"By the year 2621 A.D., two events of stupendous importance took place.
There is scarcely a man in this class who has not heard of how Professor
P222D29333Male accidentally stumbled upon the scientific fact that the
effect of gravity is reversed upon any body which vibrates
perpendicularly to the plane of the ecliptic with a frequency which is
an even multiple of the logarithm of 2 of the Naperian base 'e.' At
once, special vibrating cars were constructed which carried mankind to
all planets. That discovery of Professor P222D29333Male did nothing less
than open up seven new territories to our inhabitants; namely: Mercury,
Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. In the great land
rush that ensued, thousands who were previously poor became rich.
"But, gentlemen, land which so far had been constituted one of the main
sources of wealth, was shortly to become valuable for individual golf
links only, as it is today, on account of another scientific discovery.
"This second discovery was in reality, not a discovery, but the
perfection of a chemical process, the principles of which had been known
for many centuries. I am alluding to the construction of the vast
reducing factories, one upon each planet, to which the bodies of all
persons who have died on their respective planets are at once shipped by
Aerial Express. Since this process is used today, all of you understand
the methods employed; how each body is reduced by heat to its component
constituents: hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium, phosphorus,
and so forth; how these separated constituents are stored in special
reservoirs together with the components from thousands of other corpses;
how these elements are then synthetically combined into food tablets for
those of us who are yet alive--thus completing an endless chain from the
dead to the living. Naturally then, agriculture and stock-raising
ceased, since the food problem, with which man had coped from time
immemorial, was solved. The two direct results were, first--that land
lost the inflated values it had possessed when it was necessary for
tillage, and second--that men were at last given enough leisure to enter
the fields of science and art.
"And as to the John Jones Dollar, which now embraced countless
industries and vast territory on the earth, it stood, in value: