Hart sagged, the anger draining from him and leaving only a vast hollow void. Dimly, he heard Chang’s voice: “Du have nuw place in world. Du belong to nuw famly or group. Du have no traits wort perpetuating—indeed, we would not want children wit cancer tendency duurs. Psychotests show du as unstable, egocentric, unable to adjust to cityless world, to close familial relationship, to—anything. No one would want to associate wit completely unintegrated, hopelessly neurotic—foreigner.

“Best du find a quiet place where du can serve—out of sight.”

Hart rebelled. Bitterly, desperately, he tried to escape.

There must be something. He had been the admired leader of his little clique. Broad knowledge, sardonic humor, a way with women, ready money, all had combined to impress and delight. Surely the world had not changed so much!

No compulsion was put on him. He went where and when he chose; he spent a good three months prowling this new Earth, riding the free public transport and using an unlimited government credit card to buy necessities. And he found that the world had indeed changed.

The tall, healthy, serene folk were polite to him, and no more. But they had nothing in common with him. He belonged to no group and, for eugenic and other reasons, could not be adopted into one, and all social functions were within such alliances. He did not follow their jokes, his manners were gauche compared to the formality now accepted; his learning and background were from a period too remote to interest any but scholars. There was no underworld, no demimonde. Morality was somewhat changed, but it was never violated.

For his part, Hart began to be bored. It was not entirely a subjective attitude rising out of resentment at inferiority. These people were slow-speaking, formal, calm; they lacked the tension and the acrid mirth of the twentieth century. They were not weaklings in any sense, but they were—innocent.

There was no entertainment except what groups provided for themselves—singing, dancing, amateur showmanship, a great deal of hobbycraft. The reason for the absence of professional entertainment was basically the same as that for the lack of large-scale industry. The group society was deliberately throwing the individual and the family on their own resources. Now that there were no external challenges of war, poverty, famine, disease, now that history had slowed almost to a standstill, man must return to a degree of primitive self-sufficiency and independence if he was not to become the glorified termite inhabiting a purposeless machine city.

Hart saw the reasoning, but it seemed puritanical to him. And he could not sympathize with a people who deliberately submitted to it. A man who plowed his own fields when science had advanced to the point where everyone could eat out of cans was a fool. To be sure, the man was conditioned to like it, and certainly the food was better than the sterilized pap of twentieth century canneries, but even so…

Hart tried to leave Earth altogether. But he lacked the physique and the technical skill which would justify a spaceship in hauling him. And from what he read of the spatial colonies, he was likely to find a still more alien society out there.