Astounding British Edition, Vol. 9, No. 10 — page 53: what you’re looking at

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

MULTIFARIOUS . Si “Naturally.” “That’s all you do, isn’t it, Taj? Just go on one contact mission after another.” “All you do is work with ceramics. I think my line’s more exciting, personally,” Taj shrugged. He began to feel a certain impatience with Potter’s conversational trend. “What’s your world like?” Taj asked, hoping that bluntness would work better than simple waiting for the Earthman to drop hints in the course of normal speech. “Oh, about the same as yours, I guess,’ Potter said casually. “Say—I’m hungry. You don’t mind if I eat while we're talking, do you?” Taj restrained an impulse to put a hand on his gun butt and inform the Earthman of the true situation. For some reason, Potter was reaching up toward his helmet. “Well, I’m not so sure you should try eating Taj food before we know more about the metabolic differences,” Taj said hastily, realizing at the same time that his hand was hovering at his side, halfway down to his holster. He moved it quickly to his knee and shot a rapid glance at Potter’s expression. The Earthman displayed no sign of having noticed the awkward movement of his arm. Rather, he smiled. “That’s the reason I’m not offering you any of mine,” he said. “Don’t worry—I could have myself a banquet, if I wanted to.” Taj did not even attempt to unravel the various allusions of this remark, for the Earthman had reached up and re- moved his helmet. He held it between his hands and looked inside it, then reached in and withdrew several sealed packages. He opened one, took out something com- pletely unrecognizable, and began to eat. “Say, that’s quite a trick,” Taj said. “Looking at that helmet, you’d never know there was so much room inside it. That sure is one handy device.” “Sure is,” Potter agreed, taking another bite of his sandwich. He ran a fingernail along one corner of a square box, flipped back a lid, and took a drink. “Don’t know where we'd be without our hats.” Taj decided to take the bull by the horns. “Everybody has one, huh?” “Everybody old enough to know how to use one properly, yeah.” Potter said. “Whole culture’s built around them.” “That so? You wouldn’t mind telling me about it, would you? After all, I am supposed to be gathering information about you people.” “Sure. Glad to,” Potter said. He leaned forward, the helmet resting on his lap. “Look at it this way—what’re the basic requirements for existence? Food— always, then shelter, in most climates, and clothing ditto. The easiest solution used to be that of building your house as close to the market place as possible, right? As your population grew, though, your market place had to get bigger and bigger, and you had less and less room for your house. You wound up living in a sort of heap, with your neighbor’s nose over your shoulder, and the competition at the market place getting rougher and rougher. “All right. Now, you could reach a temporary solution by finding new market places, or building them in likely spots. But the more market places you had, the more room there was for people, so, in a generation or two, there you were, right back with your neighbor’s breath om your neck. “So they tried something else. They spread the shelters all over the world, and started bringing in products directly from the source to your door. This meant trans- portation, and fast and cheap, too. Com- bined with improved methods of storage, so that you could lay in a big supply of necessities at one time, this worked pretty well, until the population grew again, to the point where your transportation media were clogging up every clear bit of traffic lane, and your neighbors were. right back in your lap again, even if you lived in what used to be a desert area. “About this time, your sources were feeling the strain, too. So, they tried spaceflight—oh yeah, we _ eventually touched every habitable spot in the solar system. The trouble there lay in your definition of ‘habitable.’ You can’t do much in the way of a culture if it’s con- fined to a pressure dome, and spends five EOmMmIchooks.co