four hours a day inspect,
through his viewplate and certain specially installed apparatus, the
output of a certain process in one of the vast automatically controlled
food factories buried far underground beneath the base of the mountain,
where the moan of its whirring and throbbing machinery would not disturb
the peace and quiet of the citizens on the mountain top. Or he might be
required simply to watch the operation of an account machine in an
automatic store.

There is no denying that the economic system of the Hans was marvelous.
A suit of clothes, for instance, might be delivered in a man's apartment
without a human hand having ever touched it.

Having decided that he wished a suit of a given general style, he would
simply tune in a visual broadcast of the display of various selections,
and when he had made his choice, dial the number of the item and press
the order button. Simultaneously the charge would be automatically made
against his account number, and credited as a sale on the automatic
records of that particular factory in the account house. And his account
plate, hidden behind a little wall door, would register his new credit
balance. An automatically packaged suit that had been made to style and
size-standard by automatic machinery from synthetically produced
material, would slip into the delivery chute, magnetically addressed,
and in anywhere from a few seconds to thirty minutes or so, according to
the volume of business in the chutes, and drop into the delivery basket
in his room.

* * * * *

Daily his wages were credited to his account, and monthly his share of
the dividends likewise (according to his position) from the Imperial
Investment Trust, after deduction of taxes (through the automatic
bookkeeping machines) for the support of the city's pensioners and
whatever sum San-Lan himself had chosen to deduct for personal expenses
and gratuities.

A man could not bequeath his ownership interest in industry to his son,
for that interest ceased with his death, but his credit accumulation, on
which interest was paid, was credited to his eldest recorded son as a
matter of law.

Since many of these credit fortunes (The Hans had abandoned gold as a
financial basis centuries before) were so big that they drew interest in
excess of the utmost luxury costs of a single individual, there was a
class of idle rich consisting of eldest sons, passing on these credit
fortunes fro