The Second Science Fiction MEGAPACK®. Robert Silverberg

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СКАЧАТЬ Pole were busy around the clock and the Pittsburgh steel mills spewed millions of plates into the Los Alamos spaceport of the Evening Star Travel and Real Estate Corporation. It was going to be Los Angeles, for logistic reasons, and the three most accomplished psychokineticists went to Washington and mingled in the crowd at the drawing to make certain that the Los Angeles capsule slithered into the fingers of the blindfolded Senator. Los Angeles loved the idea and a forest of spaceships began to blossom in the desert. They weren’t very good spaceships, but they didn’t have to be. A team at the Pole worked at Barlow’s direction on a mail setup. There would have to be letters to and from Venus to keep the slightest taint of suspicion from arising. Luckily Barlow remembered that the problem had been solved once before—by Hitler. Relatives of persons incinerated in the furnaces of Lublin or Majdanek continued to get cheery postal cards. The Los Angeles flight went off on schedule, under tremendous press, newsreel and television coverage. The world cheered the gallant Angelenos who were setting off on their patriotic voyage to the land of milk and honey. The forest of spaceships thundered up, and up, and out of sight without untoward incident. Billions envied the Angelenos, cramped and on short rations though they were. Wreckers from San Francisco, whose capsule came up second, moved immediately into the city of the angels for the scrap steel their own flight would require. Senator Hull-Mendoza’s constituents could do no less. The president of Mexico, hypnotically alarmed at this extension of yanqui imperialismo beyond the stratosphere, launched his own Venus-colony program. Across the water it was England versus Ireland, France versus Germany, China versus Russia, India versus Indonesia. Ancient hatreds grew into the flames that were rocket ships assailing the air by hundreds daily.

      * * * *

      Dear Ed, how are you? Sam and I are fine and hope you are fine. Is it nice up there like they say with food and close grone on trees? I drove by Springfield yesterday and it sure looked funny all the buildings down but of coarse it is worth it we have to keep the greasers in their place. Do you have any trouble with them on Venus? Drop me a line some time. Your loving sister, Alma.

      * * * *

      Dear Alma, I am fine and hope you are fine. It is a fine place here fine climate and easy living. The doctor told me today that I seem to be ten years younger. He thinks there is something in the air here keeps people young. We do not have much trouble with the greasers here they keep to theirselves it is just a question of us outnumbering them and staking out the best places for the Americans. In South Bay I know a nice little island that I have been saving for you and Sam with lots of blanket trees and ham bushes. Hoping to see you and Sam soon, your loving brother, Ed.

      * * * *

      Sam and Alma were on their way shortly. Poprob got a dividend in every nation after the emigration had passed the halfway mark. The lonesome stay-at-homes were unable to bear the melancholy of a low population density; their conditioning had been to swarms of their kin. After that point it was possible to foist off the crudest stripped-down accommodations on would-be emigrants; they didn’t care. Black-Kupperman did a final job on President Hull-Mendoza, the last job that genius of hypnotics would ever do on any moron, important or otherwise. Hull-Mendoza, panic stricken by his presidency over an emptying nation, joined his constituents. The Independence, aboard which traveled the national government of America, was the most elaborate of all the spaceships—bigger, more comfortable, with a lounge that was handsome, though cramped, and cloakrooms for Senators and Representatives. It went, however, to the same place as the others and Black-Kupperman killed himself, leaving a note that stated he “couldn’t live with my conscience.” The day after the American President departed, Barlow flew into a rage. Across his specially built desk were supposed to flow all Poprob high-level documents, and this thing—this outrageous thing—called Poprobterm apparently had got into the executive stage before he had even had a glimpse of it! He buzzed for Rogge-Smith, his statistician. Rogge-Smith seemed to be at the bottom of it. Poprobterm seemed to be about first and second and third derivatives, whatever they were. Barlow had a deep distrust of anything more complex than what he called an “average.”

      While Rogge-Smith was still at the door, Barlow snapped, “What’s the meaning of this? Why haven’t I been consulted? How far have you people got and why have you been working on something I haven’t authorized?”

      “Didn’t want to bother you, Chief,” said Rogge-Smith. “It was really a technical matter, kind of a final cleanup. Want to come and see the work?”

      Mollified, Barlow followed his statistician down the corridor. “You still shouldn’t have gone ahead without my okay,” he grumbled. “Where the hell would you people have been without me?”

      “That’s right, Chief. We couldn’t have swung it ourselves; our minds just don’t work that way. And all that stuff you knew from Hitler—it wouldn’t have occurred to us. Like poor Black-Kupperman.”

      They were in a fair-sized machine shop at the end of a slight upward incline. It was cold. Rogge-Smith pushed a button that started a motor, and a flood of arctic light poured in as the roof parted slowly. It showed a small spaceship with the door open. Barlow gaped as Rogge-Smith took him by the elbow and his other boys appeared: Swenson-Swenson, the engineer; Tsutsugimushi-Duncan, his propellants man; Kalb-French, advertising.

      “In you go, Chief,” said Tsutsugimushi-Duncan. “This is Poprobterm.”

      “But I’m the World Dictator!”

      “You bet, Chief. You’ll be in history, all right—but this is necessary, I’m afraid.”

      The door was closed. Acceleration slammed Barlow cruelly to the metal floor. Something broke, and warm, wet stuff, salty tasting, ran from his mouth to his chin. Arctic sunlight through a port suddenly became a fierce lancet stabbing at his eyes; he was out of the atmosphere.

      Lying twisted and broken under the acceleration, Barlow realized that some things had not changed, that Jack Ketch was never asked to dinner however many shillings you paid him to do your dirty work, that murder will out, that crime pays only temporarily.

      The last thing he learned was that death is the end of pain.

      GHOST, by Darrell Schweitzer

      “You can never get used to this town, Henry,” I said. “Even after five years, the weirdness is still in my face, daily.”

      “So nu? It’s Tinseltown, Hollywood U.S.A., kiddo. You were expecting maybe Little Rock, Arkansas?”

      “I don’t know what I was expecting—”

      “You’re the one who lives here. I’m from New York, remember?”

      That was only one of the infinite number of things which, subtly, didn’t make any sense at all. Henry Jessel was from the one city in the country where most people don’t have cars, even feel the need for them, and he was driving the rented car he’d insisting on getting at the airport to pick me up at my place. Here we were on the Harbor Freeway, amid some of the worst driving conditions in the world, where you can theoretically get from anywhere to anywhere in forty-five minutes but in practice sometime between half an hour and next week. He was the one who wanted to be independent, or absorb the L.A. experience or something. He was driving. I think he did it to impress upon me that he was in control.

      “Yo! Look out!”

      He swerved. The lunatic who had never heard of turn signals and probably thought solid matter could pass through solid matter if you only wish upon a star cleared our fender by inches.

      “Tinseltown, kiddo,” Henry said again, remembering to breathe.

      Henry Jessel was СКАЧАТЬ