Start your review of Time in Advance. Dec 27, Olethros rated it liked it. Lo que nos cuenta. Jul 02, Richard rated it really liked it. Don't be fooled by the title; this is not a time travel story. Well, suppose the crime is murder?! This novelette has been in numerous anthologies but I would advise reading it in the Kindle edition of "The Galaxy Project", a series of science fiction stories associated wit the "Time In Advance" is a solid example of William Tenn's ironic approach in his science fiction.
This novelette has been in numerous anthologies but I would advise reading it in the Kindle edition of "The Galaxy Project", a series of science fiction stories associated wit the famous Galaxy science fiction magazine.
This edition includes excellent additional material about the author, work, and the context of its publication. I have read many stories by William Tenn over the past 15 years or so. This collection contains four stories. Two of them are novellas. I can't say I enjoyed this very much. The ideas were good but there was something about the story that didn't work for me, and I can't specify what. Brilliant conceit, handled extremely well, but with a slightly dud ending.
With a little adjustment to the climax, Tenn would have produced an almost perfect story. Nothing original here.
A virus that increases human mental capacity. The weakest story in the collection. Absolutely wonderful tale! The best Tenn story I have ever read. Full of great ideas and a suitably apt ending.
The book was worth reading for this story alone, which is surely one of the best SF stories of the s. Genuinely funny too! Nicholas Crandall has made the ultimate deal with Law Enforcement: for seven years extraterrestrial servitude he will be classed as a pre-criminal and, on his return to Earth, he will be allowed to get away with murder. This is a great story from William Tenn, where readers are asked to weigh up the pros and cons of such a deal.
Wer sind ihre Opfer? Feuerwasser Erdbewohner, die mit fremdartigen Intelligenzen Verbindung aufnehmen, wreden geisteskrank. Wie geht das aus? Orig: Time in Advance. Small volume of short stories with time as the theme.
Liked a couple of them. Last one was just odd. Time in Advance is a great read. Jun 06, Christian Schwoerke rated it liked it. I stumbled onto this old paperback edition and bought it entirely for the wrong reason, believing it was the work of James Tiptree, Jr. The basis of these stories is a twist, whether or plot or perspective, so a too thorough description of the stories deflates their impact for the first-time reader.
In this instance the protagonist has served seven perilous years on a space chain gang for the crime of murder, and he returns to Earth ready to kill that man whom he believes had ruined his life. This particular twist on crime and punishment is further contorted when the protagonist confronts various people from his past before contacting the man whose death he seeks.
The aliens are energy motes—dots—that have no material culture. Contact appears to make humans disoriented, making them dizzily ascetic and spiritual, while the aliens reaction is to devise variations on basic human machines and devices.
Human society at large cannot tolerate its state of ignorance about the aliens, and paranoia spurs the growth of a movement to wipe out the aliens and the humans affected by them. On an international space expedition to Mars, a team of Russians, Americans, and Indians discover an old city, then one of the Russians becomes ill from an alien virus. Tensions in the crew mount, as the balance of healthy Americans to Russians shift, then continues to shift daily as either an American or Russian also succumbs to the virus.
All but one of the time travelers is eager to return to the 20th century. He is condemned to death, whereupon he faints and later awakens to find himself in a totally dark room. He explores the cell and soon finds a pit.
The story is especially effective at inspiring fear in the reader because of its heavy focus on the senses, such as sound, emphasizing its reality, unlike many of Poe's stories which are aided by the supernatural.
In order to save her father's life, Belle has no choice but to go the Beast's palace and live with him. But will she learn there's more to this monster than first meets the eye? That charming 18th-century tale of the transforming power of love has enchanted generations of readers and listeners down to the present day.
Scott Fitzgerald's readers had come to expect by the end of the Jazz Age. At fifty, Tom is attracted as much to Annie Lorry's age as to her beauty or social status. She is for him a veritable fountain of youth, revivifying memories of the warm sureties of his own adolescence and reintroducing him to the very terminology of young romance.
It was a dark autumn night. The old banker was pacing from corner to corner of his study, recalling to his mind the party he gave in the autumn fifteen years ago. There were many clever people at the party and much interesting conversation.
He made a sugges-tion to the woman. The woman considered. Anything might come out, Hebster knew. But at least they were not acting snob-bish any more: they were talking down on his level now. Not only no gabble-honk, but none of this sneering double-talk which was almost worse.
