Brevity was the new watchword.
Vrythg dgstd stht lsrcdb njyd.
With a smile of sudden comprehension, the clerk produced a Manual and thumbed rapidly through its pages. He pointed to a phrase with the tip of his pen, and Walther read:
What price room do you desire?
Opposite these words was the phonetic jumble:
Whprumuirer?
Walther shrugged to indicate that price was not important, but his thoughts were spinning. And they were still spinning when the robot bellhop left him alone in his suite. The possibility of a language barrier on Earth was something he had never considered. With only six months planned for his visit, it would be impossible to learn a new language and still do all he had dreamed of doing
Dinner in the hotel's main dining room was a confusing interlude. The cuisine was superb, the robot waiter faultless—although Walther was beginning to weary of their fixed smiles. But more irritating was the flicker of huge, tri-dimensional television screens on the walls of the dining room. When he deciphered his bill, he saw he had been taxed for the TV entertainment.
After dinner, he showed the opera announcement to the hotel clerk, and asked how to get there. The clerk wrote down the number of the monorail car he was to take, but when Walther learned the opera house was only six blocks away, he decided to walk. The clerk was aghast at this, and followed him all the way to the sidewalk, waving his arms and protesting in an hysterical jumble of consonants.
My boy, work as such may still be important in Andromeda, but how could it possibly be so here on Earth? Generations ago, automation, the control of the atom, the harnessing of the sun's energy—all combined with many other factors to make work a negligible part of Man's existence! Thus, with four-fifths of his waking hours devoted to leisure-time pursuits, the balance of power shifted inevitably to the purveyors of mass entertainment. Great monopolies, operating under the Happy Time, Ltd. cartel, seized upon the digest trend in the old culture and made brevity the basis of the new order. The briefer you make a piece of entertainment, the more pieces you can sell the public in a given number of leisure hours! It's just good business," Willy concluded drily.
The servo-robot presented a bill with the drinks. Money had never meant anything to Walther, but he could scarcely repress a start when he deciphered the amount of the bill. By any standard of wealth or exchange, the drinks were fantastically expensive.
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