"And there were the gangsters, those wonderful, wonderful eccentric persons, like the robinhoods and beowulfs I've told you about. And yes, there were the bombs that went bam and boom and wham, and made beautiful colors and high gorgeous mushrooming clouds--like the pictures in the ancient book I smuggled in to show you the other day." "And people blown to bits," said Stan Thirtystanley in a fake grownup voice. "To little itsy-bitsy bits," Miss Hippiness cried. "The 20th Century, children. Ah, what happiness to have lived then, the whole world violent and dangerous and seething and exciting like a string of storybooks every inch of the way around the equator. But where you could be an individual--your own boss, they used to call it." She couldn't sit now. She raised her massive hips off the straight chair and began pacing up and down the room, her face like an ancient television screen. And the children's eyes followed her like hungry puppies after a mama dog. * * * * * "It was the final splurge, children, of the individual man," she said. "Nowadays we have a world of people, all the same, all dull, all safe and healthy and secure. Then it was a world of persons. And in between every bit of violence there was a cozy bit of restful safety. In between every bit of anger there was a silent bit of cozy peace. For every tragic moment there was a moment of sunny happiness." "And were people really, really allowed to die by themselves?" asked Charley Tencharles. She stopped and bent a loving glance on him. In the 20th Century he would have been called Teacher's Pet. He was a dear and a doll and an angel. "Oh, many, many good people," she said, a catch in her voice, "died by themselves. Imagine, some were taken by old age! And, as we said last week, there were those wonderful sicknesses. A person could die of one of those. Nobody in the whole 20th Century had a card in the central bureau which had on it the date of their death. Think of it, children." * * * * * She was wound up now, coming to the new part she had to tell them. The part about electronics, which had been an infant science at the start of the 20th Century. Matter transmitters were not known, nor disintegrators. Robots were just on the horizon. Radio and television came to flower. Man was just beginning to step off the face of the world into deep space. And there were so few people on earth that there were open fields all over every continent. Fine blowing trees everywhere, and real, live wild flowers.