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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 30416 ***
+
+[Illustration: _Illustrated by Kelly Freas_]
+
+
+WASTE NOT, WANT
+
+    _Eat your spinach, little man! It's good for you. Stuff yourself
+    with it. Be a good little consumer, or the cops will get you.... For
+    such is the law of supply and demand!_
+
+BY DAVE DRYFOOS
+
+
+Panic roused him--the black imp of panic that lived under the garish rug
+of this unfamiliar room and crawled out at dawn to nudge him awake and
+stare from the blank space to his left where Tillie's gray head should
+have been.
+
+His fists clenched in anger--at himself. He'd never been the sort to
+make allowance for his own weakness and didn't propose to begin doing so
+now, at age eighty-six. Tillie'd been killed in that crash well over a
+year ago and it was time he got used to his widowerhood and quit
+searching for her every morning.
+
+But even after he gave himself the bawling out, orientation came slowly.
+The surroundings looked so strange. No matter what he told himself it
+was hard to believe that he was indeed Fred Lubway, mechanical engineer,
+and had a right to be in this single bed, alone in this house his Tillie
+had never seen.
+
+The right to be there was all wrong. He disliked the house and hated all
+its furnishings.
+
+The cybernetic cooker in the kitchen; the magnetically-suspended divans
+in the living room; the three-dimensional color broadcasts he could so
+readily project to any wall or ceiling; the solartropic machinery that
+would turn any face of the pentagonal house into the sun or the shade or
+the breeze; the lift that would raise the entire building a hundred feet
+into the air to give him a wider view and more privacy--all left him
+dissatisfied.
+
+They were new. None had been shared with Tillie. He used them only to
+the extent required by law to fulfill his duty as a consumer.
+
+"You must change your home because of the change in your family
+composition," the Ration Board's bright young female had explained,
+right after Tillie's funeral. "Your present furnishings are obsolete.
+You must replace them."
+
+"And if I don't?" He'd been truculent.
+
+"I doubt we'd have to invoke the penalties for criminal
+underconsumption," she'd explained airily. "There are plenty of other
+possible courses of action. Maybe we'd just get a decision that you're
+prematurely senile and unable to care for yourself. Then you'd go to a
+home for the aged where they'd _help_ you consume--with forced feedings
+and such."
+
+So here he was, in this home-of-his-own that seemed to belong to someone
+else. Well, at least he wasn't senile, even if he did move a little
+slowly, now, getting out of bed. He'd warm up soon. All by himself. With
+no one's help.
+
+And as far as these newfangled gadgets in the bathroom were concerned,
+he could follow any well-written set of directions. He'd scalded himself
+that time only because the printed instructions were so confusing.
+
+He took a cold shower this time.
+
+When the airtowel had finished blowing and he was half dry--not wholly
+dry because the machine wasn't adapted to people who took ice-cold
+showers--he went in to the clothing machine. He punched the same few
+holes in its tape that he put there every day, stood in the right place,
+and in due course emerged with his long, rawboned frame covered by
+magenta tights having an excessively baggy seat.
+
+He knew the costume was neither pretty nor fashionable and that its
+design, having been wholly within his control when he punched the tape,
+revealed both his taste and his mood. He didn't care; there was no one
+in the world whom he wanted to impress.
+
+He looked in the dressing room mirror not to inspect the tights but to
+examine his face and see if it needed shaving. Too late he remembered
+that twenty years had elapsed since the permanent depilatories were
+first invented and ten since he'd used one and stopped having to shave.
+
+There were too many changes like that in this gadget-mad world; too many
+new ways of doing old things. Life had no stability.
+
+He stalked into the kitchen wishing he could skip breakfast--anger
+always unsettled his stomach. But everyone was required to eat at least
+three meals a day. The vast machine-records system that kept track of
+each person's consumption would reveal to the Ration Board any failure
+to use his share of food, so he dialed Breakfast Number Three--tomato
+juice, toast, and coffee.
+
+The signal-panel flashed "Under-Eating" and he knew the state
+machine-records system had advised his cybernetic cooker to increase the
+amount of his consumption. Chin in hands, he sat hopelessly at the
+kitchen table awaiting his meal, and in due course was served prunes,
+waffles, bacon, eggs, toast, and tea--none of which he liked, except for
+toast.
+
+He ate dutifully nevertheless, telling himself he wasn't afraid of the
+ration-cops who were always suspecting him of underconsumption because
+he was the tall skinny type and never got fat like most people, but that
+he ate what the cooker had given him because his father had been
+unemployed for a long time during the depression seventy-five years
+before, so he'd never been able to bring himself to throw food away.
