Winthrop put the enormous egg he was holding on the floor. “Have a seat, Mrs. Brucks. Take the load off your feet,” he suggested jovially.
Shuddering at the hillock of floor which came into being at her host’s gesture, Mrs. Brucks finally bent her knees and sat, her tentative rear making little more than a tangent to it. “How—how are you, Mr. Winthrop?”
“Fine, just fine! Couldn’t be better, Mrs. Brucks. Say, have you seen my new teeth? Just got them this morning. Look.”
He opened his jaws and pulled his lips back with his fingers.
Mrs. Brucks leaned forward, really interested, and inspected the mouthful of white, shining enamel. “A good job,” she pronounced at last, nodding. “The dentists here made them for you so fast?”
“Dentists!” He spread his bony arms wide in a vast and merry gesture. “They don’t have dentists in 2487 A.D. They grew these teeth for me, Mrs. Brucks.”
“Grew? How grew?”
“How should I know how they did it? They’re smart, that’s all. A lot smarter than us, every way. I just heard about the regeneration clinic. It’s a place where you lose an arm, you go down there, they grow it right back on the stump. Free, like everything else. I went down there, I said ‘I want new teeth’ to the machine that they’ve got. The machine tells me to take a seat, it goes one, two, three—and bingo! there I am, throwing my plates away. You want to try it?”
She shifted uncomfortably on her hillock. “Maybe—but I better wait until it’s perfected.”
Winthrop laughed again. “You’re scared,” he announced. “You’re like the others, scared of the twenty-fifth century. Anything new, anything different, you want to run for a hole like a rabbit. Only me, only Winthrop, I’m the only one that’s got guts. I’m the oldest, but that doesn’t make any difference —I’m the only one with guts.”
Mrs. Brucks smiled tremulously at him. “But Mr. Winthrop, you’re also the only one without no one to go back to. I got a family, Mr. Mead has a family, Mr. Pollock’s just married, a newlywed, and Miss Carthington is engaged. We’d all like to go back, Mr. Winthrop.”
“Mary Ann is engaged?” A lewd chuckle. “I’d never have guessed it from the way she was squirming round that temporal supervisor fellow. That little blondie is on the make for any guy she can get.”
“Still and all, Mr. Winthrop, she’s engaged. To a bookkeeper in her office she’s engaged. A fine, hardworking boy. And she wants to go back to him.”
The old man pulled up his back and the floor-couch hunched up between his shoulder blades and scratched him gently. “Let her go back, then. Who gives a damn?”
“But, Mr. Winthrop—” Mrs. Brucks wet her lips and clasped her hands in front of her. “She can’t go back, we can’t go back—unless we all go back together. Remember what they told us when we arrived, those temporal supervisors? We all have to be sitting in our chairs in the time machine building at six o’clock on the dot, when they’re going to make what they call the transfer. If we aren’t all there on time, they can’t make the transfer, they said. So, if one of us, if you, for instance, doesn’t show up—”
“Don’t tell me your troubles,” Winthrop cut her off savagely. His face was deeply flushed and his lips came back and exposed the brand-new teeth. There was a sharp acrid smell in the room and blotches of crimson on its walls as the place adjusted to its owner’s mood. All around them the music chanced to a staccato, vicious rumble. “Everybody wants Winthrop to do a favor for them. What did they ever do for Winthrop?”
“Umh?” Mrs. Brucks inquired. “I don’t understand you.”
“You’re damn tooting you don’t understand me. When I was a kid, my old man used to come home drunk every night and beat the hell out of me. I was a small kid, so every other kid on the block took turns beating the hell out of me, too. When I grew up, I got a lousy job and a lousy life. Remember the depression and those pictures of the breadlines? Well, who do you think it was on those breadlines, on every damn breadline in the whole damn country? Me, that’s who. And then, when the good times came back, I was too old for a decent job. Night-watchman, berrypicker, dishwasher, that’s me. Cheap flophouses, cheap furnished rooms. Everybody gets the gravy, Winthrop got the garbage.”
He picked up the large egg-shaped object he had been ex-amining when she entered and studied it moodily. In the red glow of the room, his face seemed to have flushed to a deeper color. A large vein in his scrawny neck buzzed bitterly.
“Yeah. And like you said, everybody has someone to go back to, everybody but me. You’re damn tooting I don’t have anyone to go back to. Damn tooting. I never had a friend, never had a wife, never even had a girl that stayed around longer than it took her to use up the loose change in my pocket. So why should I go back? I’m happy here, I get everything I want and I don’t have to pay for it. You people want to go back because you feel different—uncomfort-able, out of place. I don’t. I’m used to being out of place: I’m right at home. I’m having a good time. I’m staying.”
“Listen, Mr. Winthrop,” Mrs. Brucks leaned forward anxiously, then jumped as the seat under her slunk forward. She rose and stood, deciding that on her feet she might enjoy at least minimal control of her immediate environment. “Listen, Mr. Winthrop, everybody has troubles in their life. With my daughter, Annie, I had a time that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. And with my Julius— But because I have troubles, you think I should take it out on other people? I should prevent them from going home when they’re sick and tired of jumper machines and food machines and—I don’t know —machine machines and—”
“Speaking of food machines,” Winthrop perked up, “have you seen my new food phonograph? The latest model. I heard about it last night, I said I wanted one, and sure enough, first thing this morning a brand new one is delivered to my door. No fuss, no bother, no money. What a world!”
“But it’s not your world, Mr. Winthrop. You didn’t make anything in it, you don’t work in it. Even if everything is free, you’re not entitled. You got to belong, to be entitled.”
“There’s nothing in their laws about that,” he commented absent-mindedly as he opened the huge egg and peered inside at the collection of dials and switches and spigots. “See, Mrs. Brucks, double volume controls, double intensity controls, triple vitamin controls. What a set! With this one, you can raise the oil texture of a meal, say, while reducing its sweetness with that doohickey there—and if you press that switch, you can compress the whole meal so it’s no bigger than a mouthful and you’re still hungry enough to try a couple of other compositions. Want to try it? I got it set for the latest number by Unni Oehele, that new Aldebaranian composer: Memories of a Martian Soufflee.”
She shook her head emphatically. “No, by me, a meal is served in plates. I don’t want to try it. Thank you very much.”