 Stop, Look, and Dig by George O. Smith. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Stop, Look, and Dig by George O. Smith. The enlightened days of metal telepathy and ESP should have made the world a better place. At the minute the Rhine Institute opened up, all the crooks decided it was time to go collegiate. Someone behind me in the dark was toting a needle ray. The impression came through so strong that I could almost read the filed off serial number of the thing, but the guy himself I couldn't dig at all. I stopped to look back, but the only sign of life I could see was the fast flick of taxi cab lights as they crossed an intersection about a half mile back. I stepped into a doorway so that I could think and stay out of the line of fire at the same time. The impression of the needle ray did not get any stronger, and that tipped me off. The bird was following me. He was no peace-loving citizen because honest men do not cart weapons with serial numbers filed off. Therefore the character tailing me was a hot papa with a burner charge labeled Steve Hamilton in his needler. I concentrated, but the only impression I could get would have specified 98 men out of 100 anywhere. He was shorter than my 6 feet 2 and lighter than my 190. I could guess that he was better looking. I'd had my features arranged by a blocked drop kick the year before the National Football League ruled the Rhine Institute out because of our use of mentals and perceptives. I gave up trying. I wanted details and not an overall picture of a hot bird carrying a burner. I wondered if I could make a run for it. I let my sense of perception dig the street ahead, casing every bump in irregularity. I passed places where I could zig out to take cover in front of telephone poles and other places where I could zag in to take cover beyond front steps and the like. I let my perception run up the block and by the time I got to the end of my range I knew the block just as well as if I'd made a practice run in the daytime. At this point I got a shock. The hot papa was coming up the sidewalk hell-bent for destruction. He was a mental sensitive and he had been following my thoughts while my sense of perception made its trial run up the street. He was running like the devil to catch up with my mind and burn it down per schedule. It must have come as quite a shock to him when he realized that while the mind he was reading was running like hell up the street the hard old body was standing in the doorway waiting for him. I dove out of my hiding place as he came close. I wanted to tackle him hard and ask some pointed questions. He saw me as I saw him skidding to an unbalanced stop and there was the dull glint of metal in his right hand. His needle ray came swinging up and I went for my armpit. I found time to curse my own stupidity for not having hardware in my own fist at the moment. Then I had my rod in my fist. I felt the hot scorch of the needle going off just over my shoulder and then came the god-awful racket of my ancient 45. The big slug caught him high in the belly and tossed him back. It folded him over and dropped him in the gutter while the echoes of my cannon were still racketing back and forth up and down the quiet street. I had just enough time to dig his wallet, pockets, and billfold before the whole neighborhood was up and out. Sirens howled in the distance and from above I could hear the thin wail of a jet copter. Someone opened the window and called, What's going on out there? Cut it out. Tea party, I called back. Go invite the cops, Tommy. The window slammed down again. He didn't have to invite the law. I arrived in three ground cruisers and two jet copter emergency squads that came closing in like a collapsing balloon. The leader of the squadron was a Lieutenant Williamson whom I'd never met before. But he knew all about me before the copter hit the ground. I could almost feel his sense of perception frisking me from the skin outward. Going through my wallet, inspecting my private operator's license and my weapon permit. I found out later that Williamson was a Ryan Scholar with a bachelor's degree in perception which put him head and shoulders over me. He came to the point at once. Any ideas about this Hammond? I shook my head. Nope, I replied. He looked at one of his men. The other man nodded. He's leveling. He said, Now look Hammond, said the Lieutenant pointedly. You're clean and we know it. But hot poppas don't go out for fun. Why was he trying to burn you? I wouldn't know. I'm as blank as any perceptive when it comes to reading minds. I was hoping to collect him whole enough to ask questions, but he forced my hand. I looked to where some of the cleanup squad were tucking the corpse into a basket. It was one of the few times I'd have happily swapped my perception for the ability to read a mind. The Lieutenant nodded unhappily. Mind telling me why you were wandering around this neighborhood? You don't belong here, you know. I was doing the job that most private eyes do. I was tailing a gent who was playing games off the reservation. You've gone into this guy's wallet, of course. I nodded. Sure. He was Peter Rambaugh, age 30, and don't bother, I know the rest. I can add only one item that you may not know. Rambaugh was a paid hot boy, suspected of playing with Skarman's mob. I've had no dealings with Skarman, Lieutenant. The Lieutenant nodded absently. It seemed to be a habit with him, probably to cover up his thinking time. Finally he said, Hammond, you're clean. As soon as I identified you, I took a dig at your folder at headquarters. You are a bit rough and fast on that prehistoric canon of yours, but you mean you can dig a folder at central files all the way from here? I did. Here was a real asker for you. I've got a range of about two blocks for good, solid, permanent things like buildings and streetcar tracks, but unfamiliar things get foggy at about half a block. I can dig lethal machinery coming in my direction for about a block and a half because I'm a bit sensitive about such things. I looked at Lieutenant Williamson and said, with a range like yours, how come there's any crime in this town at all? He shook his head slowly. Crime doesn't out until it's committed. He said, you'll remember how fast we got here after you pulled the trigger, but you're clean, Hammond. Just come to the inquest and tell all. I can go? You can go, but just to keep you out of any more trouble, I'll have one of the jet coppers drop you off at home. Mind? Nope. But isn't that more than the police are used to doing? He eyed me amusedly. If I were a mental, he said, I could read your mind and know that you were forming a notion of calling on Scarman and asking him what for, but since I'm only a mind blank Esper, all I can do is to fall back on experience and guesswork. Do I make myself clear? Lieutenant Williamson's guesswork and experience were as good as mental sensitivity, but I didn't think it was wise to admit that I'd been considering just exactly how to get to Scarman. I was quickly and firmly conveyed home in a jet copter, but once I saw them take off I walked out of the apartment again. I had more or less tacitly agreed not to go looking for Scarman, but I had not mentioned taking a dig at the apartment of the dear departed Peter Rambaugh. Rambaugh's place was uptown and the front door was protected by an 8th tumbler cylinder job that would have taxed the best of Esper lockpicks, but there was a service entrance in back that was not locked and I took it. The elevator was a self-service job and Rambaugh's back door was locked on a snap latch that a playful kitten could have opened. I dug the place for a few minutes and found it clean, so I went in and took a more careful look. The desk was not particularly interesting, just papers and letters and unpaid bills. The dresser in the bedroom was the same, excepting for the bottom drawer. That was filled with a fine collection of needle rays and stun guns and one big force blaster that could blow a hole in a brick wall. None of them had their serial numbers intact. But behind a reproduction of a Gainsborough painting was a wall safe that must have been built before Ryan Institute discovered the key to man's latent abilities. Inside of this tin can was a collection of photographs that must have brought Rambaugh a nice sum in the months when the murder business went slack. I couldn't quite dig them clear because I didn't know any of the people involved, and I didn't try too hard because there were some letters and notes that might lead me into the answer to why Rambaugh was hut burning for me. I fiddled with the dial for about 15 minutes, watching the tumblers and the little wheels go around. Then it went click and I turned the handle and opened the door. I was standing there with both hands deep in Rambaugh's safe when I heard a noise behind me. I whirled and slid aside all in one motion and my hand streaked for my armpit and came out with the forty-five. It was a woman and she was carrying nothing more lethal than the fountain pen in her purse. She blanched when she saw my forty-five swinging towards her middle, but she took a deep breath when I halted it in midair. I didn't mean to startle you, she apologized. Startle, hell, I blurted. You scared me out of my shoes. I dug her purse. Besides the usual female junk, she had a wallet containing a couple of charge account plates, a driver's license, and a hospital card, all made out to Miss Martha Franklin. Miss Franklin was about twenty-four and she was a strawberry blonde with the pale skin and blue eyes that go with the hair. I gathered that she didn't belong there any more than I did. I don't, Mr. Hammond, she said. So Martha Franklin was a mental sensitive. I am, she told me, and that's how I came to be here. I'm an Esper. You'll have to explain in the words of one syllable because I can't read you. I was not far away when you cut loose with that field piece of yours, she said flatly, so I read your intention to come here. I've been following you at mental range ever since. Why? Because there is something in that safe I want very much. I looked at her again. She did not look like the type to get into awkward situations. She colored slightly and said, one in discretion doesn't make a tramp, Mr. Hammond. I nodded, one in intact or burned, I asked. Burned, please, she said, smiling weakly at me for my intention. I smiled back. On my way to Rambo's bedroom, I dug the rest of the thugs safe, but there wasn't anything there that would give me an inkling of why he was gunning for me. I came back with one of his needle rays and burned the contents of the safe to a black char. I stirred up the ashes with the nose of the needler and left it in the safe after wiping it clean on my handkerchief. Thank you, Mr. Hammond, she said quietly. Maybe I can answer your question. Rambo was probably after you because of me. Huh? I've been paying Rambo blackmail for about four years. This morning I decided to stop it and looked your name up in the telephone book. Rambo must have read me do it. Ever think of the police, I suggested. Of course, but that is just as bad as not paying off. You end up all over the front pages anyway. You know that. There's a lot of argument on both sides, I supposed, but let's finish this one over a bar. We're crowding our luck here. In the eyes of the law we're just a couple of nasty break-ins. Yes, she said simply. We left Rambo's apartment together and I handed Martha into my car and took off. It struck me as we were driving that mental sensitivity was a good thing in spite of its limitations. A woman without mental training might have every right to object to visiting a bachelor apartment at two o'clock in the morning, but I had no firm plans for playing up to Martha Franklin. I really wanted to top this mess out and get it squared away. This she could read, so I was saved the almost impossible task of trying to convince an attractive woman that I really had no designs upon her beautiful white body. I was not all that