But Hoppy was passionately determined to become a TV repairman, and now he had succeeded, because Fergesson was determined to do right by all the minority groups in the world. Fergesson was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP and the Help for the Handicapped League—the latter being, as far as Stuart could tell, nothing but a lobby group on an international scale, set up to promote soft berths for all the victims of modern medicine and science, such as the multitude from the Bluthgeld Catastrophe of 1972.

And what does that make me? Stuart asked himself as he sat upstairs in the store’s office, going over his sales book. I mean, he thought, with a phoce working here… that practically makes me a radiation freak, too, as if being colored was a sort of early form of radiation burn. He felt gloomy thinking about it.

Once upon a time, he thought, all the people on Earth were white, and then some horse’s ass set off a high-altitude bomb back say around ten thousand years ago, and some of us got seared and it was permanent; it affected our genes. So here we are today.

Another salesman, Jack Lightheiser, came and sat down at the desk across from him and lit a Corina cigar. “I hear Jim’s hired that kid on the cart,” Lightheiser said. “You know why he did it, don’t you? For publicity. The S.F. newspapers’ll write it up. Jim loves getting his name in the paper. It’s a smart move, when you get down to it. The first retail dealer in the East Bay to hire a phoce.”

Stuart grunted.

“Jim’s got an idealized image of himself,” Lightheiser said. “He isn’t just a merchant; he’s a modern Roman, he’s civic-minded. After all, he’s an educated man—he’s got a master’s degree from Stanford.”

“That doesn’t mean anything any more,” Stuart said. He himself had gotten a master’s degree from Cal, back in 1975, and look where it had got him.

“It did when he got it,” Lightheiser said. “After all, he graduated back in 1947; he was on that GI Bill they had.”