Worlds Enough and Time by Joe Haldeman

o’clock. In fact, it was about two, when we were down to a few hundred people determined to have fun until they dropped. Two middle-aged men started fighting, though not to much effect. They rolled around in a bleary, beery embrace, calling each other names. Other people watched with a kind of detached interest, until a police officer came over and broke it up. As prearranged, he made a big fuss (it being the first incident), upbraiding them and fining them down to zero on the spot. Another officer escorted them roughly away, supposedly to Security, though I knew that if they didn’t live together she’d just dump them in their beds and tell them to sleep it off.
    I was surprised that there were no other real incidents. I’d warned Christensen that the three-to-six shift was likely to be eventful, but maybe he’ll have it easy, too. By three o’clock most of the diehards were sober people, just too adrenalized to sleep, sitting around in clusters singing or telling tales.
    I had a vision of groundhogs doing this thousands of years ago—hanging around Stonehenge after the midnight ceremony, tossing more wood on the campfires, passing the mead, and telling ghost stories until dawn. I was probably the only person there who had ever actually smelled a campfire; felt the welcome heat with the cold autumn night at your back.
    Just before three, I ran into Charlee Boyle (her real name is Charity Lee, which she hates), who offered to split a small bottle of boo with me, my first drink of the night. I shouted us a half-liter of orange juice, which pretty well masks the industrial-solvent flavor.
    It has had the desired effect. G’night, Prime. Wake me up at ten till six. (Notes dictated about 3:45; will clean them up on the keyboard later.)

FROM EACH ACCORDING TO HIS INCLINATIONS
     
    The next day, Tuesday, was long and tiring. People showed up late or not at all, as O’Hara had predicted. Most of them saw no need for urgency, her timetable notwithstanding—if something wasn’t picked up today, it would still be there tomorrow.
    But tomorrow was exactly what O’Hara was worried about. There was going to be another anniversary celebration, less raucous, when greetings were beamed from New New. She had to have bleachers in place in front of the large screen, the area reasonably neat; coffee and tea facilities for a couple of thousand. It’s true that tomorrow everybody could just look up and watch the thing on home or office screens, but any kind of break in the routine was always welcome.
    It was an interesting exercise in leadership for O’Hara. She had asked to borrow 145 “GP auxiliaries” from various departments, but they didn’t come equipped with supervisors. So by 8:30—half an hour late—she found herself surrounded by about 110 men and women standing around with their hands in their pockets, staring at her and each other. She was an admiral in a sea of privates. Most knew who she was, but she didn’t have much authority in their eyes.
    Rather than try to find out who everyone was and what they supposedly could do best, she divided them at random into two roughly equal groups: one bunch, the pickup crew, she lined up from one side of the park to the other and sent marching off, studying the ground, picking up litter and passing it to recycle bags. The second group stayed with her and assembled bleachers. Then they took them apart and did them over, more or less right.
    A hundred motivated people could have finished everything before lunch. This group worked, if you could call it that, until three or four. After they were gone, O’Hara and her regular crew spent another hour tightening bolts and policing up tools and bags.
    It’s a problem she had discussed with Purcell, who made the obvious analogy with early European communist states, like the Soviet Union before it became the SSU. Minimum labor yielded the same result as maximum, for people who measured success in terms of material rewards. Anyone who