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Ebook has 107 lines and 9255 words, and 3 pages

COMMUNITY PROPERTY

BY ALFRED COPPEL

That simple phrase has kept three generations of Obanions in the divorce trade. And only I have had cause to regret it.

Basically, I suppose, my troubles began the day the Subversive Party swept the Joe Macs out of Congress and repealed the Alien Restriction Act of 1998. That bit of log-rolling gave the franchise to almost all resident aliens and resulted in a situation virtually destroying the sanctity of divorce as an institution.

I'm a Joe Mac myself--politically, I mean. Obanions have been voting the Joe Mac Party Ticket for more than a hundred years. Red is our color. There are even family legends that say an Obanion was with the first Joe Mac when he became President of that old unit the Euse of Aay.

We have to rely on legends, unfortunately, because the Joe Mac Party traditionally fed their rally bonfires with books, and when they won the election and took over the Euse of Aay they had a rally to end all rallies and somehow the Government Archives--books, you see, as well as punch cards and the like--got taken over by some very zealous Party men. The records were always rather incomplete after that. Only word of mouth information was available during that first Joe Mac Administration, and that can be sketchy. For example, the party color is red. All we know is that first Joe Macs had something to do with red. You see how it goes.

What I mean by all this, is that I can see the faults in my own Party. I'm no diehard. Nor am I a bad loser. The Subs won control of Congress by a landslide, so I guess the people wanted that sort of slipshod government. Only they should have been more careful, dammit, when they started tampering with the laws.

I'm not antispacegook, either. I have my framed Legal Eagle's Oath right over my desk and I live up to it. And if Congress sees fit to make any Tmm, Dccck, or Harry a citizen of our great Commonwealth--I account it my duty to see to it that they are not denied the benefits of our Terrestrial divorce laws.

The new Sub Administration and their rash repeal of Joe Mac laws has had the effect of putting reverse English on the Obanion credo.

That wonderful phrase that encompasses so many great truths--that ringing statement that has made me rich and kept me a bachelor--now means something else. Confusion. Work. Yes, and even spacegook depravity.

I should go back and pick up the story at the beginning before I get too upset.

My name, as I said before, is Jose Obanion. I'm a licensed Legal Eagle, specializing in divorce law--and doing well at it. I have a good office on the 150th floor of the Needle Building, a damned fine address and a comfortable lay-out, too. A whole room to myself, a private visor service to the Municipal Law Library, and a lap-desk for my secretary, Thais Orlof.

On the day it began I was walking to work from the tubeway station and feeling rather pleased with myself. My income was high and steady, my protein ration account was in good shape and I was doing my bit as a civilized Terrestrial.

The morning was remarkably clear. You could make out the disc of the sun quite nicely through the smog, and there was a smogbow gleaming with carbon particles in the sky. I felt alert, expectant. Something BIG was going to happen to me. I could feel it.

Even in the go-to-work press of people on Montgomery Street, I didn't get shocked once. That's the way my luck was running. And three characters brushed against me and got nipped by my new Keep-A-Way.

There's been talk about making Keep-A-Ways illegal. Just the sort of infringement on personal liberty the Subversives are famous for. Inconsistent, too. They pass laws letting every spacegook in the universe come here to live and then talk about taking away one of the things that makes the crowding bearable.

I made a point of arriving at the office a little early, hoping to catch Thais in the act of coming in late. My secretary was a hard girl to dock, but I never stopped trying. It was a game we played. If she came in late, I would be justified in docking a protein credit off her pay for every thirty seconds of office time she wasted. So far I had managed to keep her pay low enough so she couldn't think of leaving my employ--though she was earning a few prots on the side by acting as correspondent in divorce cases that couldn't be settled by Collusion Court and actually had to be tried before a judge and jury.

Thais and I were still haggling over the price of her services as part-time mistress, too. I couldn't see giving her her asking price, which was half again the regular market price. Thais knew the value of a prot, all right. And of an erg, too. "Take care of the ergs," she would say, looking at me meaningfully, "and the prots will take care of themselves." Thais was a devout Ben Franklinist and she was full of aphorisms like that.

I settled myself into my Lowfer and glanced over the desk calendar. A full, profitable day ahead. Tremmy Jessup and his new fiancee were coming in at 0900 to sign the premarital divorce settlement. A wise couple, I thought approvingly. Save a lot of trouble later. At 1100 Truncott vs Truncott and Truncott. A multiple divorce case with two women involved. Very lucrative sort of case. And then at 1200 Gleda Warick was coming in to have me validate her Interlocutory decree. A formality. But I hoped to take her to lunch at the Palace where they were advertising a five ounce portion of genuine horsemeat on their five prot dinner. That sort of thing would impress Gleda and I rather hoped for great things from her. Not only that, she was spending 25,000 prots yearly on divorces. No Franklinist, she.

It still lacked a minute to the hour so I switched on the TV to catch Honest Pancho's commercial. Pancho was my most active competitor and he cost me plenty, but I couldn't suppress a grudging admiration of his enterprise. He had Lyra Yves doing his stuff for him, and anyone as socko as Lyra was dangerous. Sweetheart of the Western Hemisphere is the way she was billed, and her agent wasn't exaggerating too much.

Lyra was singing his come-on backed by a quartet humming a steady whap rhythm and doing a slow twitch. The lights were playing her daring costume big, accenting the fact that she had one breast almost covered. I frowned. How come the League of Decency let her get away with anything as suggestive as an opaque breast covering. Pancho must have friends in the censor's office. It was just another sign of the increasing degeneracy of our times. Soon entertainers would be appearing clothed from head to foot, exploiting the erotic stimulation of imagination.

