After an hour or two, he realized that he was no longer within the City Limits.
Charles took a good look around him and discovered he was standing on a minor highway just outside of town. There were no cars or people in sight, and he dropped off the road into some bushes to get his wind and think.
He had known there was something wrong with the molecular structure of the suit he was wearing, but Edwin wouldn't listen.
It had undoubtedly been the humidity. The chemical process had no doubt been going on since he'd first donned the suit, but it had been the heat in that beer joint that had accelerated the action enough to finish the job. Human perspiration acting on the new fiber in the collar of his suit produced some obscure chemical reaction which had a corrosive effect on the plastic band and plastic card of his name tag.
He had to get home, somehow, and tell Edwin to hold up production on the new thermostatic suit. Perhaps the flaw in it could be eliminated in a short time. If it couldn't....
He considered. The world Dollar Standard had been absolutely stable for more years than he knew about. What would happen if it suddenly became unstable? A fluctuation of even a fraction of a cent would cause widespread panic; it would jolt the Public's faith in its infallible economic system. And the panic would cause further deviation in the Dollar's purchasing power, and—more panic.
He wiped his brow. If the situation in the Textile Industry was as critical as Edwin said it was, then Edwin and his superiors weren't going to be at all happy when Charles told them about the suit—and Charles was going to be the fall guy.
But of course he had to get back and tell them. Because Edwin was all set to start production on the all-weather suit immediately, and if he actually went through with that and got a few million of them onto consumer's backs, the result would be not panic, but disaster.
And Charles' present problem was how to get home without being arrested.