At least they were making sense—of a sort. Larry, Theseus and Fine bunch of people. Let's get down to business. You came here on business, I take it? They talked about you when they got back to Arizona.
I hoped they would. They also said you cheated them. Lusitania agreed, getting to her feet stealthily and taking a great swipe with both hands at something invisible in front of her face. You can have what we've brought, but you'll pay for it.
And don't think you can cheat us. She pulled them apart suddenly and a tiny eagle fluttered out. It flapped toward the fluorescent panels glowing in the ceiling. Its flight was hampered by the heavy, striped shield upon its breast, by the bunch of arrows it held in one claw, by the olive branch it grasped with the other.
It turned its miniature bald head and gasped at Algernon Hebster, then began to drift rapidly down to the rug. Just before it hit the floor, it disappeared. Hebster shut his eyes, remembering the strip of bunting that had fallen from the eagle's beak when it had turned to gasp. There had been words printed on the bunting, words too small to see at the distance, but he was sure the words would have read "E Pluribus Unum. Professor Kleimbocher said Primeys were mental drunkards.
But why did they give everyone else the D. He opened his eyes. Theseus seemed to forget the point he was trying to make; S. Lusitania stared at Larry. Larry scratched his right side through heavy, stinking cloth. Hebster grinned because he was feeling so good. Can't use it. He shook his head. He stole a sideways glance at S.
She smiled again and wriggled to the floor. Hebster," she cooed, very much like a fertilizer factory being friendly.
Very badly. Wonder if their masters would know. Well, and if they did—who does business with Aliens? Oh, no! A new shade of red, and a full set of color values derived from it! A complete set of color values derived from this one shade of red, Mr. Think what a non-objectivist painter can do with such a—" "Don't sell me, lady. Theseus, do you want to have a go now? He leaned back, looking satisfied. Hebster realized abruptly that the tension under his right foot had disappeared. Somehow, Theseus had become cognizant of the signal-spring set in the floor; and, somehow, he had removed it.
He had disintegrated it without setting off the alarm to which it was wired. Giggles from three Primey throats and a rapid exchange of "gabble-honk. They weren't angry, though—and they didn't sound triumphant. Try to understand Primey behavior! No need to get unduly alarmed—the price of dealing with these characters was a nervous stomach.
The rewards, on the other hand— Abruptly, they were businesslike again. Theseus snapped out his suggestion with all the finality of a bazaar merchant making his last, absolutely the last offer. Then, while Hebster sat back and enjoyed, temporarily forgetting the missing coil under his foot, they poured out more, desperately, feverishly, weaving in and out of each other's sentences. So that every housewife can do an entrechat while cook—" " Synthetic fabric with the drape of silk and manufactura—" " Decorative pattern for bald heads using the follicles as—" " Complete and utter refutation of all pyramidologists from—" "All right!
That's enough! Her stenographic machine had been sounding like a centrifuge. That's it, I betcha. Lusitania waved her hands contemptuously. The new red color values excited him. The new—" Ruth's voice came over the communicator. Hebster, Yost and Funatti are back.
I stalled them, but I just received word from the lobby receptionist that they're back and on their way upstairs. You have two minutes, maybe three. And they're so mad they almost look like Firsters themselves!
When they climb out of the elevator, do what you can without getting too illegal. Gabble, honk, gabble, gabble! Gabble, honk, gabble, honk, gabble, honk, honk. Was it really a language as superior to all previous languages of man as Well, at least they could communicate with the Aliens by means of it. And the Aliens, the Aliens— He recollected abruptly the two angry representatives of the world state who were hurtling towards his office. You came here to sell. You've shown me your stock, and I've seen something I'd like to buy.
What exactly is immaterial. The only question now is what you want for it. And let's make it fast. I have some other business to transact. A cloud no larger than a man's hand formed near the ceiling, burst and deposited a pail full of water on Hebster's fine custom-made rug.
He ran a manicured forefinger around the inside of his collar so that his bulging neck veins would not burst. Not right now, anyway. He looked at Greta and regained confidence from the serenity with which she waited for more conversation to tran-scribe.
There was a model of business precision for you. The Primeys might pull what one of them had in London two years ago, before they were barred from all metro-politan areas—increased a housefly's size to that of an elephant—and Greta Seidenheim would go on separating fragments of conversation into the appropriate short-hand symbols.
