michael-dean-k/

"If I tried to get away with it," said George, "then other people’d get away with it—and pretty soon we’d be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. You wouldn’t like that, would you?"

Location 233

"Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen," she said in a grackle squawk, "has just escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous."

Location 250

He was exactly seven feet tall.

Location 253

Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.

Location 257

to offset his good looks, the H-G men required that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle-tooth random.

Location 259

They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun. They leaped like deer on the moon. The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it. It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling. They kissed it. And then, neutralizing gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time. It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.

Location 289

TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW THE YEAR WAS 2158 A.D., and Lou and Emerald Schwartz were whispering on the balcony outside Lou’s family’s apartment on the seventy-sixth floor of Building 257 in Alden Village, a New York housing development that covered what had once been known as Southern Connecticut.

Location 4669

"Against Nature," said Em. "Who knows what Nature’s like anymore? Ohhhhh—I don’t guess I could ever bring myself to dilute his anti-gerasone or anything like that, but, gosh, Lou, a body can’t help thinking Gramps is never going to leave if somebody doesn’t help him along a little.

Location 4677

Verna’s dying for a baby, and Melissa’s gone thirty years without one."

Location 4680

And he can’t help being wrinkled like he is. He was seventy before anti-gerasone was invented. He’s going to leave, Em. Just give him time.

Location 4683

"Yes—and before that it was the Olympics, and before that the World’s Series, and before that the Presidential Elections, and before that I-don’t-know-what. It’s been just one excuse after another for fifty years now. I don’t think we’re ever going to get a room to ourselves or an egg or anything."

Location 4689

Em put her arms around his neck. "Lou, hon, I’m not calling you a failure. The Lord knows you’re not. You just haven’t had a chance to be anything or have anything because Gramps and the rest of his generation won’t leave and let somebody else take over."

Location 4694

"Sometimes I wish there wasn’t any such thing as anti-gerasone!" said Emerald passionately. "Or I wish it was made out of something real expensive and hard-to-get instead of mud and dandelions. Sometimes I wish folks just up and died regular as clockwork, without anything to say about it, instead of deciding themselves how long they’re going to stay around. There ought to be a law against selling the stuff to anybody over one hundred and fifty."

Location 4697

"You ready to up and die, Em?" "Well, for heaven’s sakes, what a thing to say to your wife. Hon! I’m not even one hundred yet." She ran her hands lightly over her firm, youthful figure, as though for confirmation. "The best years of my life are still ahead of me. But you can bet that when one hundred and fifty rolls around, old Em’s going to pour her anti-gerasone down the sink, and quit taking up room, and she’ll do it smiling." "Sure, sure," said Lou, "you bet. That’s what they all say. How many you heard of doing it?" "There was that man in Delaware." "Aren’t you getting kind of tired of talking about him, Em? That was five months ago." "All right, then—Gramma Winkler, right here in the same building." "She got smeared by a subway." "That’s just the way she picked to go," said Em.

Location 4702

"If we just had a car, like the folks used to in the old days," said Em, "we could go for a drive, and get away from people for a little while. Gee—if those weren’t the days!" "Yeah," said Lou, "before they’d used up all the metal." "We’d hop in, and Pop’d drive up to a filling station and say, ’Fillerup!’" "That was the nuts, wasn’t it—before they’d used up all the gasoline." "And we’d go for a carefree ride in the country." "Yeah—all seems like a fairyland now, doesn’t it, Em? Hard to believe there really used to be all that space between cities."

Location 4715

Lou shrugged. "Well, you’ve got to realize, the world wouldn’t be able to support twelve billion people if it wasn’t for processed seaweed and sawdust. I mean, it’s a wonderful thing, really. I guess. That’s what they say."

Location 4728

"Golly—remember shopping, Lou? Remember how the stores used to fight to get our folks to buy something? You didn’t have to wait for somebody to die to get a bed or chairs or a stove or anything like that. Just went in— bing!—and bought whatever you wanted. Gee whiz that was nice, before they used up all the raw materials. I was just a little kid then, but I can remember so plain."

Location 4730

Lou sighed. "Only it turns out you need something about twice the size of the Empire State Building to get one lousy colonist to Mars. And for another couple of trillion bucks he could take his wife and dog. That’s the way to lick overpopulation—emigrate!"

Location 4738

Emerald and Lou, coming in from the balcony, were obliged to take seats in the back row, behind Lou’s father and mother, brother and sister-in-law, son and daughter-in-law, grandson and wife, granddaughter and husband, great-grandson and wife, nephew and wife, grandnephew and wife, great-grandniece and husband, great-grandnephew and wife, and, of course, Gramps, who was in front of everybody. All, save Gramps, who was somewhat withered and bent, seemed, by pre-anti-gerasone standards, to be about the same age—to be somewhere in their late twenties or early thirties.

