The Dark Design by Phillip Jose Farmer

He worked hard, scraping off the thick green-blue plant growth from the black rock and stuffing it into the bamboo buckets. Others lowered the buckets on ropes to the ground, where their contents were dumped into vats.

Shortly before noon, he knocked off for the lunch hour. Before going down the ladders, he looked out over the hills. Far below, the white hull of the RazzleDazzle shone in the bright sun. Somehow, he was going to be on it when it up-anchored.

Peter walked back to the hut, noted that Eve wasn’t there, and went on down to the plain. The line of interviewers did not look any shorter. He passed along the edge of the plain where its short grass abruptly stopped and the long grass of the hills began. What made for the line of demarcation? Were there chemicals in the hill soil that halted the encroachment of plain grass? Or was it vice versa? Or both? And why?

The archery range was about half a kilometer south of the dock area. He practiced shooting at a target of grass on a bamboo tripod for about thirty minutes. Then he went to the gymnasium area and ran sprints and made long jumps and engaged in judo, karate, and spear-fighting for two hours. At the end of the time, he was sweat­ing and tired. But he was bursting with joy. It was wonderful to have a twenty-five-year-old body, the tiredness and feebleness of middle and old age gone, the aches and pains, the fat, the hernia, the ulcer, the headaches, the long-sightedness, all no more. Replacing it, the ability to run or swim swiftly and far, to feel sexual desire every night (and a good part of the day).

The worst thing he had done on Earth was to get a desk job as a technical writer at the age of thirty-eight and then at fifty-one, to become a fulltime fiction writer. He should have stayed in the steel mill. It was monotonous work, but while his body was handling the hot, heavy work, his mind-was busy dreaming up stories. At night he would read or write.

It was when he had started to sit on his butt all day that he had begun drinking so heavily. And his reading had diminished, too. It was too easy after working on a typewriter eight hours a day to sit in front of the TV all evening and swill Bourbon or Scotch. TV, the worst thing that had happened to the twentieth century. After the atom bomb and overpopulation, of course.

No, he told himself, that wasn’t fair. He didn’t have to be a boob before the tube. He could have used the self-discipline which enabled him to write to turn the set off except at highly selected times. But the lotus-eater syndrome had gotten him. Besides, there were programs on TV which were really excellent, both entertain­ing and educational.

Still, this world was good in that there were no TV’s or auto­mobiles or atom bombs or gross national production or paychecks or mortgages or medical bills. Or air or water pollution and almost no dust. And nobody gave a damn about communism or socialism or capitalism, because they didn’t exist. Well, that was not quite true. Most states did have a sort of primitive communism.

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He walked to the river and plunged in, cleaning off the sweat. Then he trotted along the bank (no huts allowed within 30 meters of it) to the dock area. He hung around until dinnertime, talking to friends. In between, he watched the two from the Razzle Dazzle. They were still interviewing, though lubricating their throats with frequent drinks. Wasn’t that line ever going to end?

Just before it was suppertime, Farrington stood up and announced in a loud voice that he was taking no more applications. Those still in the line protested, but he said that he’d had enough.

By then the head of Ruritania, “Baron” Thomas Bullitt, had appeared with his councillors. Bullitt had had some small claim to fame in his day. In 1775 he had explored the Ohio River falls by the area which would become Louisville, Kentucky. Commissioned by the William and Mary College of Virginia, he surveyed the area. And thereafter disappeared from history. His aide-de-camp, Paulus Buys, a sixteenth-century Dutchman, was with him. Both invited the crew of the Razzle Dazzle to a parry in their honor that night. The main reason for the invitation was to hear the adventures of the crew. River-dwellers loved gossip and exciting tales, since their fields of entertainment were limited.