“I rather doubt it,” Edmonds said. He brought his piece of jade from a pocket and began idly to thumb it.
Tracy looked at Stein. “For instance, Betty mentioned last night that you didn’t own this house. But if there’s no money how can you pay rent? Who does own it?”
“You misunderstood her,” the academician told him. “I don’t own the house but neither does anybody else.”
Tracy thought he understood. He said, “You mean it’s owned by the government?”
Jo Edmonds said mildly, “As we told you, there is no government in the sense of the word you’re using it.”
“Well,” Tracy said, exasperated. “How did you get the house? How come you were allowed to move into it, instead of somebody else?”
The academician was patient. “We had it built. When we first came over here to the Tangier area from America, for the experiment on you, we checked with the local distribution service, selected a site near where we planned to have you interred and then later brought out of hibernation, and had the house built.”
“And when you go back to America, what will you do with it?”
“Why, just leave it. If someone else wishes to move in—it’s a superlatively attractive location, I think—they could but more likely it would be recycled.”
“Recycled! A house like this?” Tracy looked about him in utter disbelief. “See here, how long did it take to build it?”
“Two or three days.” The other looked at Jo Edmonds. “Wasn’t it?”
“A couple of days, as I recall,” Edmonds answered idly, and then said to Tracy. “Houses these days are largely prefabricated, and the labor involved in assembling them is automated.”
Tracy couldn’t believe it. “So when you leave here to go back to your home in America, you just leave this place to be recycled?”
“We have no home in America,” Stein said.
Tracy looked at him. “Where did you live in America?”
“The last time, in the Catskill Mountains in what used to be the state of New York.”
“In a house, I assume.”
“Why yes. Some people prefer to live in apartments, but most choose houses. Ours was a somewhat smaller place than this, since it was before Jo came to live with us, and you, of course. So there were only Betty and me.”
Tracy said, “So when you decided to come over here you just left it, and now it’s probably been recycled?”
“Yes.”
Tracy couldn’t get it. He said, “But wouldn’t you want a permanent place in which to store your things?”
“What things?” the other said reasonably.
“Your private possessions. Your personal belongings.”
Betty had returned bearing a tray with breakfast. She sat it on the table.
She said, “Tracy, you are very difficult to get through to. Hasn’t it become obvious to you? We don’t have any personal belongings.”
“I have a few books that I’ve marked up,” the academician said.
Jo Edmonds said, after laughing a little, “And I have this.”
Tracy Cogswell stared at him. “You mean to tell me that in this whole world you own nothing whatsoever except that silly piece of stone?”
“That’s right. And a few other pieces.”
Tracy turned to Betty in absolute disbelief. “But you, surely you must have some favorite clothes, things like that, which you treasure.”
She said, “Of course I have favorite clothes. And every time I want to wear them, I simply dial the distribution center and they send them over. Brand new, obviously.”
He said desperately, “But little personal things, like possibly photographs of your mother, or friends when you were a kid.”
“If I wanted to see a picture of my mother… ”
“I know… I know. You dial the data banks and all the pictures of your mother ever taken are on file.”
He couldn’t think of anything else to say. Of all the things that had come up in this crazy world of the future thus far, this probably flabbergasted him more than anything else. He took a deep gulp of his coffee before trying again.
“How about your car?” he said. “The hover-car or whatever you call it, that you took me over to Spain in. When you leave here certainly you aren’t going to just leave it to be recycled or whatever.”
“It’s not our car,” Betty said. “When we came here we applied for a car. Since we live way out here on the cape, we keep it on a full-time basis, rather than summoning a different one from the car pool each time we need it. When we leave, we’ll return it to the car pool. If it’s still in good shape, they’ll continue to use it. If not, it will be recycled. Nobody owns cars anymore, Tracy. Who’d want to own a car?”
“Everybody did, in my day,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “And there were so many of them that the country was overflowing. These days we order a car only when we have need for one. In that way, you can order exactly what you need, a little sports runabout, a limousine if several of you are making a trip, a camper if you wish to go camping, a heavy-duty vehicle if you’re making a trip up into the mountains or out into the desert where there are few facilities.”
Academician Stein had been thinking it over. He said, “I think that what you should attempt, Tracy Cogswell, is to conceive of the present differences in our outlook on the ownership of
“But it didn’t simply apply to homes. Everybody wanted a larger car and more of them. It was an status symbol to have two, three, four or more cars, and possibly a private airplane, or even a yacht, as well. On top of all these possessions, each person accumulated as much clothing as possible, storing it about the house.”
Tracy said, “I’ve got you now. Your paintings. You have some beautiful paintings, statuary, and other art objects all over the house. Don’t tell me that you’re going to just ditch them when you leave.”
“Why not?” Betty said wonderingly. “When we get back to America, if that’s where we go to live next, we’ll just order a new selection.”
Tracy Cogswell closed his eyes momentarily in a silent plea to the gods. He said, “I’d forgotten about your duplicators. It’s almost impossible for me to conceive of the absolute waste of this period. The drain on natural resources must be terrible.”
“What waste?” Edmonds said. “Practically everything we use that can be recycled, we recycle. With nuclear fusion, power is all but free. With unlimited power you can tap the resources of the sea. As has been pointed out, one cubic mile of sea water contains some one hundred and fifty million tons of solid material, including about twenty tons of gold, eighteen million tons of magnesium and just about all of the other elements in quantity. Given infinite power, they can be extracted. Or take a hundred tons of plain igneous rock such as granite. It contains on an average, eight tons of aluminum, five of iron, twelve hundred pounds of titanium, one hundred and eighty pounds of magnesium, seventy of chromium, forty of nickel, twenty of copper, four of lead, ten of tungsten and many others. What natural resources did you think we were running out of, Tracy?”
For some reason, Tracy was irritated with them once again. Their answers were all so damned pat. Perhaps it was because they made him appear like a fool.
“Okay,” he said. “If the world is so affluent now, if you’ve got so damn much of everything, why aren’t you happy? The picture you’ve been drawing for me is that the world is going to pot, then you turn around and tell me everybody has everything they want.”
