His rather ridiculously high-pitched voice died quietly away as he paused and gazed into, it seemed, the room, as he had gazed into the empty temple of man's intellect but a moment before. And in that instant, standing there with his stubby hands on the railing of the platform, he had the surpassing dignity of one who sees conquest near and rejoices in the knowledge that his achievement has been something more than worthy. "The result," he continued, "was inevitable. The hobby system, as it has been flippantly termed, dissolved in a chaotic attack on the machines. Fortunately, the mobs were too disorganized to destroy much before they felt the effects of their attacks. For men, subject to a cold they had never known before--due to their damaging the weather towers--died from exposure, untended by smashed machines that could have saved them. Everywhere hundreds of people, deprived of the comfort of machines they had come to regard as essential, died swiftly from unaccustomed hardships to which their delicate constitutions had been too long unconditioned. "That, as you know, was the first and only attack on the machines. It had become apparent that they had not only degenerated man, but so degenerated him that he could not live without them. "And so the present system of credits for the amount of work done by each person in his own line has come into being. It has not changed the situation. Man still has no excuse for living, only for existing. "The frenzied, maddened search for some purpose, some reason for being, that has taken place since--I need not go into. It is a rather horrible thing to think about. And in the last twenty-five years it has resulted in a revolt against convention and the accepted decencies in life. That has led, in turn, to orgies, to abandoned pleasure-seeking that has no parallel in our written history. The frustrated creative genius of our time has found outlet shocking to more ordinary people--if any person can be called ordinary in this time and age. I do not believe there is such a person. I believe that we have all gone mad in our despair and in our lack of any intelligent goal." * * * * * The voice of Parker cut across the spell in the room like the explosion of a shell in a country graveyard. "He's just made the world's biggest understatement. By the God of the ancients, he should see some of the human wrecks that come to us, that pack our offices, and practically hang from the fluorescent. Day after day, hundreds and hundreds of them. And we can only tell them what is wrong with them--not what to do about it. A noble profession ours, gentlemen. Hah! It's hollow. Hollow and futile. Like the mobs that visit us here at Science Hall and go away uncomforted, to wait until they go completely mad and are taken away to a mechanical madhouse presided over by the same magnificently futile psychologists. A noble profession indeed."