Hans had acepted the offer reluctantly, not because he was old-fashioned and disapproved of TV, but simply because he couldn’t imagine where he could find time to look at the darned thing. Still, he thought, at least I can always sell it for fifty dollars. But before I do that, let’s see what the programmes are like…

His hand had gone out to the switch: the screen had filled with moving shapes—and, like millions of men before him, Hans was lost. He entered a world he had not known existed—a world of battling spaceships, of exotic planets and strange races—the world, in fact, of Captain Zipp, Commander of the Space Legion.

Only when the tedious recital of the virtues of Crunche, the Wonder Cereal, had given way to an almost equally tedious boxing match between two muscle-bound characters who seemed to have signed a nonaggression pact, did the magic fade. Hans was a simple man. He had always been fond of fairy tales—and this was the modern fairy tale, with trimmings of which the Grimm Brothers had never dreamed. So Hans did not sell his TV set.

It was some weeks before the initial naive, uncritical enjoyment wore off. The first thing that began to annoy Hans was the furniture and general decor in the world of the future. He was, as has been indicated, an artist—and he refused to believe that in a hundred years taste would have deteriorated as badly as the Crunche sponsors seemed to imagine.

He also thought very little of the weapons that Captain Zipp and his opponents used. It was true that Hans did not pretend to understand the principles upon which the portable proton disintegrator was based, but however it worked, there was certainly no reason why it should be that clumsy. The clothes, the spaceship interiors—they just weren’t convincing. How did he know? He had always possessed a highly developed sense of fitness of things, and it could still operate even in this novel field.