Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net FIRTH'S WORLD BY IRVING COX, JR. _His world was Utopia inhabited only by wealthy, brilliant, creative, ambitious people; it was the ultimate in freedom, exempt from taxes, social problems, petty responsibilities...._ [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, May 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Let him go. It's quite safe to leave us. I want to talk to him. Sit over there, Chris, where you can be comfortable. A paradox, isn't it? You were taught we may never go back. Now I've authorized the building of the rocket. From your point of view you were justified in trying to destroy it. I'm violating the regulations; you weren't. But time changes the shape of the truth, Chris; it isn't static. No one had the insight, then, to grasp the insanity of John Firth's dream. People hated Firth or envied him; but no one called him mad. * * * * * John Firth was an industrialist; yet far more than that, too--politician, scientist, financier, even an artist of sorts. There was nothing he couldn't do; and few things he didn't do superbly well. That accounts for his philosophy. He never understood his own superiority. He honestly believed that all men could achieve what he had, if they set their minds to it. "Lazy, incompetent fools!" he would say. "The world's full of them. And they've elected a government of fools, taxing me to support the others." As billionaires go, John Firth was very young. Six months after World Government became an established reality, Earth ships began to explore the skies; and in less than a year Mars, Venus and the Earth had formed a planetary confederacy. A new feeling came to men when the burden of war-fear was lifted from their minds. Men were free--free for the first time in centuries. Their full energies were channeled into invention, exploration, experiment. The Earth was like a frontier town: booming, uproarious, lusty, dynamic--but with a social conscience: poverty and deprivation for none and unlimited opportunity for all. For Man--that abstract symbol of mass humanity--it was the best of all possible worlds. Yet there were misfits; John Firth was one of them. "We're coddling people," he said. "We're teaching them to live on charity, on government hand-outs--and I'm expected to pay for it all. Cut them loose; let them sink or swim for themselves. If some of them don't survive--well, they won't; that's all. We'd be a stronger people if we could rid ourselves of the leeches." He was a man of the new age,--stubbornly holding to ideas from the old.