Don't Live in the Past

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Bernard François Piet Fu-tze Vargas had a clear and sustained feeling that there ought not to be days like this. Four of his wife’s cousins from Callisto had descended upon him that morning at the ungodly hour of ten o’clock (they required special diets and were obscenely fat); he had been seated below a sub-assistant minister of finance at the High Commissioner’s dinner last night, a manifest insult; the power beam had failed twice on his way into the office, over Sancisco and over the California Garbage Conversion Area; and he had a splitting headache.

Vargas was a youngish man with large, ruddy features now contorted into a heavy scowl. He sat half leaning across his desk, chin on his fist, moodily thrusting folded sheets of metal fiber into the automatic letteropener.

Abruptly the ceiling light dimmed and something swatted him on the rump three times in machine-gun tempo, jarring him all the way up his spine. Vargas found himself canted across his desk with his head in an overturned flower vase. The lights flickered again, went out altogether; and in the brief interval before they went on again a fourth shock, more violent than the others, lifted Vargas all the way across his desk and onto the thick body-temperature carpet.

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