cold to the idea, but Martha did not seem to be the pushover type. Thank you, Steve, she said. Thanks for nothing, I told her with a short laugh. Them's my sentiments. I like your sentiments, that's why I'm here. Maybe we can get our heads together and figure something out. I nodded and went back to my driving, feeling pretty good now. A man does not dig his own apartment. He expects to find it the way he left it. He digs in the mailbox on his way towards it and he may dig in his refrigerator to see whether he should stop for beer or whatever else, because these things save steps. But nobody really expects to find trouble in his own home, especially when he's coming in at three o'clock in the morning with a good looking woman. They were smart enough to come with nothing deadly in their hands, so I had no warning until they stepped out from either side of my front door and lifted me into my living room by the elbows. They hurled me into an easy chair with a crash. When I stopped bouncing, one of the gorillas was standing in front of me, about as tall as the Washington Monument as seen from the sidewalk in front. He was looking at my forty-five with careful curiosity. What gives, I demanded. The crumb in front of me leaned on and gave me a back and forth that yanked my head around. I didn't say anything, but I thought how I'd like to meet the buzzard in a dark alley with my gun in my fist. Martha said, they're friends of Rambo, Steve, and they're a little afraid of that prehistoric cannon you carry. The bird in front of Martha gave her a one-two across the face. That was enough for me. I came up out of my chair, lifting my fist from the floor and putting my back and thigh muscles behind it. It should have taken his head off, but all he did was grunt, stagger back, dig his heels in, and then come back at me with his head down. I chopped at the bridge of his nose, but missed and almost broke my hand on his hard skull. Then the other guy came charging in and I flung out a side chop with my other hand and caught him on the wrist. But Ryan Training can't do away with the old fact that two big tough men can wipe the floor with one big tough man. I didn't even take long enough to musse up my furniture. I had the satisfaction of mashing the nose and cracking my hand against a skull again before the lights went out. When I came back from Mars, I was sitting on a kitchen chair facing a corner. My wrists and ankles were taped to the arms and legs of the chair. I dug around. They had Martha take to another chair in the opposite corner, and the two gorillas were standing in the middle of the room, obviously trying to think. So was I. There was something that smelled about this mess. Peter Rambaugh was a mental, and he should have been sensitive enough to keep his take low enough so that it wouldn't drive Martha into thinking up ways and means of getting rid of him. Even so, he shouldn't have been gunning for me, unless there was a lot more to this than I could dig. What gives, I asked sourly. There was no answer. The thug with my 45 took out the clip and removed a couple of slugs. He went into the kitchen and found my pliers and came back teasing one of the slugs out of its casing. The other bird lit a cigarette. The bird with the cartridge poured the powder from the shell into the palm of my hand. I knew what was coming, but I couldn't wiggle my fingers much, let alone turn my hand over to dump the stuff out. The other guy planted the end of the cigarette between my middle fingers, and I had to squeeze hard to keep the hot end up. My fingers began to ache almost immediately, and I was beginning to imagine the flash of the flame and the fierce wave of pain that would strike when my tired hand lost its pep and let the cigarette fall into that little mound of powder. Stop it, said Martha. Stop it! What do they want, I gritted. They won't think it, she cried. The bright red on the end of the cigarette grayed with ash, and I began to wonder how long it would be before a fleck of hot ash would fall. How long it would take for the ash to grow long and top heavy and then fall into the powder, and whether or not the ash would be hot enough to touch it off? I struggled to keep my hands steady, but they were trembling. I felt the cigarette slip a bit and clamped down tight with my aching fingers. Martha pleaded again, stop it! Let us know what you want and we'll do it. Anything, I promised rashly. Even if I managed to hold that deadly fuse tight, it would eventually burn down to the bitter end. Then there would be a flash, and I'd probably never hold my hand around a gun butt again. I'd have to go looking for this pair of lice with my gun in my left. If they didn't try the same trick on my other hand. I tried to shut my mind on that notion, but it was no use. It slipped. But the chances were that this pair of closed-mouth hut boys had considered that idea before. Can you dig them, Martha? Yes, but not deep enough. They're both concentrating on that cigarette and making mental bets when it will... Her voice trailed off. A wisp of ash had dropped and my mental howl must have been loud enough to scorch their minds. It was enough to stop Martha at any rate. But the wisp of ash was cold and nothing happened except my spine got coldly wet and sweat ran down my face and into my mouth. The palm of my hand was sweating too, but not enough to wet the little pile of powder. Look, I said in a voice that sounded like a nutmeg grater. Rambo was a louse and he tried to kill me first. If it's revenge you want, why not talk it over? They don't care what you did to Rambo, said Martha. They didn't come here to practice torture, I snapped. They want something big, and the only guy I know mixed up with Peter Rambo is Scarman himself. Scarman, blurted Martha. Scarman was a big shot who lived in a palace about as lush as the Taj Mahal, in the middle of a fenced-in property big enough to keep him out of the mental range of most peepers. Scarman was about as big a louse as they came, but nobody could put a finger on him because he managed to keep himself as clean as a ray gunned needle. I was expecting a clip on the skull for thinking the things I was thinking about Scarman, but it did not come. These guys were used to having people think violence at their boss. I thought a little harder. Maybe if I made him mad enough one of them would belt me on the noggin and put me out, and then I'd be cold when the cigarette fell into the gunpowder and ruined my hand. I made myself affirm solid promise that if, as, and when I got out of this fix, I would find Scarman, shove the nose of my automatic down his throat through his front teeth, and empty the clip out through the top of his head. Then the hot boy behind me lifted the cigarette from my fingers very gently and squibbed it out in the ashtray. I got the pitch. This is the way it is done in these enlightened days. Ryan Institute and the special talents that Ryan developed should and could have made the world a better, brighter place to live in. But I've heard it said and had it proved that the minute someone comes up with something good, there are a lot of buzzards who turn it bad and make it a foul rotten medium for their lousy way of life. No, in these days of mental telepathy and extra sensory perception, crumbs do not erase other crumbs. They just grab some citizen and put him in a box until he's ready to do their dirty work for them. Guilt? That would be mine. A crime is a crime and the guy who does it is a criminal, no matter how he justifies his act of violence. The truth? Any court mentalist who waded through that pair of unwashed minds would find no evidence of any open deal with Steve Hammond. Sure, he would find violence there. But the court is no more than well aware of the fact that thinking of an act of violence is not illegal. This Ryan training has been too recent to get the human race trained into the nice cities of polite mental behavior. Sure, they'd get a few months or maybe a few years for breaking and entering as well as assault. But after all, they were friends of Rambo and this might well be a matter of retaliation, even though they thought Rambo was an incompetent bungler. So if Steve Hammond believed that he could go free with a whole hand by planning to rob a man named Skarman, that would be Steve Hammond's crime, not theirs. They didn't take any chances, even though I knew that they could read my mind well enough to know that I would go through with their nasty little scheme. They hustled Martha into the kitchen chair and all and one of them stood there with my paring knife touching her soft throat enough to indent the skin, but not enough to draw blood. The other rat untaped me and stood me on my feet. I hurt all over from the pasting I'd taken so I took a boiling shower and dressed leisurely. The guy handed me my 45 all loaded as I came out of the bathroom. The other bird hadn't moved a muscle out in the kitchen. His knife was still pressing against Martha's throat. He was still standing pat when I passed out of Esper range on the street below. In pre-Ryan days, a citizen in my pinch would holler for the cops because he couldn't be sure that the crooks would keep their end of the bargain. But Ryan training had produced a real honor among thieves so that organized crime can run as fast as organized justice. If I kept my end and they didn't keep theirs, the world would get around from their own dirty minds that they couldn't keep a bargain. Well, I was going to keep mine for the same reason, even though I am not a thief. That's the way it's done these days. You get a good Esper like me to knock off a sharp mental operator like Scarman. The trouble was I really didn't want Scarman. I wanted the pair of mental sadists up in my apartment who were holding a knife against Martha's throat. I wanted them and I wanted Martha Franklin's skin to be happily whole. And if I crossed them now, the only guys that wouldn't play ball with me in the future would be the crooks. Them I could do without. So if they figured that an Esper could take a mental like Scarman, why couldn't an Esper take the pair of them? All I had to do was think of something else until I could get my hands on their throats. Sure, they'd follow my mind as soon as they felt my mental waves within range. But if I could really find something interesting enough to occupy my attention and maybe theirs as well, they could not identify me. So I went back into the lobby of my apartment, dug into the mailbox of another party, thus identifying myself as the man in 384. Then I punched the elevator button for the fourth and leaned back against the elevator and let my mind wander up through the apartments above. I violated all the laws against esping toms as the elevator oozed upwards. Eventually my sense of perception wandered through my own apartment and I located her lying on the bed, fully dressed. She'd probably been freed lest some Esper cock get to wondering why there was a woman taped to a chair in a bachelor's kitchen. I shut my mind like a clam, but I couldn't withdraw my perception too fast. I let it ooze back there like the eyes of a letrus old man at a burly queue. I left the elevator at the fourth and walked up the stairs by reflex while my mind was positively radiating waves of vulgarity. My mind managed to identify her as the girl on the bed without thinking any name. She was a good looking strawberry blonde with a slender waist and a high bosom and long slender legs. She was wearing a pair of donnier shoes with three inch heels that did things to her ankles. Her nylons were size eight and one half, medium length, in that dark shade that always gives me ideas. Her dress was a simple thing that did not have a store label on it. So I dug the stitches for a bit and decided that it had been handmade. Someone was a fine dressmaker because it fitted her slender body perfectly. Her petticoat was a store type. It was simple and fitted too, but it had a label from Foresters in the hem. Her bra was a grace form, size 