who had been Hoddan's
only friend.

Hoddan stared blankly at nothing. As an event, it was preposterous, and
yet it was wholly natural. When in the course of human events somebody
does something that puts somebody else to the trouble of adjusting the
numb routine of his life, the adjustee is resentful. The richer he is
and the more satisfactory he considers his life, the more resentful he
is at any change, however minute. And of all the changes which offend
people, changes which require them to think are most disliked.

The high brass in the Power Board considered that everything was moving
smoothly. There was no need to consider new devices. Hoddan's drawings
and plans had simply never been bothered with, because there was no
recognized need for them. And when he forced acknowledgment that his
receptor worked, the unwelcome demonstration was highly offensive in
itself. It was natural, it was inevitable, it should have been
infallibly certain that any possible excuse for not thinking about the
receptor would be seized upon. And a single dead man found near the
operating demonstrator.... If one assumed that the demonstrator had
killed him,--why one could react emotionally, feel vast indignation,
frantically command that the device and its inventor be suppressed
together, and go on living happily without doing any thinking or making
any other change in anything at all.

Hoddan was appalled. Now that it had happened, he could see that it had
to. The world of Walden was at the very peak of human culture. It had
arrived at so splendid a plane of civilization that nobody could imagine
any improvement--unless a better tranquilizer could be designed to make
it more endurable. Nobody ever really wants anything he didn't think of
for himself. Nobody can want anything he doesn't know exists--or that he
can't imagine to exist. On Walden nobody wanted anything, unless it was
relief from the tedium of ultra-civilized life. Hoddan's electronic
device did not fill a human need; only a technical one. It had,
therefore, no value that would make anybody hospitable to it.

And Hoddan would spend his life in jail for failing to recognize the
fact.

He revolted, immediately. _He_ wanted something! He wanted out. And
because he was that kind of man he put his mind to work devising
something he wanted, simply and directly, without trying to get it by
furnishing other people with what they turned out not to want. He set
about designing hi