homes built that are still in existence. But in your day? A homeowner with a thirty-year mortgage could expect the house to have deteriorated before he finished paying for it. So bad was the workmanship and the materials that many had become hovels or shacks before ten years were up. Today, as in the long-ago past, we build houses that will last for centuries.”
“I suppose you’re right there,” Julian begrudged him. “We constructed millions of buildings each year and tore down almost an equal number—not just houses, but every other type of building as well.”
“Another great waste of your time,” Leete went one, “was power. You were going through your fossil fuels such as petroleum, coal, and natural gas as though there was an unlimited supply. For example, everyone who could afford it air-conditioned not only their homes, their offices, their stores and public buildings, but their cars as well.”
“You mean to tell me that you no longer use air-conditioning?”
“Sometimes, but not the to the extent you did. You see, most of us have come to believe that man’s body was designed for the temperatures nature provides. It did your health little good to go back and forth from the heat outside to air-conditioned interiors. How many colds and other respiratory diseases resulted from the practice, we’ll never know. You also drastically overheated your buildings in the winter months. Today, we still heat our houses, of course, but we are more inclined to wear heavier clothing, warm underwear and sweaters, rather than swelter in summer temperatures in December. Why, those who could afford it even heated their swimming pools. Can you imagine the amount of power that consumed?”
“That’s one of the things I meant to ask you about,” Julian said. “When I went into stasis, we were beginning to face a power shortage. How did you lick that? Though, from what you say, you now have unlimited power from nuclear fision.”
“It’s not as simple as all that,” Leete told him. “Unlimited power through nuclear fision could bring with it unlimited heat, which would be bound to get us into all sorts of trouble. So although we utilize it to some degree, we also call upon other sources, particularly renewable energy sources, so that we can live on the earth’s energy income, rather than its capital. We now utilize much more wind and water power—even the tides. We tap the heat of the interior of the planet. But most of all we are calling upon solar power, the vast energy pouring down on us from the sun. It produces some fifty thousand times as much energy as man’s current rate of consumption.”
Julian, as usual, was lost. He said, “You and Edith have mentioned solar power several times and although they were working on it even earlier than 1960, I never did quite understand it. You know, that was true about just almost everybody in my day. We accepted things but didn’t have the vaguest idea of how they worked. For instance, I don’t know what radio is, not really. It goes in here and it comes out there, but I haven’t the slightest idea of just what happens. I was an average citizen, with an average citizen’s knowledge of the gadgets we had; I haven’t the vaguest idea what makes a refrigerator cold. But back to solar power…1 think there were some two hundred houses completely, or at least mostly, powered by solar sources, even in my time.”
Leete nodded. “The solar battery was developed by the Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1954. It’s been improved considerably since then. The early batteries were a flat sandwich of n-type and p-type semi-conductors. Sunlight striking the plate would knock some electrons out of place. The transfer was connected, as in the ordinary-type battery, in an electrical circuit. The freed electrons move toward the positive pole and holes move toward the negative pole, thus constituting a current. Those early solar batteries developed electric potentials of up to half a volt and up to nine watts of power from each square foot exposed to the sun. Not very much, perhaps, but its advantage was that it had no liquids, no corrosive chemicals, no moving parts. Electricity continued to be generated indefinitely, so long as the sun shined.”
“You’ve already lost me,” Julian said. “I’m afraid I’m no science student.”
“It is a bit technical,” the doctor agreed. “The amount of energy falling upon one acre of a sunny area of the earth is 9.4 million kilowatt-hours per year. Square mile upon square mile have been covered with solar batteries in places such as parts of the Sahara not suited for reforestation, in Death Valley, in the deserts of what was once Utah and other parts of the West. The Chinese have emplaced them in areas of the Gobi and the Russians in desert areas of Siberia. The Arabs have a source of power as great as that of their oil of the mid-twentieth century, in the broiling sun of the Arabian peninsula. In short, Julian, in solar power we have a source of energy that will undoubtedly last as long as the human race endures.”
“What’s wrong with nuclear atomic reactors? You have unlimited power from hydrogen taken from the oceans. They were the thing when I went into stasis.”
“Radioactive wastes are more carefully handled now, but there is still danger. The United States Atomic Energy Commission, the official custodian of the deadly byproducts of the nuclear age, took calculated risks which, looking backward, have horrified us. For instance, back in the early nineteen seventies more than a half million gallons of deadly radioactive liquid leaked from huge storage tanks at the A EC’s Hanford facility, near Richmond, Washington.
“No, we are leery about nuclear power and I have no doubt that they will phase it out as our power resources from solar energy continue to grow. Perhaps future generations will revive its use again, when science has learned more about handling it.”
Edith Leete put down her stylo, got up from the desk, and took a chair nearer to them. “I can’t concentrate with you two jabbering away,” she said. “I thought you were talking about waste under the old system. You hardly touched on some of the major ways there were to throw away valuable products.”
Julian looked at her. “Such as?”
“Take something like clothing. In your day, there were thousands of clothing manufacturers in this country alone. They would design, say, a woman’s dress, keeping their fingers crossed that the potential customer would go for the lower hem or higher hem, the lower waist or the higher waist, or this, that, or the other thing in the way of style. The shopper had tens of thousands of stores to choose from, ranging from tiny one-room affairs to department stores covering acres of land. There were mail-order houses which put out catalogues as large as the phone book of a considerable city. No woman could begin to examine all the varieties of dresses manufactured to part her from her dollars.”
Julian took in the coverall-type garment she wore, which was almost identical to that he and the doctor were garbed in.
He said, an edge of sarcasm to his voice, “In my day, people, and women in particular, dressed for attractiveness. Now everybody wears the same thing. I’m not so sure I don’t prefer the old days.”
The doctor laughed, but let his daughter carry the ball.
She smiled, looking down at her outfit. “These aren’t the only clothes we wear. They just happen to be the uniform, more or less, of the university. They’re practical, comfortable, suitable for anything from laboratory work to most sports. But I wouldn’t expect to go to a party, or dancing, or skiing…” she grinned at him “…or swimming in these dungarees.”
“Okay,” Julian acknowledged. “But then what’s the difference between 1970 and the Year 2, New Calendar?”
“To get back to our woman buying a dress. She could choose among tens of thousands of dresses and so forth. So big was the choice that if she went shopping, she couldn’t possibly check out everything. Besides that, she had a choice of quality, superior and inferior textiles, cheaper and more expensive designs. In our system there is still a choice, but there are only a few hundred different designs. And all textiles are the best possible; there are no inferior materials.”
“But isn’t it monotonous?” Julian argued.
Edith laughed. “A few hundred basic dresses is no small matter. Three hundred different types of skirts, three hundred different types of blouses, three hundred sweaters, three hundred belts, three hundred shoes and sandals. Work that out mathematically and you can see that you have literally hundreds of thousands of potential costumes. But if you are still unhappy, you can buy material and design your own clothing. A good many women do, and more men are drifting into it too. Textile design and making your own clothing are growing hobbies these days. The big thing is that we don’t produce and then destroy literally millions of articles of clothing each year simply because they have gone out of fashion. For all practical purposes, styles and fashions as such have disappeared. Our clothing is made for comfort, to be warm or cool as the season dictates, and to be attractive without being garish or ridiculous. We wouldn’t dream of wearing anything as silly as a girdle, nor a tie on a man.”
“As you say,” Julian sighed. “I’ll admit we had some far-out fads in our day. You should have seen some of the hats.”
