"Then I'll sink back in the chair and the little connection on my head will fit neatly into another little connection on the chair, because my chair will fit only me, and it will fit me perfectly.
"And then, while I drift off to EL-land, the chair will unfold around me so that all sight and sound and almost all feeling will disappear and I'll be like a chrysalis in a cocoon.
"So for two or three or eight hours I'll stay inside the cocoon, living another person's life. And while I'm in there, everyone will be sighing a sigh of relief that here is another potential producer who has finally given up the ghost and turned consumer.
"Then when the tape is through, the cocoon will open and I'll wake up tired or refreshed or satiated or somehow changed, and then I'll get out to the food center and dial a meal or call someone up, or go out and walk around or something."
I was really getting wound up, but Long broke in on me. "Tell me a little more," he said, "about that one idea, will you? You know, the idea about how you will give up being a producer and will be all consumer?"
"I was just coming to that," I said hotly. "Yes, they'll probably enroll my name on the EL subscribers roll with a big cheer, and all my non-EL friends will hear about it and they'll raise their eyebrows, or maybe they'll sign up too.
"But the point is this. Is it right for me, a big, strong, healthy human being with powers of perception and reasoning and a capability for work and creativeness—is it right for me to substitute this dream world of EL for actual real thinking, or doing, or creating? Do any of us have the right to subvert our normal impulses for creation and for living in this way?"
"A good question," said Long with a sigh. "I'm afraid he's put it in pretty unanswerable terms, all right. Except for one minor point, I couldn't help but agree with everything he said, in spite of the fact that I—well, I'm sold on EL, naturally."
We sat for a while just sort of gazing around at nothing.