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Read Ebook: Making Tin Can Toys by Thatcher Edward Thatcher Isabel Illustrator
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Ebook has 72 lines and 2311 words, and 2 pages
He filed a flight plan that would return him to his home, and in due course arrived there.
The phone rang in his ears as he opened the cockpit. He didn't want to answer, and he stayed on the roof securing the gyro and plugging in its battery-charger. But he couldn't ignore the bell's insistent clamor.
When he went downstairs and switched on the phone, George Harding's round face splashed on the wall.
"Fred," he said, "when we talked a few hours ago, you forgot to say you were sick. I phoned to confirm that for the Attendance Report. Did this call get you out of bed?"
He could see it hadn't. Therefore Fred knew he must be recording the audio only, and not the video; trying to give him a break with the Attendance people and coach him on the most appeasing answers.
A well-meant gesture, but a false one. And Fred was fed up with the false. "I forgot nothing," he said bluntly. "I'm perfectly well and haven't been near bed."
"Now, wait," George said hastily. "It's no crime to be sick. And--ah--don't say anything you wouldn't want preserved for posterity."
"George, I'm not going to play along with you," Fred insisted. "This business of producing to consume and consuming to produce has got me down. It's beyond all reason!"
"No, it isn't. You're an excellent mechanical engineer, Fred, but you're not an economist. That's why you don't understand. Just excuse me for a minute, and I'll show you."
He left the field of view. Fred waited incuriously for him to return, suddenly conscious of the fact that he now had nothing better to do with his time.
George was back in less than a minute, anyhow. "O.K.," he said briskly. "Now, where were we? Oh, yes. I just wanted to say that production is a form of consumption, too--even the production of machine-tools and labor-saving devices. So there's nothing inconsistent--"
"What are you trying to do?" Fred demanded. "Don't lecture me--I know as much econ as you do!"
"But you've got to come back to work, Fred! I want you to use your rations, put your shoulder to the wheel, and conform generally. The policing's too strict for you to try anything else, fella--and I like you too well to want to see you--"
"I don't need you to protect me, George," Fred said stiffly. "I guess you mean well enough. But goodbye." He switched off.
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 plun
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