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off. You know me. I've spent plenty of money here."
     
    The bartender shrugged. "I don't own the place; anything goes over the bar has to be rung up on the cash register."
     
    "You're lucky to have a job that pays wages."
     
    "Times I'm not so sure. Why don't you indent?"
     
    Pondible looked shocked. "At my age? What would a company pay for a worn-out old carcass? A hundred dollars at the top. Then a release in a couple of years with a med holdback so I'd have to report every week somewhere. No, friend, I've come through this long a free man—in a manner of speaking—and I'll stick it out. Let's have that shot; you can see for yourself I'm tapering off. You'll get your jack tomorrow."
     
    I could see the bartender was weakening; each refusal was less surly, and at last, to my astonishment, he set out a glass and bottle for Pondible and an earthenware mug of buttermilk for me. To my astonishment, I say, for credit was rarely extended on any scale, large or small. The inflation, though sixty years in the past, had left indelible impressions; people paid cash or did without. Debt was not only disgraceful, it was dangerous; the notion things could be paid for while, or even after, they were being used was as unthinkable as was the idea of circulating paper money instead of silver or gold.
     
    I drank my buttermilk slowly, gratefully aware Pondible had ordered the most filling and sustaining liquid in the saloon. For all his unprepossessing appearance and peculiar moral notions, my new acquaintance seemed to have a rude wisdom as well as a rude kindliness.
     
    He swallowed his whiskey and called for a quart pot of light beer which he sipped slowly. "That's the trick of it, Hodge. Avoid the second shot. If you can." He sipped again. "Now what?"
     
    "What?" I repeated.
     
    "Now what are you going to do? What's your aim in life anyway?"
     
    "None—now. I. . . wanted to learn. To study."
     
    He frowned. "Out of books?"
     
    "How else?"
     
    "Books is mostly written and printed in foreign countries."
     
    "There might be more written here if more people had time to learn."
     
    Pondible wiped specks of froth from his beard with the back of his hand. "Might and mightn't. Oh, some of my best friends are book readers, don't get me wrong, boy."
     
    "I'd thought," I burst out, "I'd thought to try Columbia College. To offer—to beg to be allowed to do any kind of work for tuition."
     
    "Hmm. I doubt it would have worked."
     
    "Anyway I can't go now, looking like this."
     
    "Might be as well. We need fighters, not readers."
     
    "'We'?"
     
    He did not explain. "Well, you could always take the advice our friend here gave me and indent. A young healthy lad like you could get yourself a thousand or twelve hundred dollars—" "Sure. And be a slave for the rest of my life."
     
    "Oh, indenting ain't slavery. It's better. And worse. For one thing the company that buys you won't hold you after you aren't worth your keep. Not that long, on account of bookkeeping; they lose when they break even. So they cancel your indenture without a cent of payment. Course they'll take a med holdback so as to get a dollar or two for your corpse, but that's a long time away for you."
     
    An inconceivably long time. The medical holdback was the least of my distaste, though it had played a large part in the discussions at home. My mother had heard that cadavers for dissection were shipped to foreign medical schools like so much cargo. She was shocked not so much at the thought of the scientific use of her dead body as at its disposal outside the United States.
     
    "Yes," I said. "A long time away. So I wouldn't be a slave for life; just thirty or forty years. Till I wasn't any good to anyone, including myself."
     
    He seemed to be enjoying himself as he drank his beer. "You're a gloomy gus, Hodge. 'Tain't 's bad 's that. Indenting's pretty strictly regulated. That's the idea anyway. I ain't saying the big companies don't get away with a lot. You