With all their power, why didn't they take what they wanted? Why trudge weari-some miles to cities and attempt to smuggle themselves into illegal audiences with operators like Hebster, when most of them were caught easily and sent back to the reservation and those that weren't were cheated unmercifully by the "straight" hu-mans they encountered? Why didn't they just blast their way in, take their weird and pathetic prizes and toddle back to their masters? For that matter, why didn't their masters—But Primey psych was Primey psych—not for this world, nor of it.
He held up a hand on which the length of the fingernails was indicated graphically by the grime beneath them and began to tot up the items, bending a digit for each item. Then, twenty-five crystal radio sets, with earphones; two earphones for each set. We want those with foundations intact. A reasonably good copy of the Hermes statue by Praxiteles. And an electric toaster, circa That's about all, isn't it, Theseus?
Hebster groaned. The list wasn't as bad as he'd expected—remarkable the way their masters always yearned for the electric gadgets and artistic achievements of Earth—but he had so little time to bargain with them.
Two Empire State Buildings! Hebster," his receptionist chattered over the communicator. I mean I'm trying to You're doing fine! Hebster," Theseus said at last, "if you don't want to buy Larry's reductio ad absurdum exploder, and you don't like my method of decorating bald heads for all its innate artistry, how about a system of musical notation—" Somebody tried Hebster's door, found it locked.
There was a knock on the door, repeated almost immediately with more urgency. Lusitania snapped. Whichever is more convenient. There was a crash as of a pair of shoulders being thrown against it. Hebster knew that his office door could withstand a medium-sized tank. But there was a limit even to delay when it came to fooling around with the UM Special Investigating Commission.
Those boys knew their Primeys and their Primey-dealers; they were em-powered to shoot first and ask questions afterwards—as the questions occurred to them. I'll give you the rest of it, and—" "Open this door or we start blasting it down! The lock's stuck. You know the greatest single difficulty composers face in the twelve-tone technique?
And you get the rest of the stuff you asked for. That's it. Take it or leave it. He pushed them through the doorway and said to the tallest of the five men: "Nineteenth floor! Yost and Funatti, in the bottle-green uniform of the UM, charged through.
Without pausing, they ran to where Hebster stood and plucked the exit open. They could all hear the elevator descending. Funatti, a little, olive-skinned man, sniffed. Smell that unwash, Yost? The emergency stairway. We can track that elevator! Below, the elevator stopped. Hebster's secretary was at the communicator.
Hebster just sent down gets to a lab somewhere else. And keep apologizing to those cops until then. Remember, they're SIC. He plumped into his desk chair and blew out gustily: "There must be easier ways of making a million. Another year or two might do it. His huskies also want to replace the UM. Not to mention their colorful plans for you. And there are an awful, awful lot of them.
Humanity First will dissolve overnight once that decrepit old demagogue gives up the ghost. Maintenance, that party I sent down arrived at a safe lab yet? But everything's going all right. We sent them up to the twenty-fourth floor and got the SIC men rerouted downstairs to the personnel levels. Uh, Mr. Hebster—about the SIC. We take your orders and all that, but none of us wants to get in trouble with the Special Investigating Commission.
According to the latest laws, it's practically a capital offense to obstruct them. The boss fixes everything is the motto here. Call me when you've got those Primeys safely hidden and ready for questioning.
He thinks he may have a new angle on their gabble-honk. But Primeys enjoy reaching out and putting a hex on electrical appara-tus—when they aren't collecting it for the Aliens. I had a raft of tape recorders busted in the middle of Primey interviews before I decided that human stenos were the only answer.
And a Primey may get around to bollixing them some day. I must remember to dream about the possibility some cold night. Well, I should complain," she muttered as she went into her own little office. Something like ninety-five percent of Hebster Securities had been built out of Primey gadgetry extracted from them in various fancy deals, but the base of it all had been the small investment bank he had inherited from his father, back in the days of the Half-War—the days when the Aliens had first appeared on Earth.
The fearfully intelligent dots swirling in their variously shaped multicolored bottles were completely outside the pale of human understanding.
There had been no way at all to communicate with them for a time. A humorist had remarked back in those early days that the Aliens came not to bury man, not to conquer or enslave him. They had a truly dreadful mission—to ignore him!
No one knew, even today, what part of the galaxy the Aliens came from. Or why. No one knew what the total of their small visiting population came to. Or how they operated their wide-open and completely silent spaceships. The few things that had been discovered about them on the occasions when they deigned to swoop down and examine some human enterprise, with the aloof amusement of the highly civilized tourist, had served to confirm a technological superiority over Man that strained and tore the capacity of his richest imagination.
