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 in that lonely new
house except the slight wheeze of his breathing.

He felt tired. Bone weary. As if all the fatigues of his eighty-six
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. Lubway, 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. Lubway. 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. T