Read Our Friends From Frolix 8 for Free Online

gigantic put-on.
We
can’t understand it; the Old Men can’t understand it; we take their word for it that it’s a whole new step upward in the evolution of human brain-functioning. Admittedly, there are those Rogers nodes, or whatever. There is a physical, different structure of their cerebral cortex. But…
    One of his intercoms clicked on. ‘Director Barnes and a woman police occifer are—’
    ‘Send them in,’ Gram said. He leaned back, made himself comfortable, folded his arms and waited.
    Waited to tell them his new idea.

FIVE
    At eight-thirty in the morning, Nicholas Appleton showed up at his job and prepared to begin the day.
    The sun shone down on his shop, his little building. Therein he rolled up his sleeves, put on his magnifying glasses, and plugged in the heating iron.
    His boss, Earl Zeta, stumped up to him, hands in the pockets of his khaki trousers, an Italian cigar dangling from his overgrown lips. ‘What say, Nick?’
    ‘We won’t know for a couple of days,’ Nick said. ‘They’re going to mail us the results.’
    ‘Oh yeah, your kid.’ Zeta put a dark, large paw on Nick’s shoulder. ‘You’re cutting the grooves too light,’ he said. ‘I want them down into the casing. Into the damn carcass.’
    Nick, protestingly, said, ‘But if I go any deeper—’ The tire will blow if they back over a warm match, he said to himself. It’s equal to shooting them down with a laser rifle. ‘Okay,’ he said, the fighting strength oozing out of him; after all Earl Zeta was the boss. ‘I’ll go deeper,’ he said, ‘until the iron comes out the other side.’
    ‘You do that and you’re fired,’ Zeta said.
    ‘Your philosophy is that once they buy the squirt—’
    ‘When their three wheels hit the public pavement,’ Zeta said, ‘our responsibility ends. After that, whatever happens to them is their own business.’
    Nick had not wanted to be a tire regroover… a man who took a bald tire and, with the red hot iron, carved new grooves deeper and deeper into the tire, making it look adequate. Making it look as if it had all the tread it needed. He had inherited the craft from his father, who had learned it from his own father. Down the years, father, to son; hating it as he did, Nick knew one thing: he was a superb tire regroover and always would be. Zeta was wrong; he already burned deeply enough. I’m the artist, he thought; I should decide how deep the grooves should go.
    Leisurely, Zeta snapped on his neck radio. Cheap and noisy music – of a sort – blurred out of the seven or eight speaker-systems spread over the heavy man’s bulging body.
    The music ceased. A pause, and then an announcer’s voice, speaking in professionally disinterested tones. ‘PSS spokesmen, representing Director Lloyd Barnes, announced a short while ago that police prisoner Eric Cordon, long imprisoned for acts hostile to the people, has been transferred from Brightforth Prison to the termination facilities in Long Beach, California. When asked if this meant that Cordon is to be executed, PSS spokesmen avowed that no decision as to that has been reached. Well-informed sources outside the PSS are openly saying that this heralds Cordon’s execution,pointing out that of the last nine hundred PSS prisoners transferred at various times to the Long Beach detention facilities, almost eight hundred were eventually executed. This has been a bulletin from—’
    Convulsively, Earl Zeta clutched at the switch of his body radio; he missed it, clenched his fist spasmodically, shutting his eyes and rocking back and forth. ‘Those bastards,’ he said between his teeth. ‘They’re murdering him.’ His eyes opened; he grimaced, his face showing violent and deep pain… then, by degrees, he obtained control over himself; his anguish seemed to ease. But it did not go away; his tubby body remained tensed as he stared at Nick.
    Nick said, ‘You’re an Under Man.’
    ‘For ten years you’ve known me,’ Zeta grated. He