LITMIR.BIZ

      Sid Throndyke overrode his respirator to heave a deep sigh.

      “Wow!” he said, flipping to his wife’s personal channel. “A tough day on the Office channel.”

      The contact screens attached to his eyeballs stayed blank: Cluster was out. Impatiently, Sid toed the console, checking the channels: Light, Medium and Deep Sitcom; auto-hypno; Light and Deep Narco; four, six, and eighty-party Social; and finally, muttering to himself, Psychan. Cluster’s identity symbol appeared on his screens.

      “There you are,” he grieved. “Psychan again. After a hard day, the least a man expects is to find his wife tuned to his channel—”

      “Oh, Sid; there’s this wonderful analyst. A new model. It’s doing so much for me, really wonderful....”

      “I know,” Sid grumped. “That orgasm-association technique. That’s all I hear. I’d think you’d want to keep in touch with the Sitcoms, so you know what’s going on; but I suppose you’ve been tied into Psychan all day—while I burned my skull out on Office.”

      “Now, Sid; didn’t I program your dinner and everything?”

      “Um.” Mollified, Sid groped with his tongue for the dinner lever, eased the limp plastic tube into his mouth. He sucked a mouthful of the soft paste—

      “Cluster! You know I hate Vege-pap. Looks like you could at least dial a nice Prote-sim or Sucromash....”

      “Sid, you ought to tune to Psychan. It would do you a world of good....” Her sub-vocalized voice trailed off in the earphones. Sid snorted, dialed a double Prote-sim and a Sucromash, fuming at the delay. He gulped his dinner, not even noticing the rich gluey consistency; then, in a somewhat better mood, flipped to the Light Sitcom.

      It was good enough stuff, he conceded; the husband was a congenital psychopathic inferior who maintained his family in luxury by a series of fantastic accidents. You had to chuckle when his suicide attempt failed at the last moment, after he’d lost all that blood. The look on his face when they dragged him back....

      But somehow it wasn’t enough. Sid dialed the medium; it wasn’t much better. The deep, maybe.

      Sid viewed for a few minutes with growing impatience. Sure, you had to hand it to the Sitcom people; there was a lot of meat in the deep sitcom. It was pretty subtle stuff, the way the wife got the money the husband had been saving and spent it for a vacation trip for her Chihuahua; had a real social content, too deep for most folks. But like the rest of the sitcoms, it was historical. Sure, using old-time settings gave a lot of scope for action. But how about something more pertinent to the contemporary situation? Nowadays, even though people led the kind of rich, full lives that Vital Programming supplied, there was still a certain lack. Maybe it was just a sort of atavistic need for gross muscular exertion. He’d viewed a discussion of the idea a few nights earlier on the usual Wednesday night four-party hookup with the boys. Still, in his case, he had plenty of muscle tone. He’d spent plenty on a micro-spasm attachment for use with the narco channel....

      That was a thought. Sid didn’t usually like narco; too synthetic, as he’d explained to the boys. They hadn’t liked the remark, he remembered. Probably they were all narco fans. But what the hell, a man had a right to a few maverick notions.

      Sid tuned to the Narco channel. It was a traditional sex fantasy, in which the familiar colorless hero repeatedly fended off the advances of coitus-seeking girls. It was beautifully staged, with plenty of action, but like the sitcoms, laid in one of those never-never historical settings. Sid flipped past with a sub-vocal grunt. It wasn’t much better than Cluster’s orgasm-association treatments.

      The stylized identity-symbol of the Pubinf announcer flashed on Sid’s screens, vibrating in resonance with the impersonal voice of the Official announcer:

      “.... cause for concern. CentProg states that control will have been re-established within the hour. Some discomfort may result from vibration in sectors north of Civic Center, but normalcy will be restored shortly. Now, a word on the food situation.”

      A hearty, gelatinous voice took over: “Say, folks, have you considered switching to Vege-pap? Vege-pap now comes in a variety of rich flavors, all, of course, equally nourishing, every big swallow loaded with the kind of molecule that keeps those metabolisms rocking along at the pace of today’s more-fun-than-ever sitcoms—and today’s stimulating narco and social channels, too!

      “Starting with First Feeding tomorrow, you’ll have that opportunity you’ve wanted to try Vege-pap. Old-fashioned foods, like Prote-sim and Sucromash, will continue to be available of course, where exceptional situations warrant. Now—”

      “What’s that!” Sid sub-vocalized. He toed the replay key, listened again. Then he dug a toe viciously against the tuning key, flipping to the Psychan monitor.

      *

      “Cluster!” he barked at his wife’s identity pattern. “Have you heard about this nonsense? Some damn fool on Pubinf is blathering about Vege-pap for everybody! By God, this is a free country. I’d like to see anyone try—”

      “Sid,” Cluster’s voice came faintly, imploring. “P-P-Please, S-S-Sid....”

      “Damn it, Cluster....!” Sid stopped talking, coughed, gulped. His throat was burning. In his excitement he’d been vocalizing. The realization steadied him. He’d have to calm down. He’d been behaving like an animal....

      “Cluster, darling. Kindly interrupt your treatment. I have to talk to you. Now. It’s important.” Confound it, if she didn’t switch to his channel now—

      “Yes, Sid.” Cluster’s voice had a ragged undertone. Sid half-suspected she was vocalizing then too....

      “I was listening to Pubinf,” he said, aware of a sense of dignity in the telling. No narco-addict he, but a mature-minded auditor of a serious channel like Pubinf. “They’re raving about cutting off Prote-sim. Never heard of such nonsense. Have you heard anything about this?”

      “No, Sid. You should know I never—”

      “I know! But I thought maybe you’d heard something....”

      “Sid, I’ve been under treatment all day—except the time I spent programming your dinner.”

      “You can get Prote-sim in exceptional situations, they said! I wonder what that’s supposed to mean? Why, I’ve been a Prote-sim man for years....”

      “Maybe it will do you good, Sid. Something different....”

      “Different? What in the world do I want with something different? I have a comfortable routine, well-balanced, creative. I’m not interested in having any government fat-head telling me what to eat.”

      “But Vege-sim

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