32, medium cup, but the girl in the bed did not have much need for molding, shaping, uplifting, padding, or pretense. She was all her and she filled it right to the brim. I let my perception dawdle on the slender ankles, the listen waist and the rounded hips. My door key came out by habit reflex and entered the keyhole while my sense of perception let them have one last vicarious thrill. The girl on the bed was an honest, all over strawberry blonde. She, then the door swung open and hell went out for breakfast. My 45 bellowed at the light as I slid in and sloped to one side. The room went dark as I dropped to the floor in front of my bookcase. From across the room, a hit burner seared the door and slashed sidewise, cutting a smoking swath across my encyclopedia from A-AUD to CAN-DAN and then came down as I squirmed aside. It took King Lear right out of Shakespeare before the beam winked out. It went off just in time to keep me from sporting a cooked stripe down my face. I triggered the automatic again to make a flash in their faces while I dug the room to locate them in the dark. The needle beam flared out again and drilled a hole in the bookcase behind me. The other guy made a slashing motion with his beam to pin me down, but he made a mistake by standing up to do it. I put a slug in his middle that slammed him back against the wall. He hung there for a moment before he fell to the floor with a dull, limp sound. His needle beam slashed upward and burned the ceiling before his hand went limp and let the weapon drop. I whirled to dig the other guy in the room just as the throb of a stun gun beam moaned over my head. I wondered where they'd got the arsenal, dug the serial number and realized that it was mine. It gave me a chuckle. I'm a pistol man, so the stun gun that old gorilla man was toting couldn't have had more than one charge. I tried to dig it, but couldn't. Even a doctor of perception can't really dig the number of kilowatt seconds in a Mason chamber. My accurate esping must have made the other guy desperate because he made a dive and let his needle ray burn out a slashing beam that zipped across over my head. My 45 blazed twice. He missed, but I didn't. Just as the throb of the stun gun rang in the air again, I whirled to face my stun gun coming out of the bedroom door in front of Martha Franklin. The slug intended for Martha's body never came out of my gun because her stun gun got me first. It froze me like a hunk of Greek statuary and I went forward and toppled over until I came on a three-point landing of elbow, the opposite knee, and the side of my face. I was as good as dead. My brain was still functioning, but nothing else was. I was completely paralyzed. My heart had stopped beating and my lungs had stopped breathing. And I've been told that a healthy man can retain consciousness for maybe a minute or so without a fresh supply of blood to the brain. Then things get muddy black and you've had it for good. My ESP was still functioning, but that would black out with the rest of Steve Hammond. There was no physical pain. They could have drilled me with a blunt two-by-four and I'd not have felt it. Then, because I couldn't stare death in the face, I shut my mind on the fact and asked my late girlfriend. She was standing there with my stun gun in her hand with a smile on her beautiful puss and that vibrant body swaying gently. I wanted to vomit and I would have if I'd not been frozen solid. That beautiful body presided over by that vicious brain made me sick. Her smile faded as I began to realize the truth. Her story was thin. Rambo, a mental, would have been able to play his blackmail game to the fine degree. He would have known when Martha's patience was about to grow short if Martha's story were true. No blackmailer pushed his victim to the breaking point and Rambo wouldn't have gone for me if this had been just a plain case of blackmail. No, by thinking deeply, Martha Franklin had engineered the death of Rambo and she'd almost engineered the rubbing out of Scarman, a mental Martha Franklin, a high grade mental capable of controlling her thoughts so that her cohorts could be led by the mind into doing her dirty work. My mind chuckled. I'd be gone before they caught up with Martha but they'd catch up all right. She'd leave the apartment positively radiating her active violence and then the cops would have a catch and you should see how a son of court mentalists go to work on a guilty party these days. Once they get the guy that pulled the trigger in the witness stand, in front of a jury consisting of mixed mentals and espers with no holds barred, the court gets a full load of the killer's life, adventures, habits and attitude, just before the guilty party heads for the readjustment chamber. Things were growing blacker, waves of darkness clouded by mind and I found it hard to think straight. My espersense faded first and as it faded I let it run once more over Martha's attractiveness and found my darkening mind wishing that she were the girl I believed her to be instead of the female louse she was. It could have been fun. But now I was about to black out from stun gun paralysis and Martha was headed for the readjustment chamber where they'd reduce her mental activity to the level of a menial, sterilize her and put her to work in an occupation that no man or woman with a spark of intelligence, ambition or good sense would take. She would live and die a half robot, alone and ignored. Her attractiveness lost because of her own lackluster mind and I'd been willing to go out and plug Scarman for her. Ha! And then she was at my side. I perceived her dimly, inconstantly through the waves of blackness and unreality that were like the half dreams that we have when lying the does. She levered my frozen body over on its hard back and went to work on my chest. Her arms went around me and she squeezed. Air whooshed into my dead lungs and then she was beating my breastbone black and blue with her small fists. Beat, beat, beat, beat. I couldn't feel a thing, but I could dig the fact that she was hurting her hands as she beat on my chest in a rhythm that matched the beat of her own heart. I dug her own heart beat for her and she read my mind and matched the beat perfectly. Then I felt a thump inside of me and dug my own heart. It throbbed once sluggishly. It struggled slowly. Then it throbbed to the beat of her hands and the blackening waves went away. My frozen body relaxed and I came down to rest on the floor like a melting lump of sugar. Martha dropped on top of my body and pressed me down. Her arms were around my chest as she forced air into my lungs. She beat my ribs sore when my heart faltered and squeezed me when my breathing slowed. I felt the life coming back into me. It came in like the tide with a fringe of needles and pins that float inward from the fingers and toes and scalp. Martha pressed me down on the carpet and kissed me. Full, open mouth, passionate. It stirred my blood and my mind and I took a deep, shuttering breath. I looked up into her soft blue eyes and said, thanks, slut. She kissed me again, pressing me down and writhing against me and obviously getting a kick out of my reaction. Then I came alive and threw her off with no warning. I sat up and swung a roundhouse rite that clipped her on the jaw and sent her rolling over and over. Her eyes glazed for a moment, but she came out of it and looked pained and miserable. You promised, she said huskily. You promised to kill Scarman. Yeah? You thought how you'd kill Scarman for me, Steve. Someday, I said flatly, I may kill Scarman, but it won't be for you. She tried to claw me, but I clipped her again and this time I made it stick. She went out cold and she was still out like a frozen herring by the time Lieutenant Williamson arrived with his jet copter squad to take her away. The last time I saw Martha Franklin, she was still trying to convince 12 Ryan scholars and true that any woman with a body as beautiful as hers couldn't possibly have committed any crime. She was good at it, but not that good. Funny, mental sensitives always think they're so damn superior to anyone else. End of Stop, Look and Dig by George O. Smith. Such Blooming Talk by L. Major Reynolds. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Stephen Anderson. Such Blooming Talk by L. Major Reynolds. The ringing of the doorbell cut into Henderson's concentration and he made a gesture of irritation with one outflung hand. But he didn't raise his head or shift his eyes one iota from the tiny green thing on his laboratory table. Tensely Absorbed, he stood watching the small miracle he had made, an emotion approaching exultation gripped him. He slid one hand toward a switch, never moving his eyes from the table. The infinitesimal movement of his hand increased the power throb in the machine at his side so imperceptively that only he could be aware of it. Suddenly his breath exploded in what was almost a squeal of delight. The small green plant on the table was with great effort, extending a pair of tiny rootlets and was trying to use them to walk. As Henderson watched, spellbound, the sudden cessation of the doorbell's ring went unnoticed. He stood there, willing with every cell of his body, the miracle that would make that small shred of green take that first vital step. Slowly, slowly it struggled to an upright position, stood wavering. Henderson increased the power with a trembling hand and almost forgot to breathe as he waited for the miracle which followed. Several more rootlets abruptly appeared. And now the plant balanced itself easily on the bare table. Then, slowly, as a long minute passed, one of the roots made an uncertain step, then another, and another, until it was walking unsteadily across the surface of the table. Henderson, his face, even his lips, white with excitement, now reached for another switch. Before turning it on, he adjusted a tiny microphone on the edge of the table. Then he turned the screw switch. Instantaneously, the laboratory was filled with a rustling. Then there came a series of tiny squeaks that sounded strangely like a voice speaking. Henderson sat spellbound, watching, listening. The doorbell rang again, but this time he didn't even hear it. Nothing could break the spell which held him in his seat before the first talking and walking plant the world had ever known. He picked up an alternate phase microphone and spoke into it. His voice issued from a tiny speaker beside the plant as a small whisper of itself. His voice whispered. Man, he nearly yelled his delight as the small green thing echoed the word. He shut off the mic then and got busy. He sat down and began to plan a vocabulary to educate his plant. When that was done, he would stun the world with a demonstration of his genius. It was some time before he realized there was a ghost of a voice coming from someplace in the room. He looked at the plant on the table, but it was standing cohescent. Henderson stared around the laboratory frowning. Then a movement at the window caught his eye. His mother's prized geranium was struggling to free itself from the soil in the window box. And it was muttering. Henderson blushed as he made out some of the words the flower was muttering. That plant had been in the room with him during some of his most dismal scientific failures. And evidently, it had a good memory. He watched while died as the plant struggled to lift its roots from the earth. One root finally came loose with an audible pop accompanied by a squeaking streak of profanity. Another and another root worked free and suddenly the geranium was standing on the edge of the box. Its bright red blossom turned from side to side. There were no eyes visible, but Henderson had the chilly feeling that the flower was surveying the room. Then after a moment, the plant jumped to the cell of the window from there to the seat of a chair. Then it slid down one of the legs of the chair to the floor. It shook its leaves, lifted its blossom upward at the amazed Henderson frozen in his chair. And the tiny squeaking voice said cheerfully, Hi pal. Then it started walking across the floor toward the door, muttering, Somebody's gotta answer that damn doorbell. Henderson's legs came unfroze as it went through the doorway and he made a wild dash after the walking geranium. It was padding down the hall, its roots making little padding sounds on the linoleum as he passed it. Henderson opened the door and only then did he begin to realize the scope his rays must have. He stood, jaws agape, looking down at the rose bush which stood outside the door. His mouth opened and words tried to come out, but the bush spoke first. I've been ringing this bell for hours, it said petulantly. Some nasty boys have been picking my roses and I'm getting sore. Henderson fainted then. The last thing he remembered was the voice of the geranium saying, Hi babe, come on in. I've been watching you for a long time. End of Such Blooming Talk by L. Major Reynolds. Recording by Steve Anderson, Jacksonville, Florida. Sweet Their Blood and Sticky by Albert R. Tykner. