loss, man. Not anything like. We discovered a lot. About nature and
science and like that. We invented science all by ourselves. So how come
the Gods don't let us use it?" The old man dug his elbow once more into
Forrester's rib. "How come?"

"The Gods haven't taken anything away from us," Forrester said.

"Haven't they?" the old man demanded. "How about television? Want to
answer that one, Daddy-O? Years ago, everybody had a television set.
Color and 3-D. The most. The end. Now there's no television at all. Why
not? What happened to it?"

"Well," Forrester said reasonably, "what good is television?"

"What good?" Once more Forrester's rib felt the old man's elbow. "Let me
tell you--"

"No," Forrester interrupted, suddenly irritated with the whole
conversation. "Let _me_ tell _you_. The trouble with your generation was
that all they wanted to do was sit around on their _glutei maximi_ and
be entertained. Like a bunch of hypnotized geese. They didn't want to
do anything for themselves. Half of them couldn't even read. And now
you want to tell me that--"

"Hold it, Daddy-O," the old man said. "You're telling me that the Gods
took away television just because we were a bunch of hypnotized geese.
That it?"

"That's it."

"Okay," the old man said. "So tell me--what are we now? With the Gods
and everything. I mean, man, really--what are we?"

"Now?" Forrester said. "Now you're retired. You're a bunch of retired
hypnotized geese."

The doors of the train slid creakily open and Forrester got out onto the
34th Street platform, walking angrily toward a stairway without looking
back.

True enough, the old man hadn't committed blasphemy, but it had
certainly come close enough there at the end. And if pokes with the
elbow weren't declared blasphemous, or at least equivalent to malicious
mischief, he thought, there was no justice in the world.

The real trouble was that the man had had no respect for the Gods. There
were a good many of the older generation like him. They seemed to feel
that humanity had been better off when the Gods had been away. Forrester
couldn't see it, and felt vaguely uncomfortable in the presence of
someone who believed it. After all, mankind _had_ been on the verge of
mass suicide, and the Gods had mercifully come back from their
self-imposed exile and taken care of things. The exile had been designed
to prove, in the drastic laboratory of three thousand years, that Man by
himself headed like