CHAPTER I
THE FLAG
I was born in the teivos of Chicago, January 1, 2100, to Julian 8th and Elizabeth James. My father and mother were not married, as marriages had long since become illegal. I was called Julian 9th. My parents were of the rapidly diminishing intellectual class and could both read and write. This learning they imparted to me, although it was very useless learning—it was their religion. Printing was a lost art, and the last of the public libraries had been destroyed almost a hundred years before I reached maturity, so there was little or nothing to read, while to have a book in one's possession was to brand one as of the hated intellectuals, arousing the scorn and derision of the Kalkar rabble and the suspicion and persecution of the lunar authorities who ruled us.
The first twenty years of my life were uneventful. As a boy I played among the crumbling ruins of what must once have been a magnificent city. Pillaged, looted and burned half a hundred times, Chicago still reared the skeletons of some mighty edifices above the ashes of her former greatness. As a youth, I regretted the departed romance of the long gone days of my forefathers when the Earth Men still retained sufficient strength to battle for existence. I deplored the quiet stagnation of my own time with only an occasional murder to break the monotony of our black existence. Even the Kalkar Guard, stationed on the shore of the great lake, seldom harassed us, unless
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