There was a pile of junked tractors, trucks and harvesting machines, smashed and rusting. Then a line of farmers working with hoes and hand-guided ploughs drawn by horses.

"Machines took away sacred routine work from citizens. Eggheads built the machines to disrupt and spread the disease of reason. We are now replacing machines at the rate of a million a week. Soon, all of us will again be united in the happy harmonious brotherhood of labor. And when you see a rusting machine, what you are seeing is another captured Egghead, frothing and fuming in its cage...."

At a quarter to eight I walked ten blocks to work. There were the usual hectic early morning traffic jams. Wagon-loads of produce and half-starved horses blocking the streets. The same man was beating a nag with a board. A wagon piled with fruit and vegetables was stuck in a pot hole in the pavement. Two men were carrying a spinning wheel into the front of an apartment building. A peddler was selling oil lanterns, wicks and kerosene out of a barrel. The same women and boys in dirty sheepskin jackets were hauling rickshaws.

I really didn't see anyone or speak to anyone. I didn't know anyone. I knew I was safe and had nothing to worry about. Once a week I used up my GI liquor chit at a bar with a Security seal on the window. Twice a week, I slept over at a GI brothel, where every girl had a Security clearance number tattoed on her thigh.

I had nothing to worry about.

I was passed through three gates by guards and went to my little cage inside Pentagon Circle, local headquarters of the Department of Internal Security.

Until that Tuesday morning I couldn't remember ever having done anything but sort colored cards. My chief qualification for my job: I wasn't color blind. When a green card with figures on it meaning nothing to me came out of a slot in the wall, I pushed it into a green slot that led somewhere into a filing department. When a red card came out, I pushed it into a red slot, and so forth. There were cards of fifteen colors.

Another qualification: my unconscious efficiency. I never had even a hint of an abstract thought. I never remembered yesterday, let alone the day before. And until that Tuesday morning I never made even a tiny mistake.

I had no idea what I was doing. Nor was I at all curious. Curiosity was highly suspect. Curiosity was dangerous in the best of all possible worlds. It was ridiculous in a 

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