A sociological treatise Hebster had read recently suggested that they operated from concepts as far in advance of modern science as a meteorologist sowing a drought-struck area with dry ice was beyond the primitive agriculturist blowing a ram's horn at the heavens in a frantic attempt to wake the slumbering gods of rain. Prolonged, infinitely dangerous observation had revealed, for example, that the dots-in-bottles seemed to have developed past the need for prepared tools of any sort.
They worked directly on the material itself, shaping it to need, evidently creating and destroying matter at will. Some humans had communicated with them— They didn't stay human. Men with superb brains had looked into the whirring, flickering settlements es-tablished by the outsiders.
A few had returned with tales of wonders they had realized dimly and not quite seen. Their descriptions always sounded as if their eyes had been turned off at the most crucial moments or a mental fuse had blown just this side of understanding. Others—such celebrities as a President of Earth, a three-time winner of the Nobel Prize, famous poets—had evidently broken through the fence somehow. These, how-ever, were the ones who didn't return. Barely able to fend for themselves, de-spite newly acquired and almost unbelievable powers, they shambled worshipfully around the outsiders, speaking, with weird writhings of larynx and nasal passage, what was evidently a human approximation of their masters' language—a kind of pidgin Alien.
Talking with a Primey, someone had said, was like a blind man trying to read a page of Braille originally written for an octopus.
And that these bearded, bug-ridden, stinking derelicts, these chattering wrecks drunk and sodden on the logic of an entirely different life-form, were the absolute best of the human race didn't help people's egos any. Humans and Primeys despised each other almost from the first: humans for Primey subservience and helplessness in human terms, Primeys for human ignorance and ineptness in Alien terms. And, except when operating under Alien orders and through barely legal operators like Hebster, Primeys didn't communicate with humans any more than their masters did.
When institutionalized, they either gabble-honked themselves into an early grave or, losing patience suddenly, they might dissolve a path to freedom right through the walls of the asylum and any attendants who chanced to be in the way. Therefore the enthusiasm of sheriff and deputy, nurse and orderly, had waned considerably and the forcible incarceration of Primeys had almost ceased.
Since the two groups were so far apart psychologically as to make mating between them impossible, the ragged miracle-workers had been honored with the status of a separate classification: Humanity Prime. Not better than humanity, not necessarily worse—but different, and dangerous. What made them that way? Hebster rolled his chair back and examined the hole in the floor from which the alarm spring had spiraled. Theseus had disintegrated it— how? With a thought? Telekinesis, say, applied to all the molecules of the metal si-multaneously, making them move rapidly and at random.
Or possibly he had merely moved the spring somewhere else. In space? In hyperspace? In time? Hebster shook his head and pulled himself back to the efficiently smooth and sanely useful desk surface. Your Primeys just arrived. Regular check? This involved firing questions at them with the rapidity of a police interrogation, getting them off balance and keeping them there in the hope that a useful and unexpected bit of scientific knowledge would drop.
But first let a textile man have a whack at them. In fact, let him take charge of the check. He's competent, I hope. What does Personnel say about him?
I don't have time to muse over your departmental feuds. Put Verus on. Hey, Bert! Get Charlie Verus. These technicians! Verus was probably bril-liant and nasty. The box crackled again: "Mr. But the man was probably good despite his neuro-ses. Hebster Securities, Inc. Those Primeys, I want you to take charge of the check. One of them knows how to make a synthetic fabric with the drape of silk. Get that first and then go after anything else they have.
You are a textile technician, please to remember, and not the straight or ping-pong half of a comedy routine. Get humping. I want a report on that synthetic fabric by tomorrow. Work all night if you have to. Hebster, you might be interested in a small piece of informa-tion. There is already in existence a synthetic which falls better than silk—" "I know," his employer told him shortly.
Unfortunately, it has a few disadvantages: low melting point, tends to crack; separate and somewhat infe-rior dyestuffs have to be used for it; poor chemical resistance. Am I right? He went on. They dye well and fall well, have the thermo-conductivity control necessary for wearing apparel, but don't have the tensile strength of synthetic fabrics.
An artificial protein fiber might be the answer: it would drape as well as silk, might be we could use the acid dyestuffs we use on silk which result in shades that dazzle female customers and cause them to fling wide their pocketbooks.
There are a lot of ifs in that, I know, but one of those Primeys said something about a synthetic with the drape of silk, and I don't think he'd be sane enough to be referring to cellulose acetate.
