel,” the interviewer murmured.
* * *
That much out of the way, Guinevere marched back into her private office. With the door safely shut, she could drop into her chair and let the bitterness leak out into the set of her mouth, the narrowness of her eyes.
Lighting a Bay Gold, she stared at her reflection.
Totally confident? In this business, where tomorrow the man in the case or the girl-friend, whichever, might decide to get to closer quarters? The more elaborate and fragile and lovely the cosmetic job, the greater the effect—and the worse the letdown when it had been kissed, and caressed, and wrestled with. There were seventeen Beautiques now, one for every year she had been in the business, each licensed after careful appraisal to a manager who had to have worked for three months directly under Guinevere herself, who was trained to exacting standards and had contracted to pay a fat commission for the privilege of using the name. Every rational precaution had been taken, but who should know better than a cosmetician that human beings are less than rational creatures?