"What I want to find out," Allen said, "is what are we doing this evening?"
"I'm taking Lena's kids to the history museum." Lena was his wife's married sister. "You're not doing anything."
"I'll tag along," he decided. "I want to discuss something with you."
"Discuss what?" she asked instantly.
"Same old thing." The history museum would make as good a place as any; so many people passed through that no juvenile would single them out. "I'll be home around six. What's for dinner?"
"How about ‘steak'?"
"Fine," he said, and hung up.
After dinner they walked over to Lena's and picked up the two kids. Ned was eight and Pat was seven, and they scurried excitedly along the twilight lane and up the steps of the museum. Allen and his wife came more slowly, hand in hand, saying little. For once the evening was pleasant. The sky was cloud-scattered but mild, and many people were out to enjoy themselves in the few ways open to them.
"Museums," Allen said. "And art exhibits. And concerts. And lectures. And discussions of public affairs." He thought of Gates' phonograph playing "I Can't Get Started," the taste of sherry, and, beyond everything else, the litter of the twentieth century that had focalized in the water-soaked copy of Ulysses. "And there's always Juggle."
Clinging wistfully to him, Janet said: "Sometimes I wish I was a kid again. Look at them go." The children had vanished inside the museum. To them the exhibits were still interesting; they hadn't wearied of the intricate tableaux.
"Someday," Allen said, "I'd like to take you where you can relax." He wondered where that would be. Certainly no place in the Morec scheme. Perhaps on some remote colony planet, when they had grown old and been discarded. "Your childhood days again. Where you can take off your shoes and wriggle your toes." As he had first found her: a shy, thin, very pretty girl, living with her nonleased family on bucolic Betelgeuse 4.
"Could we sometime take a trip?" Janet asked. "Anywhere—maybe to a place where there's open country and streams and—" She broke off. "And grass."
The hub of the museum was its twentieth century exhibit. An entire white-stucco house had been painstakingly reconstructed, with sidewalk and lawn, garage and parked Ford. The house was complete with furniture, robot mannikins, hot food on the table, scented water in the tile bathtub. It walked, talked, sang and glowed. The exhibit revolved in such a way that every part of the interior was visible. Visitors lined up at the circular railing and watched as Life in the Age of Waste rotated by.
Over the house was an illuminated sign:
HOW THEY LIVED
"Can I press the button?" Ned yammered, racing up to Allen. "Let me press it; nobody's pressed it. It's time to press it."
"Sure," Allen said. "Go ahead. Before somebody beats you to it."
Ned scampered back, squeezed to the railing where Pat waited, and jabbed the button. The spectators gazed benignly at the lush house and furnishings, knowing what was coming. They were watching, for awhile, at least, the last of the house. They drank in the opulence: the stocks of canned food, the great freezer and stove and sink and washer and drier, the car that seemed made of diamonds and emeralds.
Over the exhibit the sign winked out. An ugly cloud of smoke rolled up, obscuring the house. Its lights dimmed, turned dull red, and dried up. The exhibit trembled, and, to the spectators, a rumble came, the lazy tremor of a subterranean wind.
When the smoke departed, the house was gone. All that remained of the exhibit was an expanse of broken bones. A few steel supports jutted, and bricks and sections of stucco lay strewn everywhere.
In the ruins of the cellar the surviving mannikins huddled over their pitiful possessions: a tank of decontaminated water, a dog they were stewing, a radio, medicines. Only three mannikins had survived, and they were haggard and ill. Their clothing was in shreds and their skins were seared with radiation burns.
Over this hemisphere of the exhibit the sign concluded:
AND DIED
"Gee," Ned said, returning. "How do they do that?"
"Simple," Allen said. "The house isn't really in there, on that stage. It's an image projected from above. They merely substitute the alternate image. When you press the button its starts the cycle."
"Can I press it again?" Ned begged. "Please, I want to press it again; I want to blow the house up again."
As they wandered on, Allen said to his wife: "I wanted you to enjoy dinner. Have you?"
She clutched his arm. "Tell me."
"The whirlwind is coming back to be reaped. And it's an angry whirlwind. Luddy took off with everything he could lay his hands on, right to Blake-Moffet. He's probably vice president, with what he brought."
She nodded forlornly. "Oh."
"In a way, we're ruined. We have no backlog; all we are is a bunch of clever new ideas. And Luddy took them... roughly, us for the next year. That's how far ahead we had it. But that isn't the real problem. As an official of Blake-Moffet he'll be in a position to get back at me. And he will. Let's face it; I showed Luddy up for a sycophant. And that fun isn't."
"What are you going to do?"
"Defend myself, naturally. Luddy was a hard worker, competent, with a good sense of organization. But he wasn't original. He could take somebody else's idea—my idea—and milk a great deal from it. He used to build up whole packets from the smallest grain. But I have him on the creativity. So I can still run rings around Blake-Moffet, assuming I'm in the field a year from now."
"You sound almost—cheerful."
"Why not?" He shrugged. "It merely makes a bad situation worse. Blake-Moffet have always been the inertial stone dragging us into the grave. Every time they project a boy-gets-good-girl packet they blow the breath of age on us. We have to struggle out from under the dust before we can move." He pointed. "Like that house."
The opulent twentieth century house, with its Ford and Bendix washer, had reappeared. The cycle had returned to its source.
"How they lived," Allen quoted. "And died. That could be us. We're living now, but that doesn't mean anything."
"What happened at the Resort?"
"Nothing. I saw the Analyst; I recalled; I got up and left. Next Monday I go back."
"Can they help you?"
"Sure, given time."
Janet asked: "What are you going to do?"
"Take the job. Go to work as Director of Telemedia."
"I see." Then she asked: "Why?"
"Several reasons. First, because I can do a good job."
"What about the statue?"
"The statue isn't going away. Someday I'll find out why I japed it, but not by Saturday morning. Meanwhile, I'll have to live. And make decisions. By the way... the salary's about what I'm making now."
"If you're at T-M can Luddy hurt you more?"
"He can hurt the Agency more, because I'll be gone." He reflected. "Maybe I'll dismember it. I'll wait and see; it depends on how I do at T-M. In six months I may want to go back."
"What about you?"
Truthfully, he said: "He can hurt me more, too. I'll be fair game for everybody. Look at Mavis. Four giants in the field, and all of them trying to get into T-M. And I'll have one giant with a gnat stinging it."
"I suppose," Janet said, "that's another of the several reasons. You want to tangle with Luddy head-on."
"I want to meet him, yes. And I wouldn't mind hitting up against Blake-Moffet from that position. They're moribund; they're calcified. As Director of Telemedia I'll do my best to put them out of business."
"They probably expect that."
"Of course they do. One of their packets is enough for a year; I told Mrs. Frost that. As a competitor of Blake-Moffet I could run alongside them for years, hitting them now and then, getting hit in return. But as Director of T-M we'll have a grandiose showdown. Once I'm in, there's no other way."