Nor nylon, orlon, vinyl chloride, or anything else we already have and use. I've looked into everything to which there are big gobs of money attached. And now suppose you go look into those Primeys. Several million women are wait-ing breathlessly for the secrets concealed in their beards. Do you think, Verus, that with the personal and scientific background I've just given you, it's possible you might now get around to doing the job you are paid to do?
He liked working under pressure; he liked to see people jump up straight whenever he barked. And now, he liked the prospect of relaxing.
He grimaced at the webfoam chair that Larry had used. No point in having it resquirted. Have a new one made. But don't, unless it's very important.
He gets unpleasantly annoyed when he's interrupted. They said no one would be allowed to leave the building. They've been that way be-fore. But unless and until they can hang something on me—And Ruth, tell my body-guard to go home, except for the man with the Primeys. He's to check with me, wher-ever I am, every two hours. A private elevator and entrance were all very well for an occasional crisis, but Hebster liked to taste his successes in as much public as possible.
It would be good to see Kleimbocher again. He had a good deal of faith in the lin-guistic approach; grants from his corporation had tripled the size of the University's philology department. After all, the basic problem between man and Primey as well as man and Alien was one of communication.
Any attempt to learn their science, to adjust their mental processes and logic into safer human channels, would have to be preceded by understanding. It was up to Kleimbocher to find that understanding, not him. And then I make money off them. Somebody else took his arm. Yost was touching his holstered weapon with dancing fingertips.
The SIC man shrugged. People want to talk to you. No," Funatti admitted, "we never did find out where you cached them. That's one big building you own, mister. Hebster, I wouldn't have sent my bodyguard off if I'd been in your shoes. Right now there's some-thing about five times as dangerous as Primeys after you.
I mean Humanity Firsters. Thanks, but I think I'll survive. Just don't give any long odds on the proposition.
Those people have been expanding fast and furious. The Evening Humanitarian alone has a tre-mendous circulation. And when you figure their weekly newspapers, their penny booklets and throwaway handbills, it adds up to an impressive amount of propaganda. Day after day they bang away editorially at the people who're making money off the Aliens and Primeys. Of course, they're really hitting at the UM, like always, but if an ordinary Firster met you on the street, he'd be as likely to cut your heart out as not.
Not interested? Well, maybe you'll like this. The Evening Humanitarian has a cute name for you. At the Forty-Second Street offway, the busi-est road exit in Manhattan, Yost failed to make a traffic signal. He cursed absent-mindedly, and Hebster found himself nodding the involuntary passenger's agree-ment. They watched the elevator section dwindling downward as the cars that were to mount the highway spiraled up from the right. Between the two, there rose and fell the steady platforms of harbor traffic while, stacked like so many decks of cards, the pedestrian stages awaited their turn below.
Up there, straight ahead! See it? Two hundred feet north of the offway and almost a quarter of a mile straight up, a brown object hung in obvious fascination. Every once in a while a brilliant blue dot would enliven the heavy murk imprisoned in its bell-jar shape only to twirl around the side and be replaced by another. You think they're eyes? But how do they know? It's a theory, a guess. I say they're eyes. A nasal twang, long-buried, came back into his voice as heaving emotion shook out its cultivated accents.
So all-fired interested in how we get on and off a busy highway! Won't pay us no never mind when we try to talk to it, when we try to find out what it wants, where it comes from, who it is. It's too superior to talk to the likes of us! But it can watch us, hours on end, days without end, light and dark, winter and summer; it can watch us going about our business; and every time we dumb two-legged animals try to do some-thing we find complicated, along comes a blasted 'dots-in-bottle' to watch and sneer and—" "Hey there, man," Funatti leaned forward and tugged at his partner's green jerkin.
We're SIC, on business. Not only UM, at that, but a member of a special group carefully screened for their lack of anti-Primey prejudice, sworn to enforce the reservation laws without discrimination and dedicated to the proposition that Man could somehow achieve equality with Alien. Well, how much dirt-eating could people do? People without a business sense, that is.
His father had hauled himself out of the pick-and-shovel brigade hand over hand and raised his only son to maneuver always for greater control, to search always for that extra percentage of profit. But others seemed to have no such abiding interest, Algernon Hebster knew regretfully.
They found it impossible to live with achievements so abruptly made inconse-quential by the Aliens. To know with certainty that the most brilliant strokes of which they were capable, the most intricate designs and clever careful workmanship, could be duplicated—and surpassed—in an instant's creation by the outsiders and was of interest to them only as a collector's item.
