The girls were fantastic! Shorts and little sleeveless tops that barely covered their figures. Not at all like the girls back at the Tracts, with their shapeless prefaded sloppy clothes and their constant challenging in the classroom and the athletic field. Ron grinned at these girls and they smiled right back. Every few minutes a new model would come into the window and one of the others would leave. To change into a new outfit, Ron guessed.

The window must have been soundproofed, because Ron could see the models moving their lips, talking, but he couldn’t hear them at all. The people in the crowd were yelling things to them, but they paid no attention. Some of the things that the grown men said to those girls . . . Ron was surprised at first, then he got sore. Dirty old cruds, he said to himself.

Ron began to notice the clothes that the boys were modeling. Wild. Leather, and macho-looking real metal zippers. Snug-fitting. Boots. Stripes. Glancing down at his own loose, pale green zipsuit, Ron started to feel like a real country dork. A plastic imitation. He nodded once to himself and then pushed his way through the crowd to the store’s entrance.

Inside it was much quieter. And cool. The air felt pleasant and clean. It even smelled good.

And there were human people in there to wait on you! Not the automatic machines like they had in the stores back home. Instead of talking to a dumb computer, there were people here to listen to you and make suggestions.

They were men, mostly. Some of them were young, in their twenties. But most of them were older. Gray hair, getting heavy, but smiling and ready to help a dumb kid from the Tracts.

They measured Ron: arms, legs, chest, waist, neck. They fussed all around him and brought out some of the models from the window to show him different kinds of outfits. A few of the girls from the window hung around, too, watching and smiling.

When Ron strutted out of the store, he was dressed in a black polyester suit with silver emblems on the shoulders. His boots were real synthetic leather. He felt about eighteen feet tall.

He was also three hundred dollars lighter. Under his arm he clutched a plastic box that contained another entire outfit, plus his old green zipsuit, wrinkled and tossed in only for the trip back home.

Now I look like a real New Yorker, he told himself as he strode down the street. Everyone else was dressed in very ordinary clothes. Tourists. Vistors. Ron noticed how they all stared at his outfit. He grinned. He pictured himself as an Executive, one of the men who used to live high up in a skyscraper before the City was closed and evacuated. His grin widened.

Further down the street was a movie theater. It was showing old-time films. The big signs flashing above the entrance said: MURDER! FIGHTS! WAR! SEX! There were no theaters at home. TV was everything, and kids weren’t allowed to watch anything more exciting than the six o’clock news.