More Stories by R.A. Lafferty by R A Lafferty

Author:R A Lafferty [Lafferty, R A]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-07-23T00:04:26+00:00

2.

We are the sick, ungallant band

Whose once bright step must lag.

We are the people who live in the land

Where even the buzzards gag.

-Rotten Peoples' Rollicks.

Judge Roger Baluster had once been a magistrate, and later he been a manufacturer and business man. Still later he had been a tycoon. And that is where he broke it. Tycoons are so easy to type and tear.

And really had he ever had the nobility of character that a magistrate and a business man and a tycoon should have? What he did have was a long history of noncooperation with the person-projector firms.

As a young man Roger had been a crusading judge. He had crusaded against a complex of disintegrating things when they had been new and unestablislied. And now when they were set and established they crusaded against Baluster to his ruination. But through the years he had become a man of much hidden wealth. He was a full-feathered bird and his plucking would take a long time.

In the beginning of it, he had refused to pay a firm that was in the person-projection business the simple monthly fee for 'Personality Updating and Maintenance.' This was petty of him, for he was a rich man.

Roger had had the look of an eagle. He had had pride and judgement and compassion. And humor. He had been (this is hard to believe in the light of his real character as it was later made manifest) adhered and liked and respected by almost everyone.

But he had refused to pay a simple fee. Well then, he would have to pay a complex fee of a made steeper sort. He was handed upward to larger hands. A bigger and more comprehensive firm in the person-projection business decided to take the enhancing of Baluster's personality in hand. And, unaccountably, he refused this offer also. He was placing himself above the law and above the community.

"Well then, Baluster, we will degrade your personality till you are held in universal contempt," the men of the first-class person-projector firm told him. "We will reveal a totally shabby person who is the valid 'you.' Of the false image which you built for yourself nothing will remain. That is the way that things are, and there is only one side to things."

"Aw, I think there is another side to this," Roger Baluster said resolutely. "And I believe that something of what I built will remain. The 'Inner Me' will remain. "

"So then it will remain," said those huckstering men of that firm. "But it will remain as it really is and not as you imagine it. We will give you a certain transparency now. There is nothing like letting the honest light of the day into a dark man like yourself. This transparency will be subiminal, of course, but it will be near universal. Everybody will be able to see into you in those faster-than-a-blink moments. And nobody's 'Inner Person' is attractive. People will see you, in those instantaneous intervals that are too short to be recorded, with complete revulsion.

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