Fantastic Stories Presents the Fantastic Universe Super Pack. Roger Dee

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ have not been successful.” He laid his gloved hands, palms upward, on the desk, added, “It appears that we have lost the knack for such projects.”

      When they were gone, he walked to the broad window and looked out over the World Capital buildings at the verdant Sahara that stretched hundreds of miles to the foot of the faintly purple Atlas Mountains on the northwestern horizon. A blanket of brilliant green, covering what had once been the greatest of all Earthly deserts—but a poisonous blanket of strange plant mutations, some of them poisonous beyond belief.

      Truly, Bliss thought, he belonged to a remarkable species. Man had conquered his environment, he had even, within the limits of the Solar System, conquered space. He had planted, and successfully, his own kind on a neighboring planet and made it grow. But man had never, at least on his home planet, conquered himself.

      Overpopulation had long since ceased to be a problem—the atomic wars had seen to that. But, thanks to the miracles of science—atomics and automation—man had quickly rebuilt the world into a Garden of Eden with up-to-date plumbing. He might have won two planets, but he had turned his Eden into an arbor of deadly nightshade.

      Oddly, it had not been the dreadful detonations of thermo-nuclear bombs that had poisoned his paradise—though, of course, they had helped. It had been the constant spillage of atomic waste into the upper atmosphere that had spelled ruin. Now, where four billion people had once lived in war and want, forty million lived in poisoned plenty. He was chancellor of a planet whose ruling species could not longer breed without disaster.

      His was the last generation. It should have been a peaceful generation. But it was not.

      For, as population decreased, so did the habitable areas of Earth. The formerly overpopulated temperate regions were now ghastly jungles of self-choking mutant plant growth. Only what had been the waste areas—Antarctica, the Gobi, Australia, Patagonia and the Sahara-Arabia districts—could still support even the strange sorts of human life that remained.

      And the forty millions still alive were restless, frightened, paranoiac. Each believed his own group was being systematically exterminated in favor of some other. None had yet faced the fact that humanity, for all practical purposes, was already dead on Earth.

      He sensed another presence in the room. It was Myra, his secretary, bearing a sheaf of messages in one hand, a sheaf of correspondence for him to sign in the other. She said, “You look beat, chancellor. Sit down.”

      Bliss sat down. Myra, as his faithful and efficient amanuensis for more than fifteen years, had her rights. One of them was taking care of him during working hours. She was still rather pretty, he noted with surprise. An Afro-Asian with skin like dark honey and smooth, pleasant, rather flat features. It was, he thought, a pity she had that third eye in her forehead.

      She stood beside him while he ran through the letters and signed them. “Meeting of the regional vice-chancellors tomorrow, eh?” he said as he handed them back to her.

      “Right, chancellor,” she said crisply. “Ten o’clock. You may have to take another whirlwind trip to tell them the situation is well in hand.”

      He grunted and glanced at the messages, scanned them quickly, tossed them into the disposal vent beside his desk. Myra looked moderately disapproving. “What about that possible ship from Mars?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you look into it?”

      He grunted again, looked up at her, said, “If I’d looked into every ‘ship from Mars’ astronomy has come up with in the nine years I’ve held this office, I’d never have had time for anything else. You can lay odds it’s a wild asteroid or something like that.”

      “They sound pretty sure this time,” Myra said doubtfully.

      “Don’t they always?” he countered. “Come on, Myra, wrap it up. Time to go home.”

      “Roger, boss,” she said, blinking all three eyes at him.

      Bliss turned on the autopi and napped while the gyrojet carried him to his villa outside Dakar. Safely down on the roof of the comfortable, automatic white house, he took the lift down to his second-floor suite, where he showered and changed into evening sandals and clout. He redonned his gloves, then rode down another two flights to the terrace, where Elise was waiting for him in a gossamer-thin iridescent eggshell sari. They kissed and she patted the place on the love-seat beside her. She had a book—an old-fashioned book of colored reproductions of long-since-destroyed old masters on her lap. The artist was a man named Peter Paul Rubens.

      Eyeing the opulent nudes, she giggled and said, “Don’t they look awfully—plain? I mean, women with only two breasts!”

      “Well—yes,” he said. “If you want to take that angle.”

      “Idiot!” she said. “Honestly, darling, you’re the strangest sort of man to be a World Chancellor.”

      “These are strange times,” he told her, smiling without mirth, though with genuine affection.

      “Suppose—just suppose,” she said, turning the pages slowly, “biology should be successful in stabilizing the species again. Would they have to set it back that far? I mean, either we or they would feel awfully out of style.”

      “What would you suggest?” he asked her solemnly.

      “Don’t be nasty,” she said loftily. Then she giggled again and ruffled his hair. “I wish you’d have it dyed one color,” she told him. “Either black or gray—or why not a bright puce?”

      “What’s for dinner?” he asked, adding, “If I can still eat after that.”

      *

      The regional vice-chancellors were awaiting him in the next-to-the-innermost office when Bliss arrived at World Capital the next morning. Australia, Antarctica, Patagonia, Gobi, Sahara-Arabia—they followed him inside like so many penguins in the black-and-white official robes. All were deathly serious as they stated their problems.

      Gobi wanted annual rainfall cut from 60 to 45 centimeters.

      Sahara-Arabia was not receiving satisfactory food synthetics—there had been Moslem riots because of pork flavor in the meat.

      Patagonia was suffering through a species of sport-worm that was threatening to turn it into a desert if biology didn’t come up with a remedy fast.

      Antarctica wanted temperature lowered from a nighttime norm of 62° Fahrenheit to 57.6°. It seemed that the ice in the skating rinks, which were the chief source of exercise and entertainment for the populace, got mushy after ten p.m.

      Australia wanted the heavy uranium deposits under the Great Central Desert neutralized against its causing further mutations.

      For a moment, Bliss was tempted to remind his viceroys that it was not going to make one bit of difference whether they made their spoiled citizens happy or not. The last man on Earth would be dead within fifty years or so, anyway. But that would have been an unpardonable breach of taste. Everyone knew, of course, but it was never mentioned. To state the truth was to deny hope. And without hope, there was no life.

      Bliss promised to see that these matters were tended to at once, taking each in turn. This done, they discussed his making another whirlwind trip through the remaining major dominions of the planet to bolster morale. He was relieved when at last, the amenities concluded, the penguins filed solemnly out. He didn’t СКАЧАТЬ