“I’ll ring you back,” Gallegher said. “Right now I need black coffee.”
He beamed off, stood up, and wavered out of the booth. Max Cuff was coming toward him. There were three men following the alderman.
One of them stopped short, his jaw dropping. “Cripes!” he said. “That’s the guy, boss. That’s Gallegher. Is he the one you been drinking with?”
Gallegher tried to focus his eyes. The man swam into clarity. He was a tall, thin chap hi a checkered suit, and he had yellow hair and a gold front tooth.
“Conk him,” Cuff said. “Quick, before he yells. And before anybody else comes in here. Gallegher, huh? Smart guy, huh?”
Gallegher saw something coming at his head, and tried to leap back into the visor booth like a snail retreating into its shell. He failed. Spinning flashes of glaring light dazzled him.
He was conked.
The trouble with this social culture, Gallegher thought dreamily, was that it was suffering both from overgrowth and calcification of the exoderm. A civilization may be likened to a flowerbed. Each individual plant stands for a component part of the culture. Growth is progress. Technology, that long-frustrated daffodil, had had BI concentrate poured on its roots, the result of wars that forced its growth through sheer necessity. But no world is satisfactory unless the parts are equal to the whole.
The daffodil shaded another plant that developed parasitic tendencies. It stopped using its roots. It wound itself around the daffodil, climbing up on its stem and stalks and leaves, and that strangling liana was religion, politics, economics, culture—outmoded forms that changed too slowly, outstripped by the blazing comet of the sciences, riding high in the unlocked skies of this new era. Long ago writers had theorized that in the future—their future—the sociological pattern would be different. In the day of rocketships such illogical mores as watered stock, dirty politics, and gangsters would not exist. But those theorists had not seen clearly enough. They thought of rocketships as vehicles of the far distant future.
Ley landed on the moon before automobiles stopped using carburetors.