Fillmore nodded. "And prices are away out of reach too. Only the other
day I spent six cents for twelve barrels of thousand-year-old whiskey.
The world has been aiming at high wages and low prices for the past ten
thousand years and we're still slaving and starving. You never told me
exactly what you do."
"I work pretty hard. You see, this chair has coils in it that convert
heat into Zeta Rays by shortening the wave-length. I sit here for
twenty-nine minutes each day, two days a month, and concentrate all my
heat through the seat of my pants. It goes through the converter and
comes out Zeta Rays in China. Zeta Rays are no good for anything except
to convert ordinary rock into gold, so the Chinese pipe it to Russia.
Gold, being soft, is good for nothing except to burn ceremoniously
in accordance with the ancient religious rites, and so a lot of it
is stolen and sold on the gray market to be converted into uranium.
Uranium, being useless except for fissionable purposes, is used for
fertilizer in the mineral laboratories where iron is grown. Iron is no
good for anything except food, and you can't put very much of it in
ordinary food, and so it is dissolved into an iron vapor and freed in
the atmosphere. Iron vapor gets heavier as it cools, and so it settles
on top of the clouds and holds them close to the earth and keeps the
warmth of the world from escaping. So, as I sit here and warm this
chair, I'm keeping the world warm."
"And getting only three thousand dollars for twenty-nine minutes of
that sort of slave labor! Scandalous! I'll bet you can't afford more
than a hundred vacations a year. We might as well be back in the dark
age of the twentieth century. I've been advocating a one-minute
work-day for the past decade, one day a month, two months a year. What
good is civilization if it doesn't provide something for the poor
working man? And people call me a visionary, with Utopian ideas! Bah!
If I'm not mistaken, you're the man with the seat of his intelligence
in the back of his lap! Right? You're being exploited!"
* * * * *
The bald man shook his head. "No. It's Corson who's got his
intelligence in his back side. Mine is in the soles of my feet,
according to Meyer who knows about such things. But Konwell claims the
intelligence flows through the bloodstream in all persons."
"Not all," Fillmore contradicted. "But Konwell is right. The brain is
merely the antennae. The more blood it gets the more it can express.
For instance, in order to concentrate to the full power of fourteen I
have to stand on my head. But I can't hang around here all day. Get
your secretary in and let me shake hands with her."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account