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Reading by Greg Marguerite. Sweet Their Blood and Sticky by Albert R. Tykner. They weren't human, weren't even related to humanity through ties of blood, but they were our heirs. The machine had stood there a long time. It was several hundred feet long and could run on a thimble full of earth or water. Complete in itself, the machine drew material from the surrounding landscape, transmuting matter to its special purposes. It needed sugar, salt, water and many other things, but never failed to have them. It was still working and at the delivery end where the packaging devices had been broken down, it turned out a steady turgid stream on the ground of pink striped twisting taffy. Once the whole vast desert area had been filled with such devices, producing all the varied needs of a very needful human race, but there had been no machine to produce peace. The crossing shockwaves of fused hydrogen had destroyed the machines by the tens of thousands along with all the automatic shipping lines, leaving only in the quirk of a pressure cross pattern an undisturbed taffy making machine, oozing its special lava on the plateau floor. It had been working seven and a half million years. It continued to repair itself, as if a child of the race that had started all this would come by at any moment to tip an eager pinky in the still warm taffy to taste its tangy sweetness. But there were no human beings. There had been none since the day when the package collapsed at the edge of the total evaporation zone. Krenneau said a few of his legs on the edge of the glassy weathered ridge and gazed over the plateau. Harta, next to him, trembled as she adjusted to the strange hardness of these four dimensions. Being is a thin thing here, she said. Thin, yes, Krenneau smiled, an almost dead world, but there is a mystery in that, almost to make the journey worth the coming. What mystery? But Krenneau was of the wisest on the home planet and her sense-feelers scanned once more to find what he must mean. I do feel it, everything dead, but that one great mental thing moving and a four-dimensional stream coming out in the vibrations of this world. I have been watching it, said Krenneau. What kind of life can that be? You are a sharp sensor, Harta, focus to it. She strained and then relaxed, speaking. The circuits are closed into themselves. It learns nothing from outside itself except to move and extend its metal feelers for food. Soil is its food, soil is its energy, soil is its being. Can it be alive? It is alive. All his legs rested now in a row along the ridge. He too was relaxed as one mystery disappeared. I feel your feelings, but the thing is not alive. It is a machine. I do not understand a machine in the middle of a dead world. Whether we understand why or not, that is what it is, a machine. Harta throbbed with excitement. How could Krenneau be wrong? He knew everything as soon as the facts were in his mind. Yet here now we're living things crawling toward the machine, just like the excrescents at one end, but in no way a part of it. The feeling of willed effort as they crawled slowly toward it. White and pink striped, reaching grasping feelers into the turgid product, taking it in, then rising on easing legs as the food spread within them. There are living creatures here, Krenneau pondered. I feel your messages, 20, 30. A horde is crawling from that mountain toward it. 4,391, said Harta. She concentrated. There are 3,005 more in the mountain caves, waiting to come out as the others return. They came in groups of about a hundred, pulling themselves slowly toward the edges of the great sticky lake that lay within the vaster area where the pink matter dried and crumbled into the strong breeze. Some were smaller than others, offspring who were nudged along by their elders, but these small creatures were the ones who scampered most of all after they had fed. Joyously they danced back toward the mountain. A few of medium height went back in pairs, firm taffy fingers intertwined in each other. They mate, said Krenneau. It is their custom. How tiring they are, said Harta. I have lost interest. We have seen 31 worlds with such customs and these creatures are too simple to be interesting. Let us go home or try some other system. Not yet, Krenneau insisted. We passed through the ocean and survived the lands of this tiny planet. Nowhere else has there been the tiniest unit of life. Why at this one spot should something exist? But we have several parallel situations, Harta protested. They were colonies landed in one spot by the civilization of another planet. They landed here with their feeder machine and that is the explanation. Your mind does not function well in a four-dimension continuum, Harta. You will need more training. But these cases are rare and Krenneau, I know they are rare, my child, but still they exist. You will have to learn eventually a little at a time. Now then, it is a rule of such limited dimensional realms that the movement of matter in events from place to place is highly difficult. Certain compacting procedures must be observed. To transport a machine this size across their space would have required enormous effort and an intelligence they do not yet have. More than that, it would have been unnecessary. A smaller device would have supplied them with food. I am forced to conclude that somehow we are approaching this problem backwards. Backwards? You mean they made the machine here after they came? He did not reply to that. We must concentrate together on thinking ourselves into their functioning in the manifold. Harta followed his suggestion and soon their thoughts were moving among within the striped creatures. The insides of their bodies consisted of fundamentally the same taffy substance, but it had been modified by various organic structures. All, though, were built of the same fundamental units, elongated thin cells which readily aligned themselves in semi-crystalline patterns. Enough, Krenneau said, back to the hill. Their rows of thin limbs rested on the ridge crest once more. We have seen such cell crystals before, she sighed. The inefficiencies in such a poverty of dimensions. Do you still think we have looked at it backwards? Of course we have. They did not bring the machine or make it. The machine made them. That is not possible, Krenneau. Great as you are in these matters, we have never seen life created by a machine before. No one ever has from the millions of reports I have seen at home. Maybe we have and not known it. The life we have seen always evolved through enormous eons and we could not see its origins clearly in most cases. Here we are dealing with something that has taken comparatively little time. He stopped, shocked that he, an elder, had said so much. No, disregard such theories. You are still too young to bother with them. Here is the important thing. This machine was left by an earlier race that disappeared. Everything else was destroyed, but it went right on producing its substance. The substance is not life. It is only four-dimensional matter, right, but over a long enough time, you know this as well as I do, random factors will eventually produce a life form. By some trick of radiation, this process has been speeded up here. The substance the machine produces has, in turn, produced life. Crenneau sensed with a tremor some dangerous shifting in Harta's consciousness. As an elder, it was his duty to prevent a premature insight in the young. It had been a mistake to bring this up. He must go no farther. It was not necessary. Harta took it up for him. Then any substance producing life and modified by it could, if you go far enough back, be the product of a machine. But it would have taken so long to produce life that the original matter, that for the direct imprint of the machine, would have disappeared. An error said Crenneau desperately. There is just this case. By the time these creatures have arrived at self-knowledge, the machine will be gone. They will not know it ever existed. And that is all it means. There is just this one case. Now we must leave this unimportant example of minor dimensions. He strained consciousness to a forward movement, but Harta remained behind. He had to pull back. Start, he ordered. Her mind's obstinately frozen stance made him freeze too. He applied all his force to bring her back into control, but she still held fast. Something more is hidden from me. I will be back, she said, and she disappeared from the ridge. He had never faced such a quandary before on a training trip with a younger one. If he went in pursuit, he would find her, ultimately. That was in the nature of being older and wiser. But if she revolted against his pursuit, she could extend the time considerably on this forsaken planet, and he wanted to get her away as soon as possible. The more time here, the more chance that the awful truth would come to her before her time. He watched the growing waves of creatures floundering toward the vast oozing puddle, which refilled itself as quickly as it was diminished by them, and the receding waves of those that had already fed. This he could see was an endless process. The whole life of the species moved in continuous systole diastole around the machine. Soon he would have to go in search of her. But then she was back at his side, her being for this world once more solidified. She concentrated for a moment on the pink striped waves of rippling inward and outward around the great sustaining pool, then communicated with him. We can leave now. There's nothing more to see. Something in her mind remained closed to his as the mind of younger never should be too older. But at least he could see with relief that the worst had not happened. The deeper knowledge had not arrived to her too early when it could only hurt. All he found turned to him as they receded from this thin manifold universe, then moved up the dimension ladder to their home level, was a surface of happiness. Suddenly though, as they prepared for flight in that hyperspace, all her joy was gone. I saw it, she said. In my free and unrestricted spirit, I moved deep into the substance of that world. Below all the total ruin, far below. And there was a monstrous machine near the molten core, almost infinitely older than the feeding one far above it. And it too had been left in a stratum where all else was destroyed. I could see it had once produced the ooze from which came the life, from which in turn come the beings by whom the machine above it was made. Maybe they too thought they were free and unrestricted. He sighed for the bitter cost of the knowledge. This one would no longer go forth in the joy of mere exploration, and he would no longer live vicariously in the happiness of another being's innocence. Now, Harta too would be seeking the answer to the question of original creation, the answer that he had not found in his journeys across a myriad worlds and dimensions. That no one had ever found. End of Sweep Their Blood and Sticky by Albert R. Teichner. Unborn Tomorrow by Dallas McCord Reynolds. