"_That_ gadget!" Jerry said bitterly. "It was when you first mentioned it before the U.N. Assembly that all this trouble on Earth started. Everybody and his brother hopes that tomorrow he can buy a Matter Repositor, and never have to buy anything again. I came here mostly to ask you whether it's really true, that if you have one of those dinguses, you can bring anything you want into your living room." "You _can_. In practice, of course, repositing just anything that took your fancy would produce economic anarchy." "Let's put it this way," Jerry persisted. "Home appliances were my biggest accounts. Now, when we try to sell a refrigerator, the prospect says she's saving her cash till Matter Repositors get on the Earth market. She plans to reposit a refrigerator--not from her neighbor's kitchen, because that would be stealing--but from the factory. If the factory goes bust, people figure the government will have to subsidize building appliances. Now, could she really reposit a refrigerator?" "She could. But she wouldn't want to." "Why not?" Jerry asked, puzzled. "If she conceived an illogical and useless desire for food refrigeration, she would simply reposit a block of cold air from, say, the North Pole." "Oh, fine!" Jerry said sarcastically. "That would cause more unemployment in the refrigerator industry than repositing them without paying for them! But what do you mean about food refrigeration being illogical and useless?" "Well, in a storage warehouse, there might be some reason for food preservation. But you don't need cold or canning. Why not just reposit the bacteria that cause the food to deteriorate? There's no need to store food in a home equipped with a Matter Repositor. You simply reposit one meal at a time. Fruits and vegetables direct from tree or field. Meat from a slaughterhouse, since it isn't humane to remove a pound of steak from a live steer. But even this is needless." "Why?" Jerry baffledly wanted to know. "To free the maximum amount of the effort of thinking beings for non-material activities, each consumer can reposit the chemical elements of the food, synthesize his meal on the table. He can even reposit these elements directly into his stomach, or, to by-pass the effort of digestion, into his bloodstream as glycogen and amino acids." "So refrigerators would be as dead an item as kerosene lamps in a city wired for electricity," Jerry agreed unhappily. "Suppose Mrs. Housewife, not needing a refrigerator, reposits a washing machine. The point I'm driving at--is there any practical way to compensate the factory, give it an incentive to produce more washing machines, without dragging in government control?"