The Air of Castor Oil

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine August 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Let the dead past bury its dead? Not while I am alive, it won't!

It surely was all right for me to let myself do it now. I couldn't have been more safe. In the window of the radio store a color television set was enjoying a quiz by itself and creased in my pocket was the newspaper account of the failure of a monumental human adventure in the blooming extinction of a huge rocket. The boys on the corner seemed hardly human, scowling anthropoids in walrus-skin coats. It was my own time. Anybody could see I was safe, and I could risk doing what I ached to do.