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Reading by Bologna Times. Unborn Tomorrow by Mac Reynolds. Unfortunately, there was only one thing he could bring back from the wonderful future. And though he didn't want to, nevertheless he did. Betty looked up from her magazine. She said mildly, You're late. Don't yell at me. I feel awful, Simon told her. He sat down at his desk, passed his tongue over his teeth in distaste, groaned, fumbled in a drawer for the aspirin bottle. He looked over at Betty and said, Almost as though reciting, What I need is a vacation. What, Betty said, Are you going to use for money? Providence. Simon told her whilst fiddling with the aspirin bottle will provide. Hmm. But before providing vacations, it'd be nice if Providence turned up a missing jewel deal, say. Something where you could deduce that actually the ruby ring had gone down the drain and was caught in the elbow. Something that would net about fifty dollars. Simon said, mournful of tone. Fifty dollars? Why not make it five hundred? I'm not selfish, Betty said. All I want is enough to pay me this week's salary. Money, Simon said. When you took this job, you said it was the romance that appealed to you. Hmm. I didn't know most loothing amounted to snooping around department stores to check on the clerks knocking down. Simon said enigmatically, Now it comes. There was a knock. Betty bounced up with Olympic agility and had the door swinging wide before the knocking was quite completed. He was old, little, and had bug eyes behind pence-nez glasses. His suit was caught in the style of yesteryear, but when a suit costs two or three hundred dollars, you still retain cast, whatever the styling. Simon said, unenthusiastically, Good morning, Mr. Oyster. He indicated the client's chair. Sit down, sir. The client fussed himself with Betty's assistance into the seat. Bug-eyed Simon said finally, You know my name. That's pretty good. Never saw you before in my life. Stop fussing with me, young lady. Your ad in the phone book says you'll investigate anything. Anything, Simon said. Only one exception. Excellent. Do you believe in time travel? Simon said nothing. Across the room where she had resumed her seat, Betty cleared her throat. When Simon continued to say nothing, she ventured, Time travel is impossible. Why? Why? Yes, why? Betty looked to her boss for assistance. None was worth coming. There ought to be some very quick, positive, definite answer. She said, Well, for one thing, paradox. Suppose you had a time machine and traveled back a hundred years or so and killed your own great-grandfather. Then how could you ever be born? Confounded if I know, the little fellow growled, how? Simon said, Let's get to the point what she wanted to see me about. I wanted to hire you to hunt me up some time travelers, the old boy said. Betty was too far and now to maintain her proper role of silent secretary. Time travelers, she said, not very intelligently. The potential client sat more erect, obviously with intent to hold the floor for a time. He removed the pincenaz glasses and pointed them at Betty, he said. Have you read much science fiction, Miss? Some, Betty admitted. Then you'll realize that there are a dozen explanations of the paradoxes of time travel. Every writer in the field worth his salt has explained them away. But to get on, it's my contention that within a century or so, man will have solved the problems of immortality and eternal youth. And it's also my suspicion that he will eventually be able to travel in time. So convinced am I of these possibilities that I am willing to gamble a portion of my fortune to investigate the presence in our era of such time travelers. Simon seemed incapable of carrying the ball this morning, so Betty said. But Mr. Oyster, if the future has developed time travel, why don't we ever meet such travelers? Simon put in a word. The usual explanation, Betty, is that they can't afford to allow the space-time continuum track to be altered. If, say, a time traveler returned to a period 25 years ago and shot Hitler, then all subsequent history would be changed. In that case, the time traveler himself might never be born. They have to tread mighty carefully. Mr. Oyster was pleased. I didn't expect you to be so well informed on the subject young man. Simon shrugged and fumbled again with the aspirin bottle. Mr. Oyster went on. I've been considering the matter for some time, and Simon held up a hand. There's no use prolonging this. As I understand it, you're an elderly gentleman with a considerable fortune, and you realize that thus far nobody has succeeded in taking it with him. Mr. Oyster returned his glasses to their perch, bug-eyed Simon, but then nodded. Simon said, You want to hire me to find a time traveler and in some manner or other. Any manner will do. Exort from him the secret of eternal life and youth, which you figure the future will have discovered. You're willing to pony up a part of this fortune of yours if I can deliver a bona fide time traveler. Right! Betty had been looking from one to the other. Now she said, plentifully. But where are you going to find one of these characters, especially if they're interested in keeping hid? The old boy was the center again. I told you I've been considering it for some time. The Oktoberfest, that's where they'd be, he seemed elated. Betty and Simon waited. The Oktoberfest, he repeated, the greatest festival the world has ever seen, the carnival, the fairia, fiesta, to beat them all. Every year it's held in Munich, makes the New Orleans Mardi Gras look like a Quilton party. He began to swing into the spirit of his description. It originally started in celebration of the wedding of some local prince a century and a half ago, and the Bavarians had such a bang-up time they've been holding it every year since. The Munich breweries do up a special beer, Marzenpral, they call it, and each brewery opens a tremendous tent on the fairgrounds, which will hold 5,000 customers apiece. Millions of liters of beer are put away, hundreds of thousands of barbecued chickens, a small herd of oxen, are roasted whole over spits, millions of pear of vice-first, of very special sausage, millions upon millions of pretzels. All right, Simon said. We'll accept it. The Oktoberfest is one whale of a wing-ding. Well, the old boy pursued into his subject now, that's where they'd be, places like the Oktoberfest. For one thing, a time-traveler wouldn't be conspicuous. At a festival like this, somebody with a strange accent or who didn't know exactly how to wear his clothes correctly or was off the ordinary in any of a dozen other ways wouldn't be noticed. You could be a forearm space-traveler from Mars and you still wouldn't be conspicuous at the Oktoberfest. People would figure they had the DTs. But why would a time-traveler want to go to a... Betty began. Why not? What better opportunity to study a people than when they are in their cups? If you could go back a few thousand years, the things you would wish to see would be a Roman triumph, perhaps the rites of Dionysus or one of Alexander's orgies. You wouldn't wander up and down the streets of, say, Athens while nothing was going on, particularly when you might be revealed as a suspicious character, not being able to speak the language, not knowing how to wear the clothes and not familiar with the city's layout. He took a deep breath. No, ma'am, you'd have to stick to some great event both for the sake of actual interest and for protection against being enmasked. The old boy wound it up. Well, that's the story. What are your rates? The Oktoberfest starts on Friday and continues for 16 days. You can take the plane to Munich. Spend a week there, and Simon was shaking his head. Not interested. As soon as Betty had got her jaw back into place, she glared unbelievably at him. Mr. Oyster was taken aback himself. See here, young man, I realize this isn't any ordinary assignment. However, as I said, I am willing to risk a considerable portion of my fortune. Sorry, Simon said, can't be done. $100 a day plus expenses, Mr. Oyster said quietly. I like the fact that you already seem to have some interest and knowledge of the matter. I like the way you knew my name when I walked in the door. My picture doesn't appear often in the papers. No go, Simon said, a sad quality in his voice. A $50,000 bonus if you bring me a time traveler. Out of the question, Simon said. But why? Betty wailed. Just for laughs, Simon told the two of them sourly. Suppose I tell you a funny story. It goes like this. I got $1,000 from Mr. Oyster, Simon began, in the way of an advance, and leaving him with Betty, who was making out a receipt, I hustled back to the apartment and packed a bag. Hell, I'd wanted a vacation anyway. This was a natural. On the way to Idlewild, I stopped off at the Germany Information Offices for some tourist literature. It takes roughly three and a half hours to get to Gander from Idlewild. I spent the time planning the fun I was going to have. It takes roughly seven and a half hours from Gander to Shannon, and I spent that time dreaming up material I could put into my reports to Mr. Oyster. I was going to have to give him some kind of report for his money. Time travel yet, what a laugh. Between Shannon and Munich, a faint suspicion began to simmer in my mind. These statistics I read on the Oktoberfest and the Munich tourist pamphlets, five million people attended annually. Where did five million people come from to attend an overgrown festival in comparatively remote southern Germany? The tourist season is over before September 21st, first day of the gigantic Biefbust. Nor could the Germans account for any such number. Munich itself has a population of less than a million counting children. And those millions of gallons of beer, the hundreds of thousands of chickens, the herds of oxen, who ponied up all the money for such expenditures? How could the average German with his $25 a week salary? In Munich there was no hotel space available. I went to the Bannhof, where they have a hotel service and applied. They put my name down, pocketed the husky bribe, showed me where I could check my bag, told me they'd do what they could and to report back in a few hours. I had another suspicious twinge. If five million people attended this beer-belt, how were they accommodated? The Thresenweis, the fairground, was only a few blocks away. I was stiff from the plane ride, so I walked. There are seven major brewers in the Munich area, each of them represented by one of the circus light tents that Mr. Oyster mentioned. Each tent contained benches and tables for about 5,000 persons, and from six to 10,000s packed themselves in, competing for room. In the center is a tremendous bandstand. The musicians all laid a hose and clad, the music as Bavarian as any to be found in a Bavarian beer-hall. Hundreds of peasant-garbed frault lines darted about the tables with quartz-sized earthenware mugs, platters of chicken, sausage, kraut, and pretzels. I found a place finally at a table which had space for 20 odd beer-bippers. Odd is right, as weird an assortment of Germans and foreign tourists as could have been dreamed up. Ranging from a 70 or 80-year-old couple in Bavarian costume to the bald-headed drunk across the table from me. A desperate waitress bearing six mugs of beer in each hand scurried past. They called them masses, by the way, not mugs. The bald-headed character and I both held up a finger, and she slid two of the masses over to us and then hustled on. Down the hatch, the other said, holding up his mass and toast. To the ladies, I told him. Before sipping, I said, you know, the tourist pamphlets say the stuff is 18%. That's nonsense, no beer is that strong. I took a long pull. He looked at me, waiting. I came up. Mistaken, I admitted. A mass or two, a piece later, he looked carefully at the name engraved on his earthenware mug, lo and