Equality by Mack Reynolds

Author:Mack Reynolds [Reynolds, Mack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 1977-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Year 2, New Calendar

In the three short decades between now and the twenty-first century, millions of ordinary, psychologically normal people will face an abrupt collision with the future. Citizens of the world’s richest and most technologically advanced nations, many of them, will find it increasingly painful to keep up with the incessant demand for change that characterizes our time. For them, the future will have arrived too soon.

—Alvin Toffler, Future Shock

HE REALIZED THAT Edith had opened her eyes and was watching him with an expression compounded of sleepiness, warmth, satisfaction, affection … and possibly a bit of humor.

He said, wiping his dream thoughts of Peggy Ten Eyck from his mind, “Good morning, Edie.”

“Good morning, darling. Did I make you happy?”

He took in her beauty. During past sexual experiences he had most often dreaded seeing his bed companion in the harshness of morning light; makeup smeared, hair a mop, breath heavy with the tobacco and alcohol of the night before, the animal smell of used sex and dried sweat. It didn’t apply to Edith Leete. She had never worn cosmetics in her life, her hair was short cut, she neither smoked nor drank beyond a bit of wine or beer with meals. And now that he thought about it, after their last bout with Eros, she had gone into the bath and showered. He was disgusted with himself for not having done the same.

Now she was fresh and beautiful.

He nodded and said, “Yes. Yes, Edie.”

“All right, then. Breakfast. Last one up is a rotten egg!” She threw back the single sheet that covered them and began to swing her excellent legs over the side of the bed.

He said, “Wait just a minute.”

She looked at him and raised her eyebrows mockingly. “What? After all that? Are you a satyr?”

He shook his head this time. “No. It’s not that. I just wanted to look at you, and perhaps … tell you I love you.”

Her eyes had narrowed very slightly and there was something possibly sad behind them. But her words came out in a laugh. “You are—what was your old term?—corny,” she told him.

He protested, “I’m not that old. Between that word and the time I went into hibernation there was ‘square,’ ‘not with it,’ ‘not hip,’ and various others I can’t think of right now. But, okay, breakfast it is.”

They took turns in the bath and when he returned to the bedroom she had already garbed herself in the dungarees she almost always affected, and had dialed a complete new outfit for him except for shoes. He found it difficult to get used to the modern custom of wearing clothes a single time and then disposing of them to be recycled. He had been told that less labor was involved in such a system than washing, drying, ironing, replacing buttons, mending tears and holes. The textile industry was one of the most highly automated in the nation.

They headed for the kitchen. On the way, Edith said, “Jule, tell me about prostitutes.

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