The Project Gutenberg EBook of Waste Not, Want, by Dave Dryfoos

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Title: Waste Not, Want

Author: Dave Dryfoos

Illustrator: Kelly Freas

Release Date: November 7, 2009 [EBook #30416]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Illustration: _Illustrated by Kelly Freas_]

WASTE NOT, WANT

_Eat your spinach, little man! It's good for you. Stuff yourself
with it. Be a good little consumer, or the cops will get you.... For
such is the law of supply and demand!_

BY DAVE DRYFOOS

Panic roused him--the black imp of panic that lived under the garish rug
of this unfamiliar room and crawled out at dawn to nudge him awake and
stare from the blank space to his left where Tillie's gray head should
have been.

His fists clenched in anger--at himself. He'd never been the sort to
make allowance for his own weakness and didn't propose to begin doing so
now, at age eighty-six. Tillie'd been killed in that crash well over a
year ago and it was time he got used to his widowerhood and quit
searching for her every morning.

But even after he gave himself the bawling out, orientation came slowly.
The surroundings looked so strange. No matter what he told himself it
was hard to believe that he was indeed Fred Lubway, mechanical engineer,
and had a right to be in this single bed, alone in this house his Tillie
had never seen.

The right to be there was all wrong. He disliked the house and hated all
its furnishings.

The cybernetic cooker in the kitchen; the magnetically-suspended divans
in the living room; the three-dimensional color broadcasts he could so
readily project to any wall or ceiling; the solartropic machinery that
would turn any face of the pentagonal house into the sun or the shade or
the breeze; the lift that would raise the entire building a hundred feet
into the air to give him a wider view and more privacy--all left him
dissatisfied.

They were new. None had been shared with Tillie. He used them only to
the extent required by law to fulfil