The Project Gutenberg EBook of It's All Yours, by Sam Merwin

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Title: It's All Yours

Author: Sam Merwin

Release Date: June 21, 2009 [EBook #29195]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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_It was a strange and bitter Earth over which the Chancellor
ruled--a strange and deformed world. There were times when the
Chancellor suspected that he really was a humanistic old fool, but
this seemed to be his destiny and it was difficult to be anything
else. Human, like all other organic life on Earth, was dying. Where
it spawned, it spawned monsters. What was to be the answer?_

it's
all
yours

_by ... Sam Merwin, Jr._

It was a lonely thing to rule over a dying world--a
world that had become sick, so terribly sick....

The Chancellor's private washroom, discreetly off the innermost of his
official suite of offices, was a dream of gleaming black porcelain and
solid gold. Each spout, each faucet, was a gracefully stylized mermaid,
the combination stall shower-steam room a marvel of hydraulic comfort
and decor with variable lighting plotted to give the user every sort of
beneficial ray, from ultraviolet to black heat.

But Bliss was used to it. At the moment, as he washed his hands, he was
far more concerned with the reflection of his face in the mirror above
the dolphin-shaped bowl. With a sort of wry resignation, he accepted the
red rims of fatigue around his eyes, the batch of white at his left
temple that was spreading toward the top of his dark, well-groomed head.
He noted that the lines rising from the corners of his mouth to the
curves of his nostrils seemed to have deepened noticeably during the
past few days.

As he dried his hands in the air-stream, he told himself that he was
letting his imagination run away with him--imagination had always been
his weakness, and a grave failing for a head of state. And while he drew
on his special, featherweight gloves, he reminded himself that, if he
was aging prematurely, it was