mally foul horoscope. She had not been a
planned baby. Her parents felt great guilt about it, but the deed was
done and there was no help for it. She had been born with Huck
retrograde in the tenth house, opposing Fors retrograde in the fourth,
and so on, and so on, so that even the most amateur astrologer could
see right at her birth that she was born for no good, destined for
some shameful end.

She told about it with an air of resigned cheerfulness, saying that
after all her parents had really done more than could be expected of
them. Both with her and her similarly accidental brother Lappy--now
_there_, Travis thought, was a careless couple--whose horoscope, she
said dolefully, was even worse than her own. The parents had sent her
off to school up through the first few years, and had given her a
handsome dowry when they disowned her, and they did the same with
Lappy a few years later.

But Navel held no bitterness. She was a girl born inevitably for
trouble--her horoscope forecast that she would be a shame to her
parents, would spend much of her life in obscure, dangerous places,
and would reflect no credit on anyone who befriended her. So, for a
child like this, what reasonable citizen would waste time and money
and love, when it was certain beforehand that the child grown up would
be as likely as not to end up a murderess? No, the schools were
reserved for the children of promise, as were the jobs and the parties
and the respect later on. The only logical course, the habitual
custom, was for the parents to disown their evilly aspected children,
hoping only that such tragedies as lay in the future would not be too
severe, and at least would not be connected with the family name.

And Navel was not bitter. But there was only one place for her,
following her exile from her parents' home. A career in business was
of course impossible. Prospective employers took one look at your
horoscope and--zoom, the door. The only work she could find was menial
in the extreme--dish-washing, street cleaning, and so on. So she
turned, and Lappy turned, as thousands of their ill-starred kind had
turned before them for generations, to the wild gangs of the sewers.

And it was not nearly so bad as it might have seemed. The sewer gangs
were composed of thousands of people just like herself, homeless, cast
out, and they came from all levels of society to found a society of
their own. They offered each other what none of them could hav