Not This August by C.M. Kornbluth

Konreid lives alone, but he’d rip open the package as soon as I was out of sight, taste it, and then when my friend came, he’d pretend he didn’t know what he was talking about.”
    So it was liquor or drugs or something of the sort. Justin felt pleased that he had got the answer without crude questioning. Not that Rawson would have had anything to do with anything organized which might conceivably bring retribution. The man was a born scrounger, a cutter of not very important corners. He told him: “Drop it off when you want. Any time I can’t do a favor for a neighbor I’ll close up shop.”
    “Thanks, Billy,” the legless man said. “Push me off, will you?”
    At mail time Justin got to wondering if the Fourth of July was a national holiday in the North American People’s Democratic Republic, of which he was a citizen. The morning was shot anyway; he strolled up to the mailbox. It was an easier trip than it used to be. As a citizen of the North American People’s Democratic Republic he had lost a comfortable layer of fat at the waist.
    Betsy Cardew was waiting at the mailbox looking tired.
    He said: “Cultural greetings, comrade-citizeness-post-woman.”
    “Cultural greetings to you, comrade-citizen-milk-farmer. What the heck kept you?”
    “July fourth. I dithered around a couple of minutes wondering if you’d be here.”
    “Oh, the mail must go through,” she said vaguely.
    “Then where’s mine?”
    “As a matter of fact, you haven’t got anything today. I wanted to talk to you.”
    “I’m listening.”
    “You got one of those quota increases?”
    “Yes. Fifty pounds more per week. I don’t know how I’m going to make it. They can’t really expect it from me, can they?”
    “They expect it. It went through two weeks ago in Pennsylvania. They’ve been picking up families who didn’t make the norm. Families with the biggest and best farms. They go South in trucks, men, women, and kids. Nobody seems to know where. Then they turn the acreage over to families from marginal farms that couldn’t possibly raise a cash crop. Billy, could you make your new norm with a farm hand?”
    “You know I can’t support a—”
    “This farm hand would have his board paid by the SMGU.”
    “That’s different. And what’s the catch?”
    “He’d be a little nuts. Wait a minute, Billy! Don’t let panic make up your mind until I tell you about him.
    “You know I’m a nurse’s aid three nights a week at Chiunga General. I was in surgery a week ago when they brought this guy in. His name’s Gribble. He was in shock and he’d lost plenty of blood. His hands were lacerated and there was a gash along his right forearm that cut the big superficial veins. But somebody, a cop I think, slapped a tourniquet on him and got him to the hospital. We sewed him up and gave him plasma and whole blood—he got a pint of mine—and smugly waited for him to wake up. He did, and he was nuts. Incoherent, disoriented. At that point I tottered off to home and bed.
    “When I came in on Wednesday afternoon, they had him transferred from surgery to psycho. Lieutenant Borovsky’s in charge of psycho, but I don’t think you have to know very much to handle a psycho ward Russian style. They have something they call ‘sleep therapy.’ This means you give the patient a twenty-four-hour shot of barbiturate. If he’s still nuts when he wakes up, you give him another one, and so on. Maybe there are angles to it that I don’t understand, but Borovsky’s English isn’t any better than my Russian.
    “I’d asked around during the day and found out what happened to Gribble. He was a stranger in town and he turned up at Clapp’s Department Store. He bought a pair of socks and a salesgirl noticed him standing around for maybe ten minutes inside, hanging back from the revolving door. The side doors were locked, and nuts to the fire laws. Clapp’s doesn’t aim to air-condition the whole town. Well, she’s seen eighty-year-old