Craig shook his head. «Some other time,» he said. «I’ll come back again. I want to mull it over.»
«You’re absolutely sure that you’re sour on history?» asked the counselor. «I’d rather steer you back to that than interest you in an alternative.»
«I’m sour on it,» said Craig. «I shudder when I think of it.»
«You could take a vacation,» suggested the counselor. «You could freeze your personal satisfaction rating until you returned. Maybe then you could boost it up again.»
«I think,» said Craig, «that to start with I’ll take a little walk.»
«A walk,» the counselor told him, «is very often helpful.»
«What do I owe you?» Craig asked.
«A hundred,» the counselor said. «But it’s immaterial to me if you pay or not.»
«I know,» said Craig. «You work for the love of it.»
The man sat on the shore of the little pond and leaned back against a tree.
He smoked while he kept an eye on the fishpole stuck into the ground beside him. Close at hand was an unpretentious jug made of earthenware.
He looked up and saw Craig.
«Come on, friend,» he said. «Sit down and rest yourself.»
Craig came and sat. He pulled out a handkerchief and mopped his brow.
«The sun’s a little warm,» he said.
«Cool here,» said the man. «I fish or loaf around when the sun is high. When the sun goes down I go and hoe my garden.»
«Flowers,» said Craig. «Now there’s an idea. I’ve often thought it would be fun to raise a garden full of flowers.»
«Not flowers,» the man said. «Vegetables. I eat them.»
«You mean you work to get the things you eat?»
«Uh-huh,» said the man. «I spade the ground and rake it to prepare the seed bed. Then I plant the seeds and watch them sprout and grow. I tend the garden and I harvest it. I get enough to eat.»
«It must be a lot of work.»
«I take it easy,» said the man. «I don’t let it worry me.»
«You could get a robot,» Craig told him.
«Yeah, I guess I could. But I don’t hold with such contraptions. It would make me nervous.»
The cork went under and he made a grab for the pole, but he was too late.
The hook came up empty.
«Missed that one,» he said placidly. «Miss a lot of them. Don’t pay enough attention.»
He swung in the hook and baited it with a worm from the can that stood beside him.
«Might have been a turtle,» he said. «Turtles are hell on bait.»
He swung the tackle out again, stuck the pole back into the ground and settled back against the tree.
«I grow a little extra corn,» he said, «and run a batch of moon when my stock is running low. The house ain’t much to look at, but it’s comfortable. I got a dog and two cats and I fuss my neighbors.»
«Fuss your neighbors?»
«Sure,» the man said. «They all think that I am nuts.»
He picked up the jug, uncorked it and handed it to Craig. Craig took a drink, prepared for the worst. It wasn’t bad at all.
«Took a little extra care with that batch,» the man said. «It really pays to do that if you have the time.»
«Tell me,» said Craig, «are you satisfied?»
«Sure,» the man said.
«You must have a nice P.S.,» said Craig.
«P.X.?»
«No. P.S. Personal satisfaction rating.»
The man shook his head. «I ain’t got one of them,» he said.
Craig was aghast. «But you have to have!»
«You talk just like that other fellow,» said the man. «He was around a while ago. Told me about this P.S. business, but I thought he said P.X. Told me I had to have one. Took it awful hard when I said I wouldn’t do it.»
«Everyone has a P.S.,» said Craig.
«Everyone but me,» said the man. «That’s what the other fellow said, too. He was some upset about it. Practically read me out of the human race.»
He looked sharply at Craig. «Son,» he said, «you got troubles on your mind.»
Craig nodded.
«Lots of folks have troubles,» said the man, «only they don’t know it. And you can’t start to lick your troubles until you see and recognize them.
Things are all upset. No one’s living right. There is something wrong.»
«My P.S. is way off,» said Craig. «I’ve lost all interest. I know there’s something wrong. I can sense it, but I can’t put my finger on it.»
«They get things given to them,» said the man. «They could live the life of Riley and not do a tap of work. They could get food and shelter and clothing and all the luxuries that they want by just asking for them. You want money, so you go to a bank and the bank gives you all you need. You go to a shop and buy a thing and the shopkeeper don’t give a tinker’s damn if you pay or not. Because, you see, it didn’t cost him nothing. He got it given to him. He doesn’t have to work for a living. He ain’t keeping shop, really. He’s just playing at it, like kids would play at keeping store. And there’s other people who play at all sorts of other things. They do it to keep from dying of boredom. They wouldn’t have to do it. And this P.S. business you talk about is just another play-mechanism, a way of keeping score, a sort of social pressure to keep you on your toes when there is no real reason on all of God’s green earth that you should be on your toes. It’s meant to keep you happy by giving you something to work for. A high P.S. means high social standing and a satisfied ego. It’s clever and ingenious, but it’s just playing, too.»
Craig stared at the man. «A play world,» he said. «You’ve hit it on the head. That’s what it really is.»
The man chuckled. «You never thought of it before,» he said. «That’s the trouble. No one ever thinks. Everyone is so busy trying to convince himself that he’s happy and important that he never stops to think. Let me tell you this, son: No man ever is important if he tries to make himself important. It’s when he forgets that he’s important that he really is important.
«Me,» he said. «I have lots of time to think.»
«I never thought of it,» said Craig, «in just that way before.»
«We have no economic worth,» the man said. «There’s not any of us making our own way. There’s not a single one of us worth the energy it would take to kill us.»
«Except me,» he said. «I raise my own eating and I catch some fish and I snare some rabbits and I make a batch of drinking likker whenever I run out.»
«I always thought of our way of life,» said Craig, «as the final phase in economic development. That’s what they teach the kids. Man has finally achieved economic independence. There is no government and there is no economic fabric. You get all you need as a matter of a hereditary right, a common right. You are free to do anything you want to do and you try to live a worthwhile life.»
«Son,» said the man, «you had breakfast this morning and you had lunch this ’noon before you took your walk. You’ll eat dinner tonight and you’ll have a drink or two. Tomorrow you’ll get a new shirt or a pair of shoes and there will be some equipment that you’ll need to carry on your work.»
«That’s right,» said Craig.
«What I want to know,» said the man, «is where did all that stuff come from? The shirt or the pair of shoes might have been made by someone who likes to make shirts and shoes. The food was cooked either by robots or by someone who likes to cook, and the drawing set or the typewriter or the power tools that you use might have been made by someone who likes to mess around making stuff like that. But before the typewriter was a typewriter, it was metal in the ground, the food was grown, the clothes came from one of several raw materials. Tell me: who grew the raw materials, who dug and smelted the ore?»