"The machines were to blame. They could do things better, infinitely better, than human hands. You built televisors and put them together carefully with the proud hands of a creator. With your care and skill you were able to turn out, say, some ten televisors a month, but they were the best of their kind, and you were happy in that knowledge. Then you discovered that the machines could produce those televisors of yours at the rate of some five hundred a month, and could make a better one than you could, with all your patient toil and trouble. You were a rocket builder, a constructor of homes, a monocar designer? It was the same. "Or perhaps you were an inventor? Why? That, too, was what the inventors wondered--and ceased to invent. There had been too many wonders, the world was satiated with wonderful things, and those who create more, found for them merely a bored acceptance. The acceptance was of the machine, not himself, for the majority of the population did not even know who had built the marvels that made their life so monotonously comfortable. "The incentive to do good in this world died--there was no good to do. There were no physicians, because the machines could diagnose an ailment better than they; there were no diseases to eliminate because they had long been eliminated; there were no surgeons to operate, because the machines did it quicker, safer, better. There were no abuses to correct, no social conditions to improve, because there were no abuses, and the social conditions were Utopian. "There was no longer any desire to achieve in writing, in art, in music--for achievement was no longer recognized. If your writing was packed with significance, with powerful, thought-provoking originality, then it probably would not even see publication. Those who wrote and were recognized were those who could thrill with screaming action, with the forgotten danger of the old, primitive days back in the twentieth century; cheap stuff produced by men who were more mechanical than the machines. The only art that any man recognized was illustrating posters and those stories. Beauty had become too tame. The swing, the jazz, of an earlier age had evolved into a nerve-racking bedlam of discordant sounds not even needing a composer--mechanically timed, mechanically produced, mechanically precise. "Mankind lost its most precious possession--the sense of achievement, of being valuable, and with it lost its initiative. They suffered from a mass inferiority complex that was only too well justified by the superiority of the metal monstrosities they, the Frankensteins, had made. "Something died inside the mind of man--his self-confidence, his superiority. And with it died achievement and progress. Mankind no longer lived. It existed." * * * * *