EARLY in the morning Leon Cartwright drove carefully along the narrow, twisting streets in his ancient '82 Chevrolet, his competent hands firmly gripping the wheel, his eyes on the traffic ahead. As usual, he wore an outmoded but immaculate double-breasted suit. A shapeless hat was crushed against his head, and in his vest pocket a watch ticked to itself. Everything about him breathed obsolescence and age; he was perhaps sixty, a lean, sinewy-built man, very tall and straight, but small-boned, with mild blue eyes and liver-spotted wrists. His arms were thin, but strong and wiry. He had a quiet, almost gentle expression on his gaunt face. He drove as if not completely trusting either himself or the aged car.

In the back seat lay heaps and stacks of mailing-tapes ready to be sent out. The floor sagged under heavy bundles of metalfoil to be imprinted and franked. An old raincoat was wadded in the corner, together with a stale container of lunch and a number of discarded overshoes. Wedged under the seat was a loaded Hopper popper, stuck there years ago.

The buildings on both sides of Cartwright were old and faded, thin peeling things of dusty windows and drab neon signs. They were relics of the last century, like himself and his car. Drab men, in faded pants and workjackets, hands in their pockets, eyes blank and unfriendly, lounged in doorways and against walls. Dumpy middle-aged women in shapeless black coats dragged rickety shopping carts into dark stores, to pick fretfully over the limp merchandise, stale food to be lugged back to their stuffy urine-tinged apartments, to their restless families.

Mankind's lot, Cartwright observed, hadn't changed much, of late. The Classification system, the elaborate Quizzes, hadn't done most people any good. The unks, the unclassified, remained.

In the early twentieth century the problem of production had been solved; after that it was the problem of consumption that plagued society. In the 1950's and '60's, consumer commodities and farm products began to pile up in vast towering mountains all over the Western World. As much as possible was given away—but that threatened to subvert the open market. By 1980, the pro tem solution was to heap up the products and burn them: billions of dollars worth, week after week.