The feeling of inferiority is horrible enough when imagined; but when it isn't feeling but knowledge, when it is inescapable and thoroughly demonstrable, covering every aspect of constructive activity, it becomes unbearable and maddening. No wonder men went berserk under hours of unwinking Alien scrutiny—watch-ing them as they marched in a colorfully uniformed lodge parade, or fished through a hole in the ice, as they painfully maneuvered a giant transcontinental jet to a noise-less landing or sat in sweating, serried rows chanting to a single, sweating man to "knock it out of the park and sew the whole thing up!
It did give a certain release to nerves backed into horrible psychic corners. But the Aliens didn't notice, and that was most impor-tant. The Aliens went right on watching, as if all this shooting and uproar, all these imprecations and weapon-wavings, were all part of the self-same absorbing show they had paid to witness and were determined to see through if for nothing else than the occasional amusing fluff some member of the inexperienced cast might commit.
The Aliens weren't injured, and the Aliens didn't feel attacked. Bullets, shells, buckshot, arrows, pebbles from a slingshot—all Man's miscellany of anger passed through them like the patient and eternal rain coming in the opposite direction. Yet the Aliens had solidity somewhere in their strange bodies.
One could judge that by the way they intercepted light and heat. And also— Also by the occasional ping. Every once in a while, someone would evidently have hurt an Alien slightly. Or more probably just annoyed it by some unknown concomitant of rifle-firing or javelin-throwing. There would be the barest suspicion of a sound—as if a guitarist had lunged at a string with his fingertip and decided against it one motor impulse too late.
And, after this delicate and hardly heard ping, quite unspectacularly, the rifleman would be weaponless. He would be standing there sighting stupidly up along his empty curled fingers, elbow cocked out and shoulder hunched in, like a large oafish child who had forgotten when to end the game. Neither his rifle nor a fragment of it would ever be found. And—gravely, curiously, intently—the Alien would go on watching. The ping seemed to be aimed chiefly at weapons.
Thus, occasionally, a mm howitzer was pinged, and also, occasionally, unexpectedly, it might be a muscular arm, curving back with another stone, that would disappear to the accompaniment of a tiny elfin note. And yet sometimes—could it be that the Alien, losing interest, had become careless in its irritation?
It was not as if a counterweapon were being used, but a thoroughly higher order of reply, such as a slap to an insect bite. Hebster, shivering, recalled the time he had seen a black tubular Alien swirl its amber dots over a new substreet excavation, seem-ingly entranced by the spectacle of men scrabbling at the earth beneath them.
A red-headed, blue-shirted giant of construction labor had looked up from Man-hattan's stubborn granite just long enough to shake the sweat from his eyelids. So doing, he had caught sight of the dot-pulsing observer and paused to snarl and lift his pneumatic drill, rattling it in noisy, if functionless, bravado at the sky.
He had hardly been noticed by his mates, when the long, dark, speckled representative of a race beyond the stars turned end over end once and pinged.
The heavy drill remained upright for a moment, then dropped as if it had abruptly realized its master was gone. Almost, he had never been. So thorough had his disappearance been, so rapid, with so little flicker had he been snuffed out—harming and taking with him nothing else—that it had amounted to an act of gigantic and positive noncreation.
No, Hebster decided, making threatening gestures at the Aliens was suicidal. Worse, like everything else that had been tried to date, it was useless. On the other hand, wasn't the Humanity First approach a complete neurosis? What could you do? He reached into his soul for an article of fundamental faith, found it.
That's what I can always do. Across the street was a small cigar store, the only one on the block. Brand names which had decorated the plate-glass window in all the colors of the copyright had been supplanted recently by great gilt slogans. Familiar slogans they were by now—but this close to a UM office, the Special Inves-tigating Commission itself? At the top of the window, the proprietor announced his affiliation in two huge words that almost screamed their hatred across the street: Humanity First!
Underneath these, in the exact center of the window, was the large golden initial of the organization, the wedded letters HF arising out of the huge, symbolic safety razor. And under that, in straggling script, the theme repeated, reworded and sloganized: "Humanity first, last and all the time!
Send them back to wherever they came from! Shop Humanitarian! Just about enough to pick up with a blotter. I don't imagine you're too happy about boycott-shops like that? And if there were, one Shop Humanitarian outfit isn't going to break me. It is going to break me—if it means what it seems to.
Organization membership is one thing and so is planetary patriotism, but business is something else.
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