The silence struck him. Not a sound stirred the air in that lonely new house except the slight wheeze of his breathing. He felt tired. Bone weary. As if all the fatigues of his eighty-six years were accumulated within him. He stood by a window and stared blindly out. Everyone seemed to have been heckling him, shoving him around, making him change all his ways every minute. He didn't want to change. He didn't want to be forever adapting to new gadgets, new fads, new ways of doing things. He thought of the villages of India, substantially unchanged for three, four, five thousand years. The villagers had no money, so they couldn't be consumers. Maybe they had the natural way to live. Statically. Also, frugally. But no. It was too frugal, too static. He'd heard and read too much about the starvation, pestilence, peonage and other ills plaguing those Indian villagers. They didn't have life licked, either. The Indians had not enough, the Americans, too much. One was as bad as the other. And he was in the middle. He left the window he'd been staring from unseeingly and walked to the foyer control-panel. There he pushed the button that would cause the house to rear a hundred feet into the air on its titanium-aluminum plunger. Then he went back to the window to watch the ground recede. He felt a hand on his shoulder. He decided the sensation was an illusion--a part of his state of mind. A young man's voice said, "Mr. Lubway, we need you." That was a nice thing to hear, so Fred turned, ready to smile. He didn't smile. He was confronted by another ration-cop. This one was a tall young man, dark and hefty. He seemed very kindly, in his official sort of way. "Mr. George Harding sent me," he explained. "He asked us to look you up and see if we could help." "Yes?" "You seem to have been a little unhappy this morning. I mean--well--staring out that window while your house rises dangerously high. Mr. George Harding didn't like the mood you're in, and neither do I, Mr. Lubway. I'm afraid you'll have to come to the hospital. We can't have a valuable citizen like you falling out that window, can we?" "What do you mean, 'valuable citizen'? I'm no use to anybody. There's plenty of engineers, and more being graduated every semester. You don't need me." "Oh, yes, we do!" Shaking his head, the young ration-cop took a firm grip on Fred's right biceps. "You've got to come along with me till your outlook changes, Mr. Lubway." "Now, see here!" Fred objected, trying unsuccessfully to twist free of the officer's grip. "You've no call to treat me like a criminal. Nor to talk to me as if I were senile. My outlook won't change, and you know it!" "Oh, yes, it will! And since you're neither criminal nor senile, that's what has to be done. "We'll do it in the most humane way possible. A little brain surgery, and you'll sit in your cage and consume and consume and consume without a care in the world. Yes, sir, we'll change your outlook!