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What Shall It Profit?
BY POUL ANDERSON
"The chickens got out of the coop and flew away three hundred years ago," said Barwell. "Now they're coming home to roost."
"Oh, damn," said Barwell. "I'm broke."
Radek shrugged and gave the slot a two-credit piece. It slid the whisky out on a tray with his change. He stuck the coins in his pouch and took another careful sip of beer.
There was an Asian whine to the music drifting past the curtains into the booth. Radek could hear the talk and laughter well enough to catch their raucous overtones. Somebody swore as dice rattled wrong for him. Somebody else shouted coarse good wishes as his friend took a hostess upstairs.
He wondered why vice was always so cheerless when you went into a place and paid for it.
"I am going to get drunk tonight," announced Barwell. "I am going to get so high in the stony sky you'll need radar to find me. Then I shall raise the red flag of revolution."
"And tomorrow?" asked Radek quietly.
Barwell grimaced. "Don't ask me about tomorrow. Tomorrow I will be among the great leisure class--to hell with euphemisms--the unemployed. Nothing I can do that some goddam machine can't do quicker and better. So a benevolent state will feed me and clothe me and house me and give me a little spending money to have fun on. This is known as citizen's credit. They used to call it a dole. Tomorrow I shall have to be more systematic about the revolution--join the League or something."
"The trouble with you," Radek needled him, "is that you can't adapt. Technology has made the labor of most people, except the first-rank creative genius, unnecessary. This leaves the majority with a void of years to fill somehow--a sense of uprootedness and lost self-respect--which is rather horrible. And in any case, they don't like to think in scientific terms ... it doesn't come natural to the average man."
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