yackety-yack. Haven't anything to talk to her about, anyway. She's just a child."

"A pretty one, though."

"Yes, she is."

"You sure don't know anything about women. If anyone made eyes at me that way, I'd do something about it."

"What, for instance?" Norm inquired dryly.

"Well, of course, I'm married. But I'd find out who she was, anyhow. Sometimes I think you're dead and don't know it."

"Sometimes I agree with you," Norm said. He fed one of the punch cards into the transmitter head, which fingered the holes and told ICWEA what the problem was. ICWEA began drawing a curve on the curve tracer. It would have taken Norm or anyone else days to arrive at the answer. "See? Skips here and there, but I can ink in the gaps."

"Looks like the pen catches on the paper a little. I'll grind the point while I'm at it. Say, that thing really thinks, doesn't it?"

"In a way. Generally, the digitals have it all over the analogues when it comes to reasoning, but I built an extra brain into her."

"Where?"

"The 'Y' path. Remember? Tries several appropriate methods in succession. I analyzed my own methods of attack, and built the same methods into her. She's an electronic me, except faster and more accurate."

"I bet. She's more alive than you are. Why don't you step out a little? First thing you know, you'll be getting old, and it'll be too late."

"Leave the match-making to the women. I may be old, but I'm not an old fool. It's fall, not spring."

"Yeah? All you need to be an old fool is just a little more time."

orm ignored him, and took a card from his desk. It seemed to be an extra, not with the pack. He put it in the machine. The curve-tracer began to draw a rather abrupt curve, which meandered half across the sheet before Norm realized what it was. Suddenly, an image leaped to his mind's eye and he watched with fascination while the pen traced this mathematical impossibility to the far end of the paper, and in obedience to several successive negative factors in the problem retraced in the opposite direction a little lower down.

A head, a slightly lifted elbow, full rounded breast, a knee luxuriously drawn up, a dangling arm, all in one continuous line. There was nothing obvious about it; it was formalized, but with the individual style that is the artist's signature. Once seen, the image persisted.

"Hey, Charley, look at this!"

"Yeah. What about it?"

"What about it! You ever see anything like it?"

"Sure. It's a closed loop, like a hysteresis curve."

"An hysteresis curve. But this isn't one. Look closely."

"Of course, it has harmonics and variables in it. Might be one of those gas-discharge curves, if the gas tube happened to be defective. I've seen some funny...."

"Look! It's a reclining figure, with the head turned toward you—see?—and the forearm over the head—here. Breast, knee here, foot with the toe pointed, calf, thigh, and the near arm hanging. Remarkable, once you see it...."

"You're crazy. All I can see is a closed loop with some wrinkles in it."

"Why, it's nearly as plain as a photograph! I can't understand...."

"Plain, my eye! If that's the arm hanging down, and this the hand, where are the fingers? That 'hand' is just an oval. You got some imagination if you can get a reclining figure out of that."

"Not a nude of the beer-garden type, I grant you. This is real art. Know what this means? Have you any idea how complex a formula must be to trace a curve like this? Just a plain hyperbola is bad enough. This is a test of the machine. Those Mugu boys have worked out this formula to see if she could break it down and draw the equivalent curve, though I don't see how they did it. Even the larger digitals would find this a tough nut to crack, but our baby is a