bra, he said. He took a small notebook from his pocket and a pencil, noted down the word and returned the things. That's a queer-looking pencil you have there, I told him. German. Venusian, he said. Oops, sorry, shouldn't have said that. I had never heard of the brand, so I skipped it. Next is the hof bra, he said. Next what? Baldi's conversation didn't seem to hang together very well. My pilgrimage, he told me. All my life I've been wanting to go back to an Oktoberfest and sample every one of the seven brands of the best beer the world has ever known. I'm only as far as the lo and bra, but I'm afraid I'll never make it. I finished my mass. I'll help you, I told him, very noble endeavor. Name is Simon. Arth, he said. How could you help? I'm still fresh, comparatively. I'll navigate you all round. There are seven beer tents. How many have you got through so far? Two, counting this one, Arth said. I looked at him. It's going to be a truer, I said. You've already got a nice edge on. Outside, as we made our way to the next tent, the fair looked like every big state fair ever seen, except it was bigger. Games, souvenir stands, sausage stands, rides, side shows, and people, people, people. The Huffbrough tent was as overflowing as last, but we managed to find two seats. The band was blaring, and 5,000 half-swacked voices were roaring accompaniment. In Munchen, in Munchen, Stett and Huffbrough house. Eins, zwei, Gizufa. At the Gizufa, everybody upped with the mugs and drank each other's health. This is what I call a real beer bust, I said approvingly. Arth was waving to a waitress. As in the Lohenbrough tent, a full court was the smallest amount obtainable. A beer later, I said. I don't know if you'll make it or not, Arth. Make what? All seven tents. Oh, a waitress was on her way by, mugs foaming over the rims. I gestured to her for refills. Where are you from, Arth? I asked him in the way of making conversation. 2183. 2183, where? He looked at me, closing one eye to focus butter. Oh, he said. Well, 2183, South Street. New Albuquerque. New Albuquerque. Where's that? Arth thought about it. Took another long pull at the beer. Right across the way from old Albuquerque, he said, finally. Maybe we ought to be getting on to the shorebrough tent. Maybe we ought to eat something first, I said. I'm beginning to feel this. We could get some of that barbecued ox. Arth closed his eyes in pain. Vegetarian, he said, couldn't possibly eat meat. Barbarous, ugh. Well, we need some nourishment, I said. There's supposed to be considerable nourishment in beer. That made sense. I yelled, froline, sve nu beer. Somewhere along in here the fog rolled in. When it rolled out again, I found myself closing one eye the better to read the lettering on my earthenware mug. It read, Augustine Arth Brawl. Somehow we'd evidently navigated from one tent to another. Arth was saying, where's your hotel? That seemed like a good question. I thought about it for a while. Finally I said, haven't got one. Town's jam-packed. Left my bag at the Bonhoeff. I don't think we'll ever make it, Arth. How many we got to go? Lost track, Arth said. You can come home with me. We drank to that, and the fog rolled in again. When the fog rolled out, it was daylight. Bright, glaring, awful daylight. I was sprawled, complete with clothes, on one of twin beds. On the other bed, also completely clothed, was Arth. That sun was too much. I stumbled up from the bed, staggered to the window, and fumbled around for a blind or curtain. There was none. Behind me a voice said in horror, who, how, oh, what oh, where'd you come from? I got a quick impression, looking out the window, that the Germans were certainly the most modern, futuristic people in the world. But I couldn't stand the light. Where's the shade? I moaned. Arth did something, and the window went opaque. That's quite a gadget, I ground. But I didn't feel so lousy, I'd appreciate it. Arth was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding his bald head in his hands. I remember now, he sorrowed. You didn't have a hotel. What a stupidity. I'll be phased, phased all the way down. You haven't got a handful of aspirin, have you? I asked him. Just a minute, Arth said, staggering erect, and heading for what undoubtedly was a bathroom. Stay where you are. Don't move, don't touch anything. All right, I told him, planetively. I'm clean, I won't mess up the place. All I've got is a hangover, not lice. Arth was gone. He came back in two or three minutes, box of pills in hand. Here, take one of these. I took the pill, followed it with a glass of water, and went out, like a light. Arth was shaking my arm. What, another mass? The band was blaring, and 5,000 half-swacked voices were roaring, accompaniment. In Munchen, Stett and Huffbrost house. Eins, zwei, Gezurfa. At the Gezurfa, everybody upped, with their king-size mugged, and drank each other's help. My head was killing me. This is where I came in, or something, I groaned. Arth said, that was last night. He looked at me over the rim of his beer mug. Something, somewhere, was wrong. But I didn't care. I finished my mass, and then remembered. I've got to get my bag. Oh, my head, where did we spend last night? Arth said, and his voice sounded cautious. At my hotel, don't you remember? Now very well, I admitted. I feel lousy. I must have dimmed out. I've got to go to the Banoff and get my luggage. Arth didn't put up an argument on that. We said goodbye, and I could feel him watching after me as I pushed through the tables on the way out. At the Banoff, they could do me no good. There were no hotel rooms available in Munich. The head was getting worse by the minute. The fact that they somehow managed to lose my bag didn't help. I worked on that project for at least a couple of hours. Not only wasn't the bag at the luggage checking station, but the attendant there evidently couldn't make heads nor tails of the checked receipt. He didn't speak English, and my high school German was inadequate, especially accompanied by a blockbusting hangover. I didn't get anywhere tearing my hair and complaining from one end of the Banoff to the other. I drew a blank on the bag. And the head was getting worse by the minute. I was bleeding to death through the eyes, and instead of butterflies, I had bats in my stomach. Believe me, nobody should drink a gallon or more of marks and brawl. I decided the hell with it. I took a cab to the airport, presented my return ticket, told them I wanted to leave on the first obtainable plane to New York. I'd spent two days at the Oktoberfest, and I'd had it. I got more guff there. Something was wrong with the ticket. Wrong date or as some such, but they fixed that up. I never was clear on what was fouled up. Some clerks there evidently. The trip back was as uninteresting as they went over. As the hangover began to wear off a little, I was almost sorry I hadn't been able to stay. If I'd only been able to get a room, I would have stayed, I told myself. From idle wild I came directly to the office, rather than going to my apartment. I figured I might as well check in with Betty. I opened the door, and there I found Mr. Oyster. Sitting in his chair, he had been occupying for, or was it five days before, when I'd left, I'd lost track of the time. I said to him, Glad you're here, sir, I can report. What was it you came for? Impatient to hear if I'd had any results. My mind was spinning like a whirling dervish in a revolving door. I'd spent a wad of his money, and had nothing I could think of to show for it, nothing but the last stages of a granddaddy hangover. Came for it, Mr. Oyster snorted. I'm merely waiting for your girl to make out my receipt. I thought you had already left. You'll miss your plane, Betty said. There was suddenly a double dip of ice cream in my stomach. I walked over to my desk and looked down at the calendar. Mr. Oyster was saying something to the effect that if I didn't leave today, it would have to be tomorrow, that he hadn't ponied up that $1,000 advance for anything less than immediate service. Stuffing his receipt and his wallet, he fussed his way out the door. I said to Betty, hopefully, I suppose you haven't changed this calendar since I left. Betty said, what's the matter with you? You look funny. How did your clothes get so must? You tore the top sheet off that calendar yourself, not half an hour ago, just before this marble missing client came in. She added, irrelevantly, time travelers yet. I tried just once more. When did you first see this Mr. Oyster? Never saw him before in my life, she said, not until he came in this morning. This morning, I said, weekly. While Betty stared at me as though it was me that needed candling by a head shrinker preparatory to being sent off to a pressure cooker, I fished in my pocket for my wallet, counted the contents, and winced at the pathetic remains of the thousand. I said pleadingly, Betty, listen, how long ago did I go out that door on the way to the airport? You've been acting sick all morning. You went out that door about 10 minutes ago. We're gone about three minutes and then came back. See here, Mr. Oyster said, interrupting Simon's story. Did you say this was supposed to be a musing young man? I don't find it so. In fact, I believe I'm being ridiculed. Simon shrugged, put one hand to his forehead, and said, that's only the first chapter. There are two more. I'm not interested in more, Mr. Oyster said. I suppose your point was to show me how ridiculous the whole idea actually is. Very well, you've done it, confound it. However, I suppose your time, even when spent in this manner, has some value. Here is fifty dollars, and go day-said. He slammed the door after him as he left. Simon winced at the noise, took the aspirin bottle from its drawer, took two, washed them down with water from the desk carafe. Betty looked at him admiringly, came to her feet, crossed over, and took up the fifty dollars. Weeks wages, she said. I suppose that's one way of taking care of a crackpot. But I'm surprised you didn't take his money and enjoy that vacation you've been yearning about. I did, Simon ground, three times. Betty stared at him. You mean Simon nodded miserably, she said. But Simon, fifty thousand dollars, bonus. If that story was true, you should have gone back again to Munich. If there was one time traveler, there might have been. I keep telling you, Simon said bitterly. I went back there three times. There were hundreds of them, probably thousands. He took a deep breath. Listen, we're just going to have to forget about it. They're not going to stand for the spacetime continuum track being altered. If something comes up that looks like it might result in the track being changed, they set you right back at the beginning and let things start for you all over again. They just can't allow anything to come back from the future and change the past. You mean, Betty was suddenly furious at him. You've given up. Why, this is the biggest thing. Why, the fifty thousand dollars is nothing. The future, just think. Simon said wearily. There's just one thing you can bring back with you from the future. A hangover, compounded of a gallon or so of marks and brawl. What's more, you can pile one on top of the other and another on top of that. He shuddered. If you think I'm going to take another crack at this merry-go-round and pile a fourth hangover on the three I'm already nursing all at once, you can think again. End of Unborn Tomorrow by Dallas McCord Reynolds. The vanishing point by C.C. Beck. This is the LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Greg Vestel. Vanishing point by C.C. Beck. Translated by me. In perspective, theoretically, the vanishing point is at infinity and therefore unattainable. But reality is different. Vanishing occurs a lot sooner than theory suggests. That? Well, that's a perspective machine. Well, not exactly, but that's what I call it. Now, I don't know how it works. Too complicated for me. Carter could make it go, but after he made it, he never used it. Too bad. He