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"Uh, I really don't know because I don't know what it is I have done. You see-"
"Do you want a public defender? If you do you can be locked up until one can handle your case. I
understand they are running about six days late right now. . . but it's your privilege."
"Uh, I still don't know. Maybe what I want is a labor-company parole, though I'm not sure what it is.
What I really want is some advice from the Court, if the Court pleases."
The judge said to the bailiff, "Take the others out." He turned back to me. "Spill it. But I'll warrant
you won't like my advice. I've been on this job long enough to have heard every phony story and to have
acquired a deep disgust toward most of them."
"Yes, sir. Mine isn't phony; it's easily checked. You see, I just got out of the Long Sleep yesterday
and-"
But he did look disgusted. "One of those, eh? I've often wondered what made our grandparents think
they could dump their riffraff on us. The last thing on earth this city needs is more people especially ones
who couldn't get along in their own time. I wish I could boot you back to whatever year you came from
with a message to everybody there that the future they're dreaming about is not, repeat not, paved with
gold." He sighed. "But it wouldn't do any good, I'm sure. Well, what do you expect me to do? Give you
another chance? Then have you pop up here again a week from now?"
"Judge, I don't think I'm likely to. I've got enough money to live until I find a job and-"
"Eh? If you've got money, what were you doing barracking?"
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"Judge, I don't even know what that word means." This time he let me explain. When I came to how
I had been swindled by Master Insurance Company his whole manner changed.
"Those swine! My mother got taken by them after she had paid premiums for twenty years. Why
didn't you tell me this in the first place?" He took out a card, wrote something on it, and said, "Take this
to the hiring office at the Surplus & Salvage Authority. If you don't get a job come back and see me this
afternoon. But no more barracking. Not only does it breed crime and vice, but you yourself are running a
terrible risk of meeting up with a zombie recruiter."
That's how I got a job smashing up brand-new ground cars. But I still think I made no mistake in
logic in deciding to job-hunt first. Anywhere is home to the man with a fat bank account-the cops leave
him alone.
I found a decent room, too, within my budget, in a part of West Los Angeles which had not yet been
changed over to New Plan. I think it had formerly been a coat closet.
I would not want anyone to think I disliked the year 2000, as compared with 1970. I liked it and I
liked 2001 when it rolled around a couple of weeks after they wakened me. In spite of recurrent spasms
of almost unbearable homesickness, I thought that Great Los Angeles at the dawn of the Third
Millennium was odds-on the most wonderful place I had ever seen. It was fast and clean and very
exciting, even if it was too crowded . . . and even that was being coped with on a mammoth,
venturesome scale. The New Plan parts of town were a joy to an engineer's heart. If the city government
had had the sovereign power to stop immigration for ten years, they could have licked the housing
problem. Since they did not have that power, they just had to do their best with the swarms that kept
rolling over the Sierras-and their best was spectacular beyond belief and even the failures were colossal.
It was worth sleeping thirty years just to wake up in a time when they had licked the common cold
and nobody had a postnasal drip. That meant more to me than the research colony on Venus.
Two things impressed me most, one big, one little. The big one was NullGrav, of course. Back in
1970 I had known about the Babson Institute gravitation research but I had not expected anything to
come of it-and nothing had; the basic field theory on which NullGrav is based was developed at the
University of Edinburgh. But I had been taught in school that gravitation was something that nobody
could ever do anything about, because it was inherent in the very shape of space.
So they changed the shape of space, naturally. Only temporarily and locally, to be sure, but that's all
that's needed in moving a heavy object. It still has to stay in field relation with Mother Terra, so it's
useless for space ships-or it is in 2001; I've quit making bets about the future. I learned that to make a lift
it was still necessary to expend power to overcome the gravity potential, and conversely, to lower
something you had to have a power pack to store all those foot-pounds in, or something would go
Phzzt!Spung! But just to transport something horizontally, say from San Francisco to Great Los Angeles,
just lift it once, then float along, no power at all, like an ice skater riding a long edge.
Lovely!
I tried to study the theory of it, but the math starts in where tensor calculus leaves off; it's not for me.
But an engineer is rarely a mathematical physicist and he does not have to be; he simply has to savvy the
skinny of a thing well enough to know what it can do in practical applications-know the working
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parameters. I could learn those.
The "little thing" I mentioned was the changes in female styles made possible by the Sticktite fabrics. I
was not startled by mere skin on bathing beaches; you could see that coming in 1970. But the weird
things that the ladies could do with Sticktite made my Jaw sag.
My grandpappy was born in 1890; I suppose that some of the sights in 1970 would have affected
him the same way.
But I liked the fast new world and would have been happy in it if I had not been so bitterly lonely so
much of the time. I was out of joint. There were times (in the middle of the night, usually) when I would
gladly have swapped it all for one beat-up tomcat, or for a chance to spend an afternoon taking little
Ricky to the zoo. . . or for the comradeship Miles and I had shared when all we had was hard work and
hope.
It was still early in 2001 and I wasn't halfway caught up on my homework, when I began to itch to
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