Location 4750

For them, the poignancy of the prospective Big Trip had been dulled somewhat by its having been mentioned by Gramps about once a day for fifty years.

Location 4761

descendants stared silently at the screen. "You, there, boy—" "I didn’t mean anything by it, sir," said Lou. "Get me my will. You know where it is. You kids all know where it is. Fetch, boy!"

Location 4769

Gramps’ room, the only private room in the Schwartz apartment. The other rooms were the bathroom, the living room, and the wide, windowless hallway, which was originally intended to serve as a dining area, and which had a kitchenette in one end. Six mattresses and four sleeping bags were dispersed in the hallway and living room, and the daybed, in the living room, accommodated the eleventh couple, the favorites of the moment.

Location 4772

his will, smeared, dog-eared, perforated, and blotched with hundreds of additions, deletions, accusations, conditions, warnings, advice, and homely philosophy. The document was, Lou reflected, a fifty-year diary, all jammed onto two sheets—a garbled, illegible log of day after day of strife. This day, Lou would be disinherited for the eleventh time, and it would take him perhaps six months of impeccable behavior to regain the promise of a share in the estate.

Location 4775

was instantly offered eleven pens, one from each couple. "Not that leaky thing," he said, brushing Lou’s pen aside. "Ah, there’s a nice one. Good boy, Willy." He accepted Willy’s pen. That was the tip they’d all been waiting for. Willy, then, Lou’s father, was the new favorite. Willy, who looked almost as young as Lou, though one hundred and forty-two, did a poor job of concealing his pleasure. He glanced shyly at the daybed, which would become his, and from which Lou and Emerald would have to move back into the hall, back to the worst spot of all by the bathroom door.

Location 4780

"I, Harold D. Schwartz, residing in Building 257 of Alden Village, New York City, do hereby make, publish, and declare this to be my last Will and Testament, hereby revoking any and all former wills and codicils by me at any time heretofore made."

Location 4787

repeating in particular his ever-more-elaborate specifications for a funeral.

Location 4789

He erased the date at the foot of the will, and substituted a new one, including the time of day. "Well—time to watch the McGarvey Family." The McGarvey Family was a television serial that Gramps had been following since he was sixty, or for one hundred and twelve years. "I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen next," he said.

Location 4801

"You don’t have to explain anything to me, hon. I’m on your side no matter what." She kissed him on his cheek, and whispered in his ear. "It wouldn’t have been murder, hon. It wouldn’t have killed him. It wasn’t such a terrible thing to do. It just would have fixed him up so he’d be able to go any time God decided He wanted him."

Location 4833

they had hardly swallowed two mouthfuls of egg-type processed seaweed

Location 4840

The toughest part of the job was having to handle the honest-to-God eggs and bacon and oleomargarine on which Gramps spent almost all of the income from his fortune.

Location 4843

’Somebody who I have sheltered and protected and taught the best I know how all these years last night turned on me like a mad dog and diluted my anti-gerasone, or tried to. I am no longer a young man. I can no longer bear the crushing burden of life as I once could. So, after last night’s bitter experience, I say goodbye. The cares of this world will soon drop away like a cloak of thorns, and I shall know peace. By the time you find this, I will be gone.’ "

Location 4859

"he didn’t even get to see how the Five-Hundred-Mile Speedway Race was going to come out." "Or the World’s Series," said Eddie. "Or whether Mrs. McGarvey got her eyesight back," said Morty.

Location 4862

In the next moment, a free-for-all was underway, with each couple battling to eject every other couple from the room. Fighting coalitions formed and dissolved with the lightning changes of the tactical situation. Em and Lou were thrown into the hall, where they organized others in the same situation, and stormed back into the room.

Location 4881

"I have a special message from the makers of anti-gerasone, a message for all you folks over one hundred and fifty. Are you hampered socially by wrinkles, by stiffness of joints and discoloration or loss of hair, all because these things came upon you before anti-gerasone was developed?

Location 4899

"After years of research, medical science has now developed super-anti-gerosone! In weeks, yes weeks, you can look, feel, and act as young as your great-great-grandchildren! Wouldn’t you pay $5,000 to be indistinguishable from everybody else? Well, you don’t have to. Safe, tested super-anti-gerasone costs you only dollars a day. The average cost of regaining all the sparkle and attractiveness of youth is less than fifty dollars.

Location 4902