To attempt to solve it after the dynamics had commenced, when he himself was one of the variables, was another matter. Had he been in the second couple? Or the ninth?

He had decided that the dance would not bring them together, and was trying to figure out some way to fudge-to change positions with another male dancer-when the dance did bring them together.

He felt her finger tips in his. Then her weight was cradled against his hand as he swung her by the waist. He was dancing lightly, beautifully, ecstatically. He was outdoing himself -he could feel it.

Fortunately, she landed on top.

Because of that he could not even help her to her feet. She scrambled up and attempted to help him. He started laboriously to frame his apology in the most abjectly formal terms he could manage when he realized that she was laughing.

"Forget it," she interrupted him. "It was fun. We'll practice that step on the quiet. It will be a sensation."

"Most gracious madame-" he began again.

"The dance-" she said. "We'll be lost!" She slipped away through the crowd, found her place.

Monroe-Alpha was too demoralized by the incident to attempt to find his proper place. He slunk away, too concerned with his own thalamic whirlwind to worry over the gaucherie he was commiting in leaving a figure dance before the finale.

He located her again, after the dance, but she was in the midst of a group of people, all strangers to him. A dextrous young gallant could have improvised a dozen dodges on the spot whereby the lady could have been approached. He had no such talent. He wished fervently that his friend Hamilton would show up-Hamilton would know what to do. Hamilton was resourceful in such matters. People never scared him.

She was laughing about something. Two or three of the braves around her laughed too. One of them glanced his way. Damn it-were they laughing at him?

Then she looked his way. Her eyes were warm and friendly. No, she was not laughing at him. He felt for an instant that he knew her, that he had known her for a long time, and that she was inviting him, as plain as speech, to come join her. There was nothing coquettish about her gaze. Nor was it tomboyish. It was easy, honest, and entirely feminine.

He might have screwed up his courage to approach her then, had not a hand been placed on his arm. "I've been looking everywhere for you, young fellow."

It was Doctor Thorgsen. Monroe-Alpha managed to stammer, "Uh... How do you fare, learned sir?"

"As usual. You aren't busy, are you? Can we have a gab?"

Monroe-Alpha glanced back at the girl. She was no longer looking at him, was instead giving rapt attention to something one of her companions was saying. Oh well, he thought, you can't expect a girl to regard being tumbled on a dance floor as the equivalent of a formal introduction. He would look up his hostess later and get her to introduce them. "I'm not busy," he acknowledged. "Where shall we go?"

"Let's find some place where we can distribute the strain equally on all parts," Thorgsen boomed. "I'll snag a pitcher of drinks. I see by this morning's news that your department announces another increase in the dividend, " he began.

"Yes," Monroe-Alpha said, a little mystified. There was nothing startling in an increase in the productivity of the culture. The reverse would have been news; an increase was routine.

"I suppose there is an undistributed surplus?"

"Of course. There always is." It was a truism that the principal routine activity of the Board of Policy was to find suitable means to distribute new currency made necessary by the ever-increasing productive capital investment. The simplest way was by the direct issue of debt-free credit-flat money-to the citizens directly, or indirectly in the form of a subsidized discount on retail sales. The indirect method permitted a noncoercive control against inflation of price symbols. The direct method raised wages by decreasing the incentive to work for wages. Both methods helped to insure that goods produced would be bought and consumed and thereby help to balance the books of every businessman in the hemisphere.

But man is a working animal. He likes to work. And his work is infernally productive. Even if he is bribed to stay out of the labor market and out of production by a fat monthly dividend, he is quite likely to spend his spare time working out some gadget which will displace labor and increase productivity.

Very few people have the imagination and the temperament to spend a lifetime in leisure. The itch to work overtakes them. It behooved the planners to find as many means as possible to distribute purchasing power through wages in spheres in which the work done would not add to the flood of consumption goods. But there is a reasonably, if not an actual, limit to the construction, for example, of non-productive public works. Subsidizing scientific research is an obvious way to use up credit, but one, however, which only postpones the problem, for scientific research, no matter how "pure" and useless it may seem, has an annoying habit of paying for itself many times, in the long run, in the form of greatly increased productivity.

"The surplus," Thorgsen went on, "have they figured out what they intend to do with it?"

"Not entirely, I am reasonably sure," Monroe-Alpha told him. "I haven't given it much heed. I'm a computer, you know, not a planner."

"Yes, I know. But you're in closer touch with these planning chappies than I am. Now I've got a little project in my mind which I'd like the Policy Board to pay for. If you'll listen, I'll tell you about and, I hope, get your help in putting it over."

"Why don't you take it up with the Board directly?" Monroe-Alpha suggested. "I have no vote in the matter."

"No, but you know the ins-and-outs of the Board and I don't. Besides I think you can appreciate the beauty of the project. Offhand, it's pretty expensive and quite useless."

"That's no handicap."

"Huh? I thought a project had to be useful?"

"Not at all. It has to be worthwhile and that generally means that it has to be of benefit to the whole population. But it should not be useful in an economic sense."

"Hmmm... I'm afraid this one won't benefit anybody."

"That is not necessarily a drawback. 'Worthwhile' is an elastic term. But what is it?"

Thorgsen hesitated a moment before replying. "You've seen the ballistic planetarium at Buenos Aires?"

"No, I haven't. I know about it, of course."

"It's a beautiful thing! Think of it, man-a machine to calculate the position of any body in the solar system, at any time, past or future, and give results accurate to seven places."

"It's nice," Monroe-Alpha agreed. "The basic problem is elementary, of course. " It was-to him. To a man who dealt in the maddeningly erratic variables of socio-economic problems, in which an unpredictable whim of fashion could upset a carefully estimated prediction, a little problem involving a primary, nine planets, a couple of dozen satellites, and a few hundred major planetoids, all operating under a single invariable rule, was just that-elementary. It might be a little complex to set up, but it involved no real mental labor.

"Elementary!" Thorgsen seemed almost offended. "Oh, well, have it your own way. But what would you think of a machine to do the same thing for the entire physical universe?"

"Eh? I'd think it was fantastic."

"So it would be-now. But suppose we attempted to do it for this galactic island only."

"Still fantastic. The variables would be of the order of three times ten to the tenth, would they not?"

"Yes. But why not? If we had time enough-and money enough. Here is all I propose," he said earnestly. "Suppose we start with a few thousand masses on which we now have accurate vector values. We would assume straight-line motion for the original set up. With the stations we now have on Pluto, Neptune, and Titan, we could start checking at once. Later on, as the machine was revised, we could include some sort of empirical treatment of the edge effect-the limit of our field, I mean. The field would be approximately an oblate ellipsoid."