thought he'd make a lot of money with it there for a while while he was working it out. I almost had me convinced, but I told him, get it working first, Carter, and then show me what you can do with it better than I can do without it. I'm doing pretty well as is. Picture selling good. Even if I do make them all by guesswork, as you call it. That's what I told him. You see, Carter was one of them artists that think they can work everything out by formulas and stuff. Me, I just paint things as I see them. Never worry about perspective and all that kind of mechanical aids. Never even went to art school, but I do all right. Carter now has a different sort of artist. Well, he wasn't really an artist, more of a draftsman. I first got him to help me with a series of real estate paintings I got an order for. Big aerial views of land developments and drawings of buildings, roads and causeways, that kind of stuff. Was a little too much for me to handle alone because I never studied that kind of thing, you know? I thought he'd do the mechanical drawings which should have been simple for anybody trained that way, and I throw in a colors, figures, trees, and so on. He did fine. Job came out good. Client was real happy. We made a pretty good amount on that job and have to keep us in a couple of months without working afterwards. I took it easy fishing and so on, but Carter stayed here in the studio working on his own stuff. I let him keep an eye on things from me around the place and he just dropped by in now and then check up. The guy was nuts on the subject of perspective. I thought he knew all there was to know about it already but he claimed nobody knew anything about it, really. Said he'd been studying it for years and the more he learned about it the more there was to learn. He used to cover big sheets of paper with complicated diagrams, trying to prove something on others himself. I'd come to the studio and find him with thumbtacks and strings and stuff all over the place. He'd get big, long rulers and draw lines to various points all over the room and end up with little drawings of a cube about an inch square and anybody could have made it in half a minute without all that apparatus. Seemed pretty silly to me. Then he brought in some books on mathematics and physics and other things and a bunch of slide rules, calculators, and John. He must have been a pretty smart guy to know how to handle all those things even if he was kind of dopey about other things. You know, women in fishing and sports and drinking, he was lousy at everything except working those perspective problems. Personally, I couldn't see much sense to what he was doing. The guy could draw all right already so I asked him what more he'd he want. Let me see if I can remember what he said. I'm trying to get at things as they really are not as they appear, he said. I think those were his words. Art is an illusion, a bag of tricks. Reality is something else, not what we think it is. Drawings are two-dimensional projections of a world that is not merely three, but four dimensions, if not more, he said. Yeah, kind of a crackpot, Carter was. Just on that one subject, though, nice enough guy otherwise. Here, look at some of the drawings he made. Working out his formulas, nice designs, huh? Might make good wallpaper or fabric patterns real abstract. That's what people seem to like. See all those little letters scattered around among the lines, different kinds of vanishing points they are. Carter claimed that the whole world was full of vanishing points. You don't know what a vanishing point is? Let me see if I can explain. Come over here to the window. You see how the road out there gets smaller and smaller in distance? Of course, the road doesn't really get smaller, it just looks that way. That's what we call a vanishing point in drawings. It's simple, isn't it? Never could understand why Carter went to so much trouble working out all those ways to locate vanishing points. Me, I just throw them in wherever I need them. But Carter claimed that was wrong. Said that we're all connected together some way and he was gonna work out a method to prove it. Here, here's a little gadget he made up to help his calculations. Bunch of disks all pivoted together at the center. You're supposed to turn them around so the arrows point to different figures and things. Here's the square root sign. I remember Carter telling me that this one is the tangent function, whatever that means. Log, there, is a short of an algorithm. Oh, he had a bunch of that scientific stuff in his head all the time. Don't know whether he understood it all himself. He built this thing just before he put together the perspective machine there. Silly-looking gadget, huh? All these pipes and wires and little cube in the center? Don't try to touch it, it ain't really there. You just think it is. It's what Carter called a teterach, or catarach. No, that ain't right, what's the word? Something like that tesser, something or other. Here's a picture like that in one of Carter's books. Hurt your eyes to look at it, don't it? That's what Carter thought was gonna make him a lot of money and fame and the perspective machine. I tell him nobody ever made a drawing machine yet that worked, but he said it wasn't supposed to make drawings, it was just supposed to give people a view of what reality really is instead of what they think it is. I don't know whether he expected to charge money to look through it or whether he was gonna look through it himself and make some new kind of drawings and sell them. No, I can't tell you how it works. I said before, I don't know. Carter only used it once himself. I came in here the day he finished it just as he was ready to turn it on. He was just putting the finishing touches on it. In a few minutes he told me I'll have the answer to a question that may never have been answered before. What is reality? Is the world a thing by itself and all they know is illusion? Why do things grow smaller the farther away they appear? Why can't we see more than one side of anything at a time? What happens to the far side of an object? Does it cease to exist just because we can't see it? Are objects not present, nonexistent? Because artists draw things, vanishing to points, does that mean that they really vanish? Oh, whack, that's what he was. Nice guy, but sorta screwy. He kept saying more goofy things while he was finishing up the machine about how he figured out that all we knew about vision and drawing and so on must be wrong once he got a look at the real world he'd prove it. How about cameras, I asked him. Take a picture with a camera and it looks just about the same as a drawing, don't it? That's because cameras are built to take pictures like we're used to seeing them. He said, flat two-dimensional slices of reality without depth or motion. Even 3D moving pictures, I asked. They're closer to reality, but they still only cross sections of it. The shutter of a movie camera is closed as much of the time as it's open. What happens in between the times it's open? You know, he went on. People used to think matter and motion were continuous, but scientists have proved that they are discontinuous. Now, some of them think time may be too. Maybe everything is just imaginary and appears to our senses in whatever way we want it to appear. We are so well trained that we see everything just as we were taught to see it by generations of artists, writers, and other symbol makers. If we could see things as they really are, what might happen? We'd probably all go nuts, I told him. He just smiled. Well, here goes. It's finished. Now, to find out who's right, the scientists and philosophers who say reality is forever unreachable, or the artists who say there isn't any reality, and that we make the whole thing up to suit ourselves. He moved one of the pointers you see there and squinted around at a different scale and dialed and stepped back. That little testy thing appeared real small at first, just a point, you could hardly see it. I couldn't see anything else happening and thought it was gonna do something else to machine. I turned to look at it harder and saw his face was white as a sheet. Good God, he says, just like that. Good God, that's all? Well, that says to him, who was right? The scientists or the artists? The artists, he sort of screeches. The artists were right all the time. There is no reality. It's all a fabric of illusion we've created ourselves, and now I've ripped a hole in that. He gives a strangled hoop and goes hot-tailing out of here like something was after him. Jumps in his car and roars off down the road and disappears. Now, I don't mean he really disappeared. Are you nuts? Just roared on down the road till he got so small I couldn't see him no more. You know, the way things do when they go farther and farther away happens every day. That's what artists mean by perspective. The machine? Well, I don't know what to do with it. If Carter ever comes back, he might not like me getting rid of it. I was thinking maybe I'd put it in a hobby show at county fair next week. You notice that how that funny-looking cube inside there gets bigger every time you look at it? There, it just doubled its size again, see? People at the fair ought to get a kick out of that. No telling how big it'll get with all those people looking at it. But come on, let's go fishing. We better hurry before it's too late. The end. End of Vanishing Point by C.C. Beck. Wasteland Want by Dave Dreyfus. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Reading by Bologna Times. Wasteland Want by Dave Dreyfus. Eat your spinach, little man. It's good for you. Stuff yourself with it. Be a good little consumer, or the cops will get you. For such is the law of supply and demand. Panic roused him. The black imp of panic that lived under the garish rug of this unfamiliar room and crawled out at dawn to nudge him awake and stare from the blank space to his left where Tilly's gray head should have been. His fists clenched in anger at himself. He'd never been the sort to make allowance for his own weakness and didn't propose to begin doing so now at age 86. Tilly'd been killed in that crash well over a year ago and it was time he got used to his widower hood and quit searching for her every morning. But even after he gave himself the balling out, orientation came slowly. The surroundings looked so strange. No matter what he told himself, it was hard to believe that he was indeed Fred Lubway, mechanical engineer, and had a right to be in this single bed alone in this house his Tilly had never seen. The right to be there was all wrong. He disliked the house and hated all its furnishings. The cybernetic cooker in the kitchen, the magnetically suspended divans in the living room, the three-dimensional color broadcasts he could so readily project to any wall or ceiling. The solar-tropic machinery that would turn any face of the pentagonal house into the sun or the shade or the breeze, the lift that would raise the entire building a hundred feet into the air to give him a wider view and more privacy, all left him dissatisfied. They were new. None had been shared with Tilly. He used them only to the extent required by law to fulfill his duty as a consumer. You must change your home because of the change in your family composition, the Eurasian board's bright young female had explained right after Tilly's funeral. Your present furnishings are obsolete. You must replace them. And if I don't, he'd been truculent. I doubt we'd have to invoke the penalties for criminal underconsumption, she'd explained, airily. There are plenty of other possible courses of action. Maybe we'd just get a decision that you're prematurely senile and unable to care for yourself. Then you go to a home for the aged where they'd help you consume with forced feedings and such. So here he was, in this home of his own that seemed to belong to someone else. Well, at least he wasn't senile, even if he did move a little slowly now, getting out of bed. He'd