Count to a Trillion

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The future did not arrive.

Overhearing his elders talk, no one seemed to know what the holdup was. Grown-ups occasionally made jokes about flying cars and rocket packs and moonshots, and shook their heads, and then talked about horse breeds and plague vectors and prevailing winds, and someday-soon rural-electrification plans, next-year-for-sure or whenever Houston had the know-how to repair the pre-war power grid. Even his earliest memories had the murmur of conversation in the background of a glorious yesterday, and glorious tomorrows; but there was nothing but chores in the cold today, for all this talk.

Young Menelaus Illation Montrose told himself he would fix the jerk who’d stopped those bright and shining tomorrows from getting here, if he ever laid eyes on the fellow. It had to be someone’s fault. Stood to reason.

At that age, when one reads the books that live in one’s heart forever, Menelaus quite by accident came across in his library a cartoon of stark colors and convincing depth-illusion, which some writer of two hundred years ago had composed. It was a strange cartoon, unlike anything young Menelaus read in study, for each episode ended happily, not just in one, but in all possible episode results.

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