tiny wrinkles where she had clutched the sheets, her small hands on either side of her head. He tried to look away, but he found it difficult to do so. He recalled the hem of the dress, as it had been pushed a little above the back of her knees, and the disturbing exquisiteness of what had consequently met his view. The wholeness of what had been revealed had been particularly striking to him, the way the curves, from the foot to the ankle, to the calf, to the back of the knee, and above, blended into one another. He had suddenly understood how, on some barbaric, monstrous worlds, men could kill for the possession of women. To be sure, he did not think that the women of the home world, so miserable, frustrated, smug, inhibited, petulant, and cold, would be in great danger. It was hard to imagine them stripped and roped in the grass, prizes awaiting the outcomes of savage contests. Still, he did not know. They were, after all, women. Perhaps, somehow, under proper conditions, their psychological disarrangements, or improvements and perfections, so carefully wrought by subtle, pervasive conditioning programs, might be torn down and the female might then be freed to find herself as she might be in and of herself, as a female. Then Brenner dismissed such horrid thoughts. But found it hard to forget the chain and disk, with the lock, on the maid’s ankle. Too, he remembered how she had made tiny noises when Rodriguez had touched her. He scarcely dared conjecture what might have occasioned them. One of the great breakthroughs of the past several millenniums had been the scientific proof that human beings did not have sexual needs, but that such needs had been invented by insidious men as devices wherewith to dominate, oppress, and enslave women. Accordingly, even if, as Brenner seemed to, one had such needs, one must realize that they did not exist. Certainly almost no one on the home world would admit that they had such needs, and the public admission of such in a public figure was tantamount to disgrace and ruin. Many biologists and even social scientists, who, because of the sensitivity of the issues with which they dealt, could usually be relied upon to produce findings congenial to, and supportive of, current political orthodoxies, whatever they might be, had lost posts for pretending to have come up with politically dubious results. For a time some recusants had embraced a “Two-Truth Theory,” namely, that there was scientific truth and political truth, which many scientists accepted because it let the chips fall where they might, rather than in prescribed configurations, but the dishonesty of this distinction was quickly detected by various political establishments. This was succeeded by the “Two-Opinion-One-Truth” Theory, which was to the effect that there was only one truth, the political truth, whatever it might be on the world in question, but that there might be two opinions, according to one of which truth might seem to be “A” and according to the other of which truth might seem to be other than “A.” This approach, too, was quickly suppressed in the best interests of the community, party, people or whatever, and replaced with the “One-Opinion-One-Truth” Theory, which, in an intellectual tour de force of unity, simplicity, and elegance, successfully restored one qualified opinion, identical with the one correct truth, the political truth, whatever it might be at the time. The theory, incidentally, that human beings lacked sexual needs superseded a somewhat less politically effective theory, which had earlier also been indisputably proven scientifically, the theory that there was only one sex, the human sex. This theory had been quite useful in its role of reducing gender differences which, because there was now only one sex, the human sex, were then regarded as either minimal or nonexistent. The flaw with this theory was that one then had to recognize two varieties of human sexuality, or two sorts of individuals, for example, the egg-carriers, or “eggers,” as it was said, and the sperm-producers, or “spermers,” as it was said. Astute, politically progressive critics saw in this a concealed version of the old, troublesome two-sex theory which had been so politically divisive, in which men, in particular, thinking of themselves as different from women, might find it more difficult to recognize that that their true best interests lay in the inhibition, suppression, and denial of their own sexuality, in the surrender of manhood, or, perhaps better,