ed politely as he ushered us to the door, but I don't think
he knew what I meant. They don't have unions in State.

* * * * *

The island isn't too bad. I swore, years ago, with the first cold I
ever remember having, that I would never care if I ever saw snow
again. And where I am, there isn't any snow. The beach is yellow as
gold, the sun comes up every day in the east and sets in the west, and
I've got for my personal use the biggest, shiniest bar you ever saw in
all your life. They ship in draft beer for me all the way from La
Crosse, Wisconsin, and Munich, Germany. Every month I get a four-quart
keg from Belfast in Ireland, and I've got all the gadgets I need to
mix anything a barkeep could dream up. The ice I get from what
probably is a six-hundred dollar refrigerator that makes nothing but
ice cubes. I have a subscription to practically every magazine I ever
heard of, and I get daily aerial delivery--that's right. A little
Piper Cub with floats drops the New York _Times_, the _Monitor_, and a
couple of others every morning--of the newspapers with the least
amount of junk. I used to get the Detroit papers, but I found out it
took too much mental effort to avoid looking at the Vital Statistics,
where they record the marriages and deaths.

I finally learned to play bridge. Euchre doesn't seem the same without
a barful of people, and pinochle is not the game that Stein is good
at. Bob Stein, the poor guy--although he never says one word about
it--takes everything in his stride. He spends six weeks out of every
eight here with me and the others that form the crew of this little
island afloat in the Southern Sea. The food is good, and with no limit
to variety and type. We can't be too far from somewhere, because every
once in a while we hear a rattle and banging somewhere out to sea.
Once we heard what sounded like a full scale battle. I pried it out of
Bob Stein that it was just maneuvers, as he called it. I know better.
I see nothing but naval craft, and I suspect that they're not always
just at the horizon for practice.

National affairs? Well, they're not too bad. The big noise came when
the UN wanted my custody and didn't get it. The Old Man once asked me
why I wasn't in favor of it, and I told him. In theory, yes; in
practice, the UN was too dangerous. Personally, I felt that I could
trust very few, and none that I hadn't known before all this happened.
UN supervision meant that