+
+Failure to consume had in the old days been called "overproduction" and
+by any name it was bad. So was war--he'd read enough about war to be
+glad that form of consumption had finally been abolished.
+
+Still it was a duty and not a pleasure to eat so much, and a relief to
+get up and put the dirty dishes into the disposal machine and go up
+topside to his gyro.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Disgustingly, he had a long wait before departure. After climbing into
+the gyro and transmitting his flight plan, he had to sit seething for
+all of fifteen minutes before the Mount Diablo Flight Control Center
+deigned to lift his remote-controlled gyro into the air. And when the
+signal came, ascent was so awkwardly abrupt it made his ears pop.
+
+He couldn't even complain. The Center was mechanical, and unequipped to
+hear complaints.
+
+It routed him straight down the San Joaquin Valley--a beautiful sight
+from fifteen thousand feet, but over-familiar. He fell asleep and
+awakened only when unexpectedly brought down at Bakersfield Field.
+
+Above his instrument panel the printing-receiver said "Routine Check of
+Equipment and Documents. Not Over Five Minutes' Delay."
+
+But it could take longer. And tardiness was subject to official
+punishments as a form of unproductiveness. He called George Harding at
+the plant.
+
+Harding apparently had been expecting the call. His round bluff face
+wore a scowl of annoyance.
+
+"Don't you ever watch the newscasts?" he demanded angrily. "They began
+this 'Routine Check' you're in at five this morning, and were
+broadcasting pictures of the resulting traffic jam by six. If you'd
+filed a flight plan for Santa Barbara and come on down the coast you'd
+have avoided all this."
+
+"I'm not required to listen to newscasts," Fred replied tartly. "I own
+the requisite number of receivers and--"
+
+"Now, listen, Fred," Harding interrupted. "We need you down here so
+hurry up!"
+
+Fred heard him switch off and sat for a moment trembling with rage. But
+he ended by grinning wryly. Everyone was in the same boat, of course.
+For the most part, people avoided thinking about it. But he could now
+see himself as if from above, spending his life flitting back and forth
+between home and plant, plant and home; wracking his brain to devise
+labor-saving machines while at the plant, then rushing home to struggle
+with the need to consume their tremendous output.
+
+Was he a man? Or was he a caged squirrel racing in an exercise-wheel,
+running himself ragged and with great effort producing absolutely
+nothing?
+
+He wasn't going to do it any longer, by golly! He was going to--
+
+"Good morning!" A chubby young man in the pea-green uniform of a
+ration-cop opened the door and climbed uninvited into the cockpit. "May
+I check the up-to-dateness of your ship's equipment, please?"
+
+Fred didn't answer. He didn't have to. The young officer was already in
+the manual pilot's seat, checking the secondary controls.
+
+In swift routine he tried motor and instruments, and took the craft
+briefly aloft. Down again, he demanded Fred's papers.
+
+The licenses that pertained to the gyro were in order, but there was
+trouble over Fred's personal documents: his ration-book contained far
+too few sales-validations.
+
+"You're not doing your share of consuming, Oldtimer," the young cop said
+mildly. "Look at all these unused food allotments! Want to cause a
+depression?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Man, if you don't eat more than this, we'll have mass starvation!"
+
+"I know the slogans."
+
+"Yes, but do you know the penalties? Forced feeding, compulsory
+consumption--do you think they're fun?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, you can file your flight plan and go, but if you don't spend
+those tickets before their expiration dates, Mister, you'll have cause
+to regret it."
+
+With a special pencil, he sense-marked the card's margins.
+
+Fred felt that each stroke of the pencil was a black mark against him.
+He watched in apprehensive silence.
+
+The young cop was also silent. When finished he wordlessly returned the
+identification, tipped his cap, and swaggered off, his thick neck red
+above his green collar.
+
+Fred found he'd had more than enough of swaggering young men with beefy
+red necks. That added to his disgust with the constant struggle to
+produce and consume, consume and produce. Vague, wishful threats froze
+as determination: he absolutely wasn't going through any more of it.
+
+He filed a flight plan that would return him to his home, and in due
+course arrived there.
+
+The phone rang in his ears as he opened the cockpit. He didn't want to
+answer, and he stayed on the roof securing the gyro and plugging in its
+battery-charger. But he couldn't ignore the bell's insistent clamor.
+
+When he went downstairs and switched on the phone, George Harding's
+round face splashed on the wall.
+
+"Fred," he said, "when we talked a few hours ago, you forgot to say you
+were sick. I phoned to confirm that for the Attendance Report. Did this
+call get you out of bed?"
+
+He could see it hadn't. Therefore Fred knew he must be recording the
+audio only, and not the video; trying to give him a break with the
+Attendance people and coach him on the most appeasing answers.
