Damned If You Don't

Damned If You Don't is a Fiction Short Story Book. You can and you can't; You will and you won't. You'll be damn'd if you do; You'll be damn'd if you don't. We've all heard of the wonderful invention that the Big Corporation or the Utilities suppressed…? Usually, that Wonderful Invention won't work, actually. The workshop laboratory was a mess. Sam Bending looked it over silently; his jaw muscles were hard and tense, and his eyes were the same. To repeat what Sam Bending thought when he saw the junk that had been made of thousands of dollars worth of equipment would not be inadmissible in a family magazine, because Bending was not particularly addicted to four letter vulgarities. But he was a religious man in a lax sort of way so repeating what ran through his mind that gray Monday in February of 1981 would be unfair to the memory of Samson Francis Bending. Sam Bending folded his hands over his chest. It was not an attitude of prayer; it was an attempt to keep those big, gorillalike hands from smashing something. The fingers intertwined, and the hands tried to crush each other, which was a good way to keep them from actually crushing anything else. He stood there at the door for a full minute just looking. The lab as has been said was a mess. It would have looked better if someone had simply tossed a grenade in it and had done with it. At least the results would have been random and more evenly dispersed.