_Man's every resource was being stripped
to feed the millions on Earth ... but George
was a throwback, and a poacher, and his
punishment had to fit the crime...._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, August 1955.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
There's a library in a small town near Charles Neck on Murdock Sound.
It's so run down and useless that a lot of old books still hang around
on the shelves, the big kind with stiff backs and all kinds of fancy
little stars or small, curly designs to show the end of one section
and the beginning of another. Very quaint. After the WFI took over the
Sound in our remote area, I didn't have much to do in the day time,
so I used to walk down the road to town and get a handful of these
stiff backs once in a while. From reading them I got the notion I'm
a one man resistance movement, which is pitiful and foolish, and, I
gather, always has been a seedy, run-down sort of thing, a backward
state of mind and feelings. That's me, alright: backward. I tried to
be forward, but it made me hard to live with; and since I live mostly
with myself, I had to quit. Still, I knew I couldn't get away with
backwardness, and that sooner or later the WFI would slap me down,
squash this bussing insect, and get on with its work again as usual.
* * * * *
Sure enough, one bleak November morning, when I was half through a
couple of eggs and a cup of coffee, I heard the throb of a motor. I
walked down to the end of my wharf and looked skyward. I was pretty
sure they wouldn't come by land, because most of the secondary roads
were in bad shape; and they wouldn't travel by water, because that took
too much gas and time. In fact, the WFI never wasted anything. They
couldn't afford to. Everything went for food, its growth, collection,
and processing. The big freighters, some of them, had atomic piles,
but that power was impossibly clumsy and expensive for smaller boats.
So they came by air in the usual inspection helicopter. The pilot
dropped her in the cove right alongside the wharf and made fast. Three
men stepped onto the planks. They had the wheat sheaf insignia of the
WFI on their overcoat arms and caps, and they looked cold and bored.
A small sea sucked at the pilings and the helicopter rose and fell,
grating against the wharf. I looked at the pilot and said, "Better put
your chafing gear out if you intend staying a while." We all watched
while the pilot put a few kapoks at the tight spots. Then he looked at
a notebook and said, "You George Arthur Henry?"