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Everything was swell.
There was prisons, no slums, no insane asylums, no cripples, no poverty, no wars. All diseases were conquered. So was old age.
Death, barring accidents, was adventure for volunteers.
The population of the United States was stabilized at 40,000,000 souls.
One bright morning in the Chicago Hospital, a hedgehog named Sonic, waited for his wife to give birth. He was the only hedgehog waiting. Not many were born a day anymore.
Sonic was 56, a mere strolling in a population whose average age is 129.
X-Rays had revealed that his wife was going to have triplets. The children would be his 1st.
Young Sonic was hunched in his chair, his head in his hands. He was so rumpled, so still and colorless as to be virtually invisible. His camouflage was perfect, since the waiting room had a disorderly and demoralized air, too. Chairs and ashtrays had been moved away from the walls. The floor was paved with spattered dropcloths.
The room was being redecorated. It was being redecorated as a memorial to a man who had volunteered to die.
A sardonic old man, about 200, sat on a stepladder, painting a mural he did not like. Back in the days when people aged visibly, his age would have been guessed at 35 or so. Aging had touched him that much before the cure for aging was found.
The mural he was working on depicted a very neat garden. Men and women in white, doctors and nurses, turned the soil, planted seedlings, sprayed bugs, spread fertilizer.
Man and women in purple uniforms pulled up weeds, cut down plants that were old and sickly, raked leaves, carried rubbish to trash-burners. Never, never, never-not even in medieval Holland nor old Japan- had a garden been more formal, been better tended. Every plant had all the loam, light, water, air and nourishment it could use.
A hospital orderly came down the corridor, singing under his breath a popular song:
Backup Singers: Social crisis!
Roger Daltry: Getting burnt by the sun...
BS: This is true!
RD: This ain't no social crisis! Just a another tricky day for you!
The orderly looked at the mural and the muralist, "Looks so real," he said, "I can practically imagine I'm standing in the middle of it."
"What makes you think you're not in it?" said the painter. He gave a satiric smile. "It's called 'The Happy Garden of Life', you know."
"That's good of Dr. Robotnik."