AS TROPILE WALKED THROUGH the town in the evening light, electricity flared white and violet in the buildings around him. Imagine! Electricity was calories, and calories were to be hoarded.
There were other walkers in the street. Their gait was not the economical shuffle with pendant arms. They burned energy visibly. They swung. They strode. It had been chiseled on his brain in earliest childhood that such walking was wrong, reprehensible, debilitating. It wasted calories. These people did not look debilitated and they didn’t seem to mind wasting calories.
It was an ordinary sort of town, apparently named Princeton. It did not have the transient look to it of, say, Wheeling, or Altoona, or Gary, in Tropile’s experience. It looked like—well, it looked permanent.
Tropile had heard of a to
