He went on and on in the same vein. After a while, when it became evident that he wasn't going to relegate me to Chevrolet Meadows or Buick Lawn, I relaxed. His idealism was high-flown, but I could endure it as long as the money kept coming in.
When he finally dismissed me, I started back to the hives. I couldn't help thinking, as I walked along the crumbling ancient highway, that if the manufacturers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries had been a little less zealous in their production of art, the Mesabi iron range might be something more than a poignant memory and there might have been enough ore available to have made mass 'copter production something more than an interrupted dream. There was an element of irony in using a super-highway for a footpath.
I hailed a rickshaw at the out-skirts of the city and rode in style to my apartment. There was a letter in my mail receptacle. The return address said: MARRIAGE ADMINISTRATION HEADQUARTERS. I waited till I got to my roomettes before I opened it. I wouldn't have opened it then if I'd dared not to.
The message was brief:
Report 1500, City Cathedral, Chapel 14, for marital union with one Julia Prentice, cit. no. 14489304-P, as per M. I. directive no. 38572048954-PR.
I read it again. And again. It still said Julia Prentice.
I knew my heart was beating a lot faster than it normally did and I knew my hands were trembling. I also knew that I was reacting like a fool. There were probably a hundred Julia Prentices in the hive sector alone and probably a hundred more in the other residential districts. So the chance that this Julia Prentice was the one I wanted her to be was one in two hundred.
But my heart kept up its rapid pace and my hands went right on trembling, and I kept seeing that beautiful flowing river with the green sweep of meadow just beyond, the lovely forested hills and the white cloud; the dark and forlorn speck of the soaring bird....
She was there waiting for me, standing in the Cathedral corridor before the little door of Chapel 14, and she was the Julia Prentice. I asked myself no questions as to why and wherefore. The reality of her sufficed for the moment.