All the same, I want
out." He wet his lips. "Frazer, you're on the Board here. You've got
connections higher up. If I could only get a chance to transfer to Ag
Culture, go on one of those farms as a worker--"

Frazer shook his head. "Sorry, Harry. You know the situation there,
I'm sure. Right now there's roughly ninety million approved
applications on file. Everybody wants to get into Ag Culture."

"But couldn't I just buy some land, get a government contract for
foodstuffs?"

"Have you got the bucks? A minimum forty acres leased from one of the
farm corporations will cost you two hundred thousand at the very
least, not counting equipment." He paused. "Besides, there's
Vocational Apt. What did your tests show?"

"You're right," Harry said. "I'm supposed to be an agency man. An
agency man until I die. Or retire on my pension, at fifty, and sit in
my little room for the next fifty years, turning on the telescreen
every morning to hear some loudmouthed liar tell me it's a beautiful
day in Chicagee. Who knows, maybe by that time we'll have a hundred
billion people enjoying peace and progress and prosperity. All sitting
in little rooms and--"

"Watch out!" Frazer grabbed the wheel. "You nearly hit that truck." He
waited until Harry's face relaxed before relinquishing his grip.
"Harry, you'd better go in for a checkup. It isn't just a headache
with you, is it?"

"You're not fooling," Harry told him. "It isn't just a headache."

He began to think about what it _really_ was, and that helped a
little. It helped him get through the worst part, which was the
downtown traffic and letting Frazer off and listening to Frazer urge
him to see a doctor.

Then he got to the building parking area and let them take his car
away and bury it down in the droning darkness where the horns hooted
and the headlights glared.

Harry climbed the ramp and mingled with the ten-thirty shift on its
way up to the elevators. Eighteen elevators in his building, to serve
eighty floors. Nine of the elevators were express to the fiftieth
floor, three were express to sixty-five. He wanted one of the latter,
and so did the mob. The crushing, clinging mob. They pressed and
panted the way mobs always do; mobs that lynch and torture and dance
around bonfires and guillotines and try to drag you down to trample
you to death because they can't stand you if your name is Harry and
you want to be different.

They hate you because you don't like powdered eg