The 4-D Doodler

white brows out over the laboratory. To his near sighted eyes the blurred figure of Harper, his young assistant, seemed busily at work over his mathematical charts. ******** 2BR02B by KURT VONNEGUT, JR. Everything was perfectly swell. There were no prisons, no slums, no insane asylums, no cripples, no poverty, no wars. All diseases were conquered. So was old age. Death, barring accidents, was an adventure for volunteers. The population of the United States was stabilized at forty-million souls. One bright morning in the Chicago Lying-in Hospital, a man named Edward K. Wehling, Jr., waited for his wife to give birth. He was the only man waiting. Not many people were born a day any more. Wehling was fifty-six, a mere stripling in a population whose average age was one hundred and twenty-nine. X-rays had revealed that his wife was going to have triplets. The children would be his first.  ******** Groverzb knew what he wanted-peace and quiet. He was willing to scream his head off for it! QUIET, PLEASE By KEVIN SCOTT The big man eased the piano off his back and stood looking at Groverzb. "You ain't gonna like it here." He mopped his face. "Boy, will I ever be glad to get off this cockeyed planet." Groverzb pushed at his spectacles, sniffed, and said, "Quite." The big man said, "Ain't no native here over three feet tall. And they got some crazy kind of communication. They don't talk." Groverzb said, "Quiet." "Uh?" "Precisely why I am here. I," said Groverzb, sniffing again, "loathe conversation." "Oh. Well." He left. Alone, Groverzb surveyed his realm. The house was the shell of what had formerly been a Little People apartment building. Ceilings, floors and walls had been removed to form one large room. The tiny doors and windows had been sealed, and a single window and door had been cut into the shell for Groverzb's use. ******** CROSSROADS OF DESTINY by H. Piper Beam I still have the dollar bill. It's in my box at the bank, and I think that's where it will stay. I simply won't destroy it, but I can think of nobody to whom I'd be willing to show it-certainly nobody at the college, my History Department colleagues least of all. Merely to tell the story would brand me irredeemably as a crackpot, but crackpots are tolerated, even on college faculties. It's only when they begin producing physical evidence that they get themselves actively resented. ________________________________________ When I went into the club-car for a nightcap before going back to my compartment to turn in, there were five men there, sitting together. One was an Army officer, with the insignia and badges of a Staff Intelligence colonel. Next to him was a man of about my own age, with sandy hair and a bony, Scottish looking face, who sat staring silently into a highball which he held in both hands. Across the aisle, an elderly man, who could have been a lawyer or a banker.