FADAUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION The idea for this one was given me y by Vance Packard, perhaps the outstanding muckraker of our generation. He lived in the apartment above us in Spain’s capital and got a terrible case of the Madrid Minuet (known as the Aztec Two-Step, or Montezuma’s Revenge, here in Mexico) and couldn’t go out. So we sat around a bit and rapped about his work and mine. At the time I was concentrating on stories laid in the year 2000 and suggested that he do a book, nonfiction, of course, projecting the most-probable world thirty years in the future. He shook his head and said that the way the world was going anyone who seriously tried to extrapolate a decade into the future made a fool of himself. This one first appeared in Analog. —Mack Reynolds * * * * Warren Dempsey Wither