+
+A well-meant gesture, but a false one. And Fred was fed up with the
+false. "I forgot nothing," he said bluntly. "I'm perfectly well and
+haven't been near bed."
+
+"Now, wait," George said hastily. "It's no crime to be sick.
+And--ah--don't say anything you wouldn't want preserved for posterity."
+
+"George, I'm not going to play along with you," Fred insisted. "This
+business of producing to consume and consuming to produce has got me
+down. It's beyond all reason!"
+
+"No, it isn't. You're an excellent mechanical engineer, Fred, but you're
+not an economist. That's why you don't understand. Just excuse me for a
+minute, and I'll show you."
+
+He left the field of view. Fred waited incuriously for him to return,
+suddenly conscious of the fact that he now had nothing better to do with
+his time.
+
+George was back in less than a minute, anyhow. "O.K.," he said briskly.
+"Now, where were we? Oh, yes. I just wanted to say that production is a
+form of consumption, too--even the production of machine-tools and
+labor-saving devices. So there's nothing inconsistent--"
+
+"What are you trying to do?" Fred demanded. "Don't lecture me--I know as
+much econ as you do!"
+
+"But you've got to come back to work, Fred! I want you to use your
+rations, put your shoulder to the wheel, and conform generally. The
+policing's too strict for you to try anything else, fella--and I like
+you too well to want to see you--"
+
+"I don't need you to protect me, George," Fred said stiffly. "I guess
+you mean well enough. But goodbye." He switched off.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The silence struck him. Not a sound stirred the air in that lonely new
+house except the slight wheeze of his breathing.
+
+He felt tired. Bone weary. As if all the fatigues of his eighty-six
+years were accumulated within him.
+
+He stood by a window and stared blindly out. Everyone seemed to have
+been heckling him, shoving him around, making him change all his ways
+every minute. He didn't want to change. He didn't want to be forever
+adapting to new gadgets, new fads, new ways of doing things.
+
+He thought of the villages of India, substantially unchanged for three,
+four, five thousand years. The villagers had no money, so they couldn't
+be consumers. Maybe they had the natural way to live. Statically. Also,
+frugally.
+
+But no. It was too frugal, too static. He'd heard and read too much
+about the starvation, pestilence, peonage and other ills plaguing those
+Indian villagers. They didn't have life licked, either.
+
+The Indians had not enough, the Americans, too much. One was as bad as
+the other.
+
+And he was in the middle.
+
+He left the window he'd been staring from unseeingly and walked to the
+foyer control-panel. There he pushed the button that would cause the
+house to rear a hundred feet into the air on its titanium-aluminum
+plunger.
+
+Then he went back to the window to watch the ground recede. He felt a
+hand on his shoulder. He decided the sensation was an illusion--a part
+of his state of mind.
+
+A young man's voice said, "Mr. Lubway, we need you."
+
+That was a nice thing to hear, so Fred turned, ready to smile. He didn't
+smile. He was confronted by another ration-cop.
+
+This one was a tall young man, dark and hefty. He seemed very kindly, in
+his official sort of way.
+
+"Mr. George Harding sent me," he explained. "He asked us to look you up
+and see if we could help."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"You seem to have been a little unhappy this morning. I
+mean--well--staring out that window while your house rises dangerously
+high. Mr. George Harding didn't like the mood you're in, and neither do
+I, Mr. Lubway. I'm afraid you'll have to come to the hospital. We can't
+have a valuable citizen like you falling out that window, can we?"
+
+"What do you mean, 'valuable citizen'? I'm no use to anybody. There's
+plenty of engineers, and more being graduated every semester. You don't
+need me."
+
+"Oh, yes, we do!" Shaking his head, the young ration-cop took a firm
+grip on Fred's right biceps. "You've got to come along with me till your
+outlook changes, Mr. Lubway."
+
+"Now, see here!" Fred objected, trying unsuccessfully to twist free of
+the officer's grip. "You've no call to treat me like a criminal. Nor to
+talk to me as if I were senile. My outlook won't change, and you know
+it!"
+
+"Oh, yes, it will! And since you're neither criminal nor senile, that's
+what has to be done.
+
+"We'll do it in the most humane way possible. A little brain surgery,
+and you'll sit in your cage and consume and consume and consume without
+a care in the world. Yes, sir, we'll change your outlook!
+
+"Now, you mustn't try to twist away from me like that, Mr. Lubway. I
+can't let you go. We need every consumer we can get."
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+    This etext was produced from _If Worlds of Science Fiction_
+    September 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
+    the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling
+    and typographical errors have been corrected without note.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Waste Not, Want, by Dave Dryfoos
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 30416 ***