Adventures in the Far Future & Tales of Outer Space — page 143: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

noting the action and interaction. “Practice enough,” he thought at last. Then he cut sharply into a little cellar apartment, the incarnation of squalor and dank poverty. It was the contrast between his clean, brisk lab, this hell of stenches and fetor. lt was a contrast too intolerable, almost, to be real. He probed the minds of the family that lived there—terror- ridden, hating, despising and despised. Striker was shocked. His emotions were stirred, and that, he found abruptly, as he tried to shift his focus of attention, was very bad, because if he let his emotions enter into the matter he was stuck. And the fear that this realization engendered nearly undid him for good. With a coldly violent wrench he snapped himself into the next day. It would not do to observe too closely, he realized. After a thorough inspection of the world of the 1950’s, he drifted on along the time-stream for a score of years, alternately contracting and expanding his ego, as it were. This seemed to give him some sort of purchase on the fabric of space; the mechanical analogy was peristalsis. The North America of 1970 was not pretty to see. All hell had broken loose, and the fin du siecle mind had begun to assert itself. New York city was still the biggest town in the world, but it had regained the unwanted title of the most corrupt. To the customary sewer and sanitation grafts there had been added a few new ones; Striker saw into the minds of what was known as the “Powerhouse,” the dozen men who ran the lives of the dozen million New Yorkers. Striker shifted to the West Coast and found things in better shape. There the factories were cleaner and better-lit; there were anti-sopeedup laws enforced by aé_ reform government. Hollywood, entertainment capital before television had granted that palm to high-up, centrally located Denver, was the world focus’ for plastics manufacture. Square miles of buildings turned out everything from buttons to houses, molded in one piece. CORniclooo SS CO