He felt tired. Bone weary. As if all the fatigues of his eighty-six years were accumulated within him.
He stood by a window and stared blindly out. Everyone seemed to have been heckling him, shoving him around, making him change all his ways every minute. He didn't want to change. He didn't want to be forever adapting to new gadgets, new fads, new ways of doing things.
He thought of the villages of India, substantially unchanged for three, four, five thousand years. The villagers had no money, so they couldn't be consumers. Maybe they had the natural way to live. Statically. Also, frugally.
But no. It was too frugal, too static. He'd heard and read too much about the starvation, pestilence, peonage and other ills plaguing those Indian villagers. They didn't have life licked, either.
The Indians had not enough, the Americans, too much. One was as bad as the other.
And he was in the middle.
He left the window he'd been staring from unseeingly and walked to the foyer control-panel. There he pushed the button that would cause the house to rear a hundred feet into the air on its titanium-aluminum plunger.
Then he went back to the window to watch the ground recede. He felt a hand on his shoulder. He decided the sensation was an illusion—a part of his state of mind.
A young man's voice said, "Mr. Lubway, we need you."
That was a nice thing to hear, so Fred turned, ready to smile. He didn't smile. He was confronted by another ration-cop.