began. But it came very seldom and
seemed no more than a common thing. Because there was no longer any such
thing as disease, neither Wainer nor I thought much about it, except
that Wainer went and got some pills from the government. For a long
while--we may be thankful for that, at least--the cough did not bother
him.

And so the years passed.

* * * * *

When Wainer was forty-two, he met the girl. Her name was Lila. She was a
Rash, a teacher of mnemonics, and all I can remember of her are the
dark-brown lovely eyes, and the warm, adoring face. She was the only
woman that Wainer ever really loved, except perhaps his mother, and he
chose to have his child by her.

Because of the population problem, a man could have one child then every
hundred years. Wainer had his child by Lila, and although he was very
happy that the boy turned out to be a Rash, he never paid him much
attention.

He was about fifty then and beginning to break down. So that he could
see Lila often and with pride, he wrote a great deal during those years,
and his lungs were collapsing all that while. It was out of that period
that he wrote all his symphonies from the Second to the Ninth.

It is unbelievable; they were all purely commercial. He tossed them out
with a part of his mind. I cannot help but wonder what the rest of that
mind was doing.

I can see him now, that gaunt and useless man, his great muscled arms
chained to a pen, his stony, stretching legs cramped down beneath a
desk....

I did not see him again for almost ten years, because he went away. He
left New York for perhaps the only time in his life, and began to wander
across the inland of the American continent. I heard from him rarely. I
think it was in one of those letters that he first mentioned the pain
that was beginning in his lungs.

I never knew what he did, or how he lived during those ten years.
Perhaps he went into the forests and worked and lived like a primitive,
and perhaps he just walked. He had no transportation. I know that he was
not wholly sane then, and never was again until the end of his life. He
was like a magnificent machine which has run out of tune for too many
years--the delicate gears were strained and cracking.

(The old man paused in the utter silence, while several tears dropped
down his cheek. None of Them moved, and at last he went on.)

Near the end of the ten years, I received a package from him in the
mail.