warm up soon, all by himself, with no one's help. And as far as these newfangled gadgets in the bathroom were concerned, he could follow any well-written set of directions. He'd scolded himself that time only because the printed instructions were so confusing. He took a cold shower this time. When the air towel had finished blowing and he was half dry, not wholly dry because the machine wasn't adapted to people who took ice-cold showers, he went into the clothing machine. He punched the same few holes in its tape that he put there every day, stood in the right place and in due course emerged with his long, raw-bone frame covered by magenta tights having an excessively baggy seat. He knew the costume was neither pretty nor fashionable and that its design, having been wholly within his control when he punched the tape, revealed both his taste and his mood. He didn't care. There was no one in the world whom he wanted to impress. He looked in the dressing-room mirror not to inspect the tights, but to examine his face and see if it needed shaving. Too late, he remembered that 20 years had elapsed since the permanent depilatories were first invented and 10 since he'd used one and stopped having to shave. There were too many changes like that in this gadget-mad world, too many new ways of doing old things. Life had no stability. He stalked into the kitchen, wishing he could skip breakfast. Anger always unsettled his stomach, but everyone was required to eat at least three meals a day. The vast machine records system that kept track of every person's consumption would reveal to the ration board any failure to use his share of food. So he dialed breakfast number three, tomato juice, toast, and coffee. The signal panel flashed under eating and he knew the state machine records system had advised his cybernetic cooker to increase the amount of his consumption. Chen in hands, he sat hopelessly at the kitchen table waiting his meal and, in due course, was served prunes, waffles, bacon, eggs, toast, and tea, none of which he liked except for toast. He ate dutifully, nevertheless, telling himself he wasn't afraid of the uration cops who were always suspecting him of underconsumption because he was the tall skinny type and never got fat like most people, but that he ate what the cooker had given him because his father had been unemployed for so long during the depression 75 years before, so he'd never been able to bring himself to throw food away. Failure to consume had, in the old days, been called overproduction, and by any name it was bad. So was war, he'd read enough about war to be glad that form of consumption had finally been abolished. Still it was a duty and not a pleasure to eat so much and a relief to get up and put the dirty dishes into the disposal machine and go up topside to his gyro. Disgustingly he had a long wait before departure. After climbing into the gyro and transmitting his flight plan, he had to sit seething for all of 15 minutes before the Mount Diablo flight control center deigned to lift his remote-controlled gyro into the air, and when the signal came, Ascent was so awkwardly abrupt it made his ears pop. He couldn't even complain. The center was mechanical and unequipped to hear complaints. It routed him straight down the San Joaquin Valley, a beautiful site from 15,000 feet, but over familiar. He fell asleep and awakened only when unexpectedly brought down at Bakersfield Field. Above his instrument panel, the printing receiver said, routine check of equipment and documents, not over five minutes delay. But it could take longer, and tardiness was subject to official punishments as a form of unproductiveness. He called George Harding at the plant. Harding apparently had been expecting the call. His round bluff face were a scowl of annoyance. Don't you ever watch the newscasts? He demanded angrily. They began this routine check. You're in at five this morning, and we're broadcasting pictures of the resulting traffic jam by six. If you'd filed a flight plan for Santa Barbara and come on down the coast, you'd have avoided all this. I'm not required to listen to newscasts. Fred replied tartly. I own the requisite number of receivers, and now listen, Fred, Harding interrupted. We need you down here, so hurry up. Fred heard him switch off and sat for a moment trembling with rage. But he ended by grinning riley. Everyone was in the same boat, of course. For the most part, people avoided thinking about it, but he could now see himself as if from above, spending his life flitting back and forth between home and plant, plant and home, racking his brain to devise labor-saving machines while at the plant, then rushing home to struggle with the need to consume their tremendous output. Was he a man, or was he a caged squirrel racing in an exercise wheel, running himself ragged and with great effort producing absolutely nothing? He wasn't going to do it any longer by golly. He was going to. Good morning! A chubby young man in the pea-green uniform of a ration-cop opened the door and climbed uninvited into the cockpit. May I check the up-to-dateness of your ship's equipment, please? Fred didn't answer. He didn't have to. The young officer was already in the manual pilot's seat, checking the secondary controls. In swift routine he tried motor and instruments and took the craft briefly aloft. Down again he demanded Fred's papers. The licenses that pertained to the gyro were in order, but there was trouble over Fred's personal documents. His ration-book contained far too few sales validations. You're not doing your share of consuming, old-timer, the young cop said mildly. Look at all these unused food allotments. Want to cause a depression? No. Man, if you don't eat more than this, we'll have mass starvation. I know the slogans. Yes, but do you know the penalties? Forced feeding, compulsory consumption. Do you think they're fun? No. Well, you can file your flight plan and go, but if you don't spend those tickets before their expiration dates, Mr., you'll have cause to regret it. With a special pencil he sense-marked the card's margins. Fred felt that each stroke of the pencil was a black mark against him. He watched in apprehensive silence. The young cop was also silent. When finished he wordlessly returned the identification, tipped his cap, and swaggered off, his thick neck red above his green collar. Fred found he'd had more than enough of swaggering young men with beefy red necks. That added to his disgust with the constant struggle to produce and consume, consume and produce. Vague, wishful threats froze as determination. He absolutely wasn't going through any more of it. He filed a flight plan that would return him to his home and, in due course, arrived there. The phone rang in his ears as he opened the cockpit. He didn't want to answer, and he stayed on the roof securing the gyro and plugging in its battery charger. But he couldn't ignore the bell's insistent clamor. When he went downstairs and was switched on the phone, George Harding's round face splashed on the wall. Fred, he said, when we talked a few hours ago, you forgot to say you were sick. I phoned to confirm that for the attendance report. Did this call get you out of bed? He could see it hadn't. Therefore Fred knew he must be recording the audio only and not the video. Trying to give him a break with the attendance people and coach him on the most appeasing answers. A well-meant gesture, but a false one. And Fred was fed up with the false. I forgot nothing, he said bluntly. I'm perfectly well and haven't been near bed. Now wait, George said hastily. It's no crime to be sick. And don't say anything you wouldn't want preserved for posterity. George, I'm not going to play along with you, Fred insisted. This business of producing to consume and consuming to produce has got me down. It's beyond all reason. No it isn't. You're an excellent mechanical engineer, Fred, but you're not an economist. That's why you don't understand. Just excuse me for a minute, and I'll show you. He left the field of view. Fred waited incuriously for him to return, suddenly conscious of the fact that he now had nothing better to do with his time. George was back in less than a minute anyhow. Okay, he said briskly. Now where were we? Oh yes, I just wanted to say that production is a form of consumption too. Even the production of machine tools and labor-saving devices. So there's nothing inconsistent. What are you trying to do? Fred demanded. Don't lecture me. I know as much econ as you do. But you've got to come back to work, Fred. I want you to use your rations, put your shoulder to the wheel, and conform generally. The police is too strict for you to try anything else, fella, and I like you too well to want to see you. I don't need you to protect me, George, Fred said stiffly. I guess you mean well enough, but goodbye. He switched off. The silence struck him. Not a sound stirred the air and that lonely new house except the slight wheeze of his breathing. He felt tired, bone weary, as if all the fatigues of his 86 years were accumulated within him. He stood by a window and stared blindly out. Everyone seemed to have been heckling him, shoving him around, making him change all his ways every minute. He didn't want to change. He didn't want to be forever adapting to new gadgets, new fads, new ways of doing things. He thought of the villages of India, substantially unchanged for three, four, five thousand years. The villagers had no money, so they couldn't be consumers. Maybe they had the natural way to live, statically, also frugally. But no, it was too frugal, too static. He'd heard and read too much about the starvation, pestilence, peonage, and other ills plaguing those Indian villagers. They didn't have life licked, either. The Indians had not enough. The Americans too much. One was as bad as the other. And he was in the middle. He left the window he'd been staring from, unseeingly, and walked to the foyer control panel. There he pushed the button that would cause the house to rear a hundred feet into the air on its titanium aluminum plunger. Then he went back to the window to watch the ground recede. He felt a hand on his shoulder. He decided the sensation was an illusion, a part of his state of mind. A young man's voice said, "'Mr. Loveway, we need you.'" That was a nice thing to hear. So Fred turned, ready to smile. He didn't smile. He was confronted by another ration cop. This one was a tall young man, dark and hefty. He seemed very kindly in his official sort of way. "'Mr. George Harding sent me,' he explained. "'He asked us to look you up and see if we could help.'" "'Yes.'" "'You seem to have been a little unhappy this morning. "'I mean, well, staring out that window "'while your house rises dangerously high. "'Mr. George Harding didn't like the mood you're in, "'and neither do I, Mr. Loveway. "'I'm afraid you'll have to come to the hospital. "'We can't have a valuable citizen like you "'falling out that window, can we? "'What do you mean valuable citizen? "'I'm no use to anybody. "'There's plenty of engineers "'and more being graduated every semester. "'You don't need me.'" "'Oh, yes we do,' shaking his head, "'the young ration cop took a firm grip "'of Fred's right biceps. "'You've got to come along with me "'till your outlook changes, Mr. Loveway.'" "'Now, see here,' Fred objected, "'trying unsuccessfully to twist free "'of the officer's grip. "'You've no call to treat me like a criminal, "'nor to talk to me as if I were senile. "'My outlook won't change, and you know it. "'Oh, yes it will, and since you're "'neither criminal nor senile, "'that's what has to be done. "'We'll do it in the most humane way possible. "'A little brain surgery, "'and you'll sit in your cage and consume and consume "'and consume without a care in the world. "'Yes, sir, we'll change your outlook.'" "'Now, you mustn't try to twist away "'from me like that, Mr. Loveway. "'I can't let you go. "'We need every consumer we can get. "'End of Waste Not Want,' by Dave Dreyfus.'