The Second Randall Garrett Megapack. Randall Garrett

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      “Damn subways, that’s what,” the old man said. “Worse every year. Bumpier and slower and worse. Just look around, Daddy-O. Look around.”

      “I wouldn’t quite say—” Forrester began, but the old man gave him another dig in the ribs and cut in:

      “Wouldn’t say, wouldn’t say,” he muttered. “Listen, man, there ain’t been an improvement in years. You realize that?”

      “Well, I—”

      “No progress, man, not in more than half a century. Listen, when I was a teen king—War Councilor for the Boppers, I was, and let me tell you that was big time, Daddy-O—when I was a teen king, we were going places. Going places for real. Mars. Venus. We were going to have spaceships, man.”

      Forrester smiled spasmically at the old man. “I’m sure you—”

      “But what happened?” the old man interrupted. “Tell you what happened, man. We never got to Mars and Venus. Mars and Venus came to us instead. Right along with Jupiter and Neptune and Pluto and all the rest of the Gods. And we had no progress ever since that day, Daddy-O, no progress at all and you can believe it.”

      He dug Forrester in the ribs one final time and sat back with melancholy satisfaction.

      “Well,” Forrester said mildly, “what good is progress?” The old man, he assured himself after a moment’s reflection, wasn’t actually saying anything blasphemous. After all, the Gods didn’t expect their worshippers to be mindless slaves.

      Somehow the notion made him feel happier. He’d have hated reporting the old man. Something in the outdated slang made him feel—almost patriotic. The old man was a part of America, a respected and important part.

      The respected part of America made itself felt again in Forrester’s ribs. “Progress?” the old man said. “What good’s progress? Listen, Daddy-O—how can the human race get anywhere without progress? Answer me that, will you, man? Because it’s for-sure real we’re not going any place now. No place at all.”

      “Now look,” Forrester said patiently, “progress is an outmoded idea. We’ve got to be in step with the times. We’ve got to ask ourselves what progress ever did for us. How did we stand when the Gods returned?” For a brief flash he was back in his history class, but he went on: “Half the world ready to fight the other half with weapons that would have wiped both halves out. You ought to be grateful the Gods returned when they did.”

      “But we’re getting into Nowheresville, man,” the old man complained. “We’re not in orbit. We can’t progress.”

      Forrester sighed. Why was he talking to the old man, anyway? The answer came to him as soon as he’d asked the question. He wanted to keep his mind off the Tower of Zeus and his own unknown fate there. It was an unpleasant answer; Forrester blanked it out.

      “Now, friend,” he said. “What have you got? Just what mankind’s been looking for all these centuries. Security. You’ve got security. Nobody’s going to blow you to pieces tomorrow. Your job isn’t going to vanish overnight. I mean, if you—”

      “I got a job,” the old man said.

      “Really?” Forrester said politely. “What is it?”

      “Retired. And it’s a tough job, too.”

      “Oh,” Forrester said.

      “And anyhow,” the old man went on, “what’s all this got to do with progress?”

      Forrester thought. “Well—”

      “Well, nothing,” the old man said. “Listen to me, man. I say nothing against the Gods—right? Nothing at all. Wouldn’t want to do anything like that. But at the same time, it looks to me like we ought to be able to—reap the fruits of our labors. I read that some place.”

      “But—”

      “In the three thousand years the Gods were gone, we weren’t a total loss, man. Not anything like. We discovered a lot. About nature and science and like that. We invented science all by ourselves. So how come the Gods don’t let us use it?” The old man dug his elbow once more into Forrester’s rib. “How come?”

      “The Gods haven’t taken anything away from us,” Forrester said.

      “Haven’t they?” the old man demanded. “How about television? Want to answer that one, Daddy-O? Years ago, everybody had a television set. Color and 3-D. The most. The end. Now there’s no television at all. Why not? What happened to it?”

      “Well,” Forrester said reasonably, “what good is television?”

      “What good?” Once more Forrester’s rib felt the old man’s elbow. “Let me tell you—”

      “No,” Forrester interrupted, suddenly irritated with the whole conversation. “Let me tell you. The trouble with your generation was that all they wanted to do was sit around on their glutei maximi and be entertained. Like a bunch of hypnotized geese. They didn’t want to do anything for themselves. Half of them couldn’t even read. And now you want to tell me that—”

      “Hold it, Daddy-O,” the old man said. “You’re telling me that the Gods took away television just because we were a bunch of hypnotized geese. That it?”

      “That’s it.”

      “Okay,” the old man said. “So tell me—what are we now? With the Gods and everything. I mean, man, really—what are we?”

      “Now?” Forrester said. “Now you’re retired. You’re a bunch of retired hypnotized geese.”

      The doors of the train slid creakily open and Forrester got out onto the 34th Street platform, walking angrily toward a stairway without looking back.

      True enough, the old man hadn’t committed blasphemy, but it had certainly come close enough there at the end. And if pokes with the elbow weren’t declared blasphemous, or at least equivalent to malicious mischief, he thought, there was no justice in the world.

      The real trouble was that the man had had no respect for the Gods. There were a good many of the older generation like him. They seemed to feel that humanity had been better off when the Gods had been away. Forrester couldn’t see it, and felt vaguely uncomfortable in the presence of someone who believed it. After all, mankind had been on the verge of mass suicide, and the Gods had mercifully come back from their self-imposed exile and taken care of things. The exile had been designed to prove, in the drastic laboratory of three thousand years, that Man by himself headed like a lemming for self-destruction. And, for Forrester, the point had been proven.

      Yet now that the human race had been saved, there were still men who griped about the Gods and their return. Forrester si­lently wished the pack of them in Hades, enjoying the company of Pluto and his ilk.

      At the corner of 34th and Broadway, as he came out of the subway tunnels, he bought a copy of the News and glanced quickly through the headlines. But, as always, there was little sensational news. Mars was doing pretty well for himself, of course: there were two wars going on in Asia, one in Europe and three ­re­volutions in South and Central America. That last did seem to СКАЧАТЬ