and went to see Ann.

It was a house that invited relaxation. It was a house where time
seemed to be stated in a value that could not be measured with
credits. It was a house that whispered, "I saw one world fall into
dust; yours is no more eternal"--and, for a moment, that whisper made
the cartel-jungle meaningless.

V

Hunter left his autojet on the parking flat behind the house. He fed
enough coins in the meter to hold the car for twenty-four hours. He
didn't know how fast he'd want an autojet after he talked to Mrs.
Ames, but he didn't want a chance passer-by to pick up his car if the
charter expired.

It was necessary for him to ring a bell manually, by means of a metal
button fixed to the wooden frame of the front door. No scanner
announced his arrival, nor did any soundless auto-door respond to a
beam transmitted from within the house. After a time Hunter heard
footsteps. A strange woman--probably a new resident who had taken
Ann's place--opened the door.

"I'm Captain Hunter," he said. "I came to see Mrs. Ames."

"Won't you come in, Captain?" the woman replied.

She led him into a front room which, Ann had once told him, had been
called a living room. A peculiar name, surely, for the room appeared
to have been designed solely as a place to sit while watching
Tri-D--or flat-screen television, as it had been called in its early
developmental stage when the house was new--or to hear someone play
the bulky instrument known as a piano.

The room was an example of the appalling waste of space so common to
the twentieth century. It was extremely spacious, but neither food
tubes nor bed drawers were concealed in the walls.

Hunter had always been curious about the piano. It amazed him that it
had been operated entirely by hand. There was no electric scanner to
read the mood of the player and interpret it in melody. Driven to
contrive his own harmonics, how could the twentieth century man have
derived any satisfaction at all from music? His sensibilities had been
immature, of course. But even so, an instrument which demanded so much
individual creativeness must have been an enormous frustration.

Since so many surviving twentieth century machines made the same
demand on the individual--their automobiles, for example, had been
individually directed, without any sort of electronic safety
control--it had puzzled both Hunter and Ann that the incidence of
maladjustment in the past had been so low.

The captai