The manuscript was put aside for thirty-five years until its present publication on the Web. A grand dame bursting with vertiginous authority crackled information from behind a flash light at the Information Booth of Pennsylvania Station. Just before the blackout, the re-constructors of the Mausoleum of Killed Free Time had cleverly shifted the counter so that Thomas would not have found it if, with equal cleverness, he had not happened to fall through a large hole freshly dug, and landed smack in the middle of the gentry earnestly seeking knowledge. Thomas clucked sympathetically. However, he actually felt a trifle better.
Happiness comes from outstripping others in the hopeless competition of life.
He waded through the hip-deep murk toward the great center hall. Passing him was a woman wearing white and holding a lighted candle, immediately succeeded by a sleek, black hipster with a transistor radio glued to his ear, and a retinue of brokers and bankers carrying dispatch cases. They solicitously garnered the buds of news that he would let drop. A mass jammed into the main hall in celebration of its utter wreck. The miserable commuters, who every day in recent weeks had scrambled like tiny crabs between the subterranean chaos and a platform of cranes, trucks and tractors that had been lifted and stranded there grotesquely by some huge force, had been frustrated before, times beyond number.