Now the announcer cut in with his insinuating voice explaining how you could get your divorces quicker, cheaper and twice as funny at Honest Pancho's Big Splitzmart in the Flatiron Building, as well as his Legal Eaglery just down from the County Courthouse. "--yes, friends--TWO big locations to serve you. Come in and see Honest Pancho today!" And then Lyra again: "Whap! Honest Pancho's on the baaalll! WHAP!" She faded doing a sinuous twitch. I turned the TV off feeling a little worse than when I turned it on.

I watched her strip off her smog mask and cinder cape--on office time--and place them carefully in the sterilizer. She was very careful not to smear the paint that was most of what she wore. I tapped a NoKanse alight and inhaled deeply. "Good morning, Thais," I said.

"Whap!" she said in return. "I heard the TV all the way down the hall."

She pulled a Lowfer out of the wall and settled down with her lap-desk across her knees. The tip of one sandal was just brushing my shin. The office, unfortunately, could have been bigger, but with sixteen million people living in the city, space was rather costly even for a man with a better than average prot account.

"New paint?" I asked.

She smiled brilliantly at me. "Nice of you to notice, boss." She fumbled in the pockets of the belt around her naked, cerise-painted middle and took out her pad and stylus. "On time and ready for work," she said. "A calorie saved is a calorie earned."

But now, somehow, I didn't feel like attacking the day's schedule. Not quite yet. Pancho's commercial had disturbed me. "Thais," I said. "I wonder if I'm--well, slowing down--"

"You, boss?" She fluffed her green-tinted hair provocatively and raised an eyebrow at me. "I wouldn't say so."

"I don't mean that way," I said. "I mean professionally. I wonder if I shouldn't seek wider horizons."

"Not give it up, Thais. Not that. I couldn't. Divorce is my life. Could a doctor give up healing? Could a Freudist give up lobotomy? No, I didn't mean that. Frankly, I meant should I get more aggressive. Go out and get cases that would have a certain advertising value." I didn't want to say I didn't feel like spending good protein on the sort of advertising Pancho and some of the other Legal Eagles, an unethical lot really, were buying. Besides, we Obanions have always been rather frugal.

I knew that Thais had some rather questionable friends, being a Franklinist and all. And I knew too that some of them were spacegooks. But the combination of Lyra singing for Pancho and the way Thais was looking at me made me get careless.

"Tell me about it," I said in my best legal manner.

"Where are these spacegooks from? And what time can they be in the office tomorrow?"

"The Llagoe Islands on Venus," she said excitedly. "And they can be here anytime you say."

"Okay, ten hundred sharp. What do they do and how many people are involved?"

"They're musicians. And, uh, there are three. And two correspondents." She looked rather sheepishly at me as I raised my eyebrows and commented that even in this day and age of easy morality that was quite a number of 'people' to be involved in one divorce case. Too many, in fact.

"Indeed they are--thanks to a Subversive Congress." I made a few notations on my desk pad. "Five of them, eh? A multiple marriage."

Thais' voice was very low. "Well, no. Not exactly."

"What then?"

She looked at me resignedly. "Three sexes," she said.

To raise steam in large quantities we must employ a fuel which develops great heat in proportion to its weight, is readily procured, and cheap. Coal fulfils all these conditions. Of the 800 million tons mined annually throughout the world, 400 million tons are burnt in the furnaces of steam-boilers.

A good boiler must be-- Strong enough to withstand much higher pressures than that at which it is worked; so designed as to burn its fuel to the greatest advantage.

Even in the best-designed boilers a large part of the combustion heat passes through the chimney, while a further proportion is radiated from the boiler. Professor John Perry considers that this waste amounts, under the best conditions at present obtainable, to eleven-twelfths of the whole. We have to burn a shillingsworth of coal to capture the energy stored in a pennyworth. Yet the steam-engine of to-day is three or four times as efficient as the engine of fifty years ago. This is due to radical improvements in the design of boilers and of the machinery which converts the heat energy of steam into mechanical motion.

CIRCULATION OF WATER IN A BOILER.

If you place a pot filled with water on an open fire, and watch it when it boils, you will notice that the water heaves up at the sides and plunges down at the centre. This is due to the water being heated most at the sides, and therefore being lightest there. The rising steam-bubbles also carry it up. On reaching the surface, the bubbles burst, the steam escapes, and the water loses some of its heat, and rushes down again to take the place of steam-laden water rising.

If the fire is very fierce, steam-bubbles may rise from all points at the bottom, and impede downward currents . The pot then "boils over."

Fig. 2 shows a method of preventing this trouble. We lower into our pot a vessel of somewhat smaller diameter, with a hole in the bottom, arranged in such a manner as to leave a space between it and the pot all round. The upward currents are then separated entirely from the downward, and the fire can be forced to a very much greater extent than before without the water boiling over. This very simple arrangement is the basis of many devices for producing free circulation of the water in steam-boilers.

We can easily follow out the process of development. In Fig. 3 we see a simple U-tube depending from a vessel of water. Heat is applied to the left leg, and a steady circulation at once commences. In order to increase the heating surface we can extend the heated leg into a long incline , beneath which three lamps instead of only one are placed. The direction of the circulation is the same, but its rate is increased.

A further improvement results from increasing the number of tubes , keeping them all on the slant, so that the heated water and steam may rise freely.

THE ENCLOSED FURNACE.

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