aw. "Earthsmith doesn't even know
what planet he's from. Good old Earthsmith." He was a small thin man,
this titterer, with too-bright eyes, vaguely purple skin, and a
well-greased shock of stiff green hair.

Smith squared his wide shoulders and looked into the colored lights of
the registrar. "It's a mistake. My name is Smith."

"What planet, Smith?"

"Earth. The planet Earth." Smith had a rosy, glistening bald head and a
hairless face. A little bead of sweat rolled into his left eye and made
him blink. He rubbed his eye.

"Age?" The machine had a way of asking questions suddenly, and Smith
just stared.

"Tell me your age. Age. How old are you?"

Smith wanted to sit down, only there were no chairs. Just the room with
its long line of people behind him, and the machine up front. The
registrar.

"I'm twenty-seven."

"Twenty-seven what?"

"You asked me my age. I'm twenty-seven years old, and three months."

Except for the clicking of the machine, there was a silence. The voice
of the machine, feminine again, seemed confused when it spoke. "I cannot
correlate years, Smith of Earth. How old are you?"

It wasn't an ordeal, really, but Smith felt more uncomfortable every
moment. Was the machine making fun of him? If it were, then it had an
ally in the crowd, because the man who had tittered was laughing again,
the green shock of hair on his head bobbing up and down.

"Earthsmith doesn't even know how old he is. Imagine."

The machine, which was more feminine than not, asked Smith how far the
planet Earth was from its primary, and what the orbital speed of the
planet was. Smith told her, but again the terminology was not capable of
correlation.

"Unclassified as to age, Smith. It's not important. I wonder, are you
dominant or receptive?"

"I'm a man. Male. Dom--"

"That doesn't matter. Smith, tell me, how long has it been since anyone
from the planet Earth has attended the school?"

Smith said he didn't know, but, to his knowledge, no one from Earth had
ever been here. "We don't get around much any more. It's not that we
can't. We just go and then we don't like it, so we come back to Earth."

"Well, from the looks of you I would say you are a receptive. Very
definitely receptive, Smith." Given sufficient data, the registrar could
not be wrong. Given sufficient data the registrar could tell you
anything you wanted to know, provided the answer could be arrived at
from the data itself. "The male and female