Catastrophes! Isaac Asimov

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and jabbering again. The newcomers even got a little drunk.
They weren't used to so much oxygen.
Funny thing, though I didn't do much talking at all and
Sis hung on to Ma all the time and hid her face when anybody
looked at her. I felt pretty uncomfortable and disturbed my-
self, even about the young lady. Glimpsing her outside there,
I'd had all sorts of mushy thoughts, but now I was just em-
barrassed and scared of her, even though she tried to be nice
as anything to me.
I sort of wished they'd all quit crowding the Nest and let
us be alone and get our feelings straightened out.
And when the newcomers began to talk about our all going
to Los Alamos, as if that were taken for granted, I could see
that something of the same feeling struck Pa and Ma, too,"
Pa got very silent all of a sudden and Ma kept telling the
young lady, "But I wouldn't know how to act there and I
haven't any clothes."
The strangers were puzzled like anything at first, but then
they got the idea. As Pa kept saying, "It just doesn't seem
right to let this fire go out."
Well, the strangers are gone, but they're coming back. It
hasn't been decided yet just what will happen. Maybe the
Nest will be kept up as what one of the strangers called a
"survival school." Or maybe we will join the pioneers who
are going to try to establish a new colony at the uranium
mines at Great Slave Lake or in the Congo.
Of course, now that the strangers are gone, I've been think-
ing a lot about Los Alamos and those other tremendous col-
onies. I have a hankering to see them for myself.
You ask me, Pa wants to see them, too. He's been getting
pretty thoughtful, watching Ma and Sis perk up.
"It's different, now that we know others are alive," he
explains to me. "Your mother doesn't feel so hopeless arty
more. Neither do I, for that matter, not having to carry the
whole responsibility for keeping the human race going, so to
speak It scares a person."
I looked around at the blanket walls and the fire and the
pails of air boiling away and Ma and Sis sleeping in the
warmth and the flickering light.
"It's not going to be easy to leave the Nest," I said, wanting
to cry, kind of. "It's so small and there's just the four of us.
I get scared at the idea of big places and a lot of strangers."
He nodded and put another piece of coal on the fire. Then
he looked at the little pile and grinned suddenly and put a
couple of handfuls on, just as if it was one of our birthdays
or Christmas.
"You'll quickly get over that feeling son," he said. "The
trouble with the world was that it kept getting smaller and
smaller, till it ended with just the Nest. Now it'll be good to
have a real huge world again, the way it was in the begin-
ning."
I guess he's right. You think the beautiful young lady will
wait for me till I grow up? I'll be twenty in only ten years.
King of the Hill
CHAD OLIVER
She floated there in the great nothing, still warm and soft
and blue-green if you could eyeball her from a few thousand
miles out, still kissed under blankets of clouds.
Mama Earth, Getting old now, tired, her blankets soiled
with her own secretions, her body bruised and torn by a
billion forgotten passions.
Like many a mother before her, she had given birth to a
monster. Me was not old, not as planets measure time, and
there had been other children. But he was old enough. He
had taken over.
His name?
You know it: there are no surprises left. Man. Big Daddy
of the primates. The ape that walks like a chicken. Homo
sap. Ah, the tool-maker, flapper of tongues, builder of fires,
sex fiend, dreamer, destroyer, creator of garbage...
You know me, Al.
Mirror, mirror, on the wall
Ant is the name, anthill is the game.
There were many men, too many men. They have names.
Try this one on for size: Sam Gregg. Don't like it? Rings
no bells? Not elegant enough? Wrong ethnic affiliation?
Few among the manswarm, if any, cared for Sam Gregg.
One or two, possibly, gave a damn about his name. A billion
or so knew his name.
Mostly, they hated his guts and envied him.
He was there, Sam Gregg, big as life and twice as ugly.
He stuck out.
A rock in the sandpile.
They were after him again.
Sam Gregg felt the pressure. There had been a time when
he had thrived on it; the adrenaline had flowed and the juices
bubbled. Sure, and there had been a time when dinosaurs
had walked the earth. Sam had been born in the year that
men had first walked on the moon. (It had tickled him, when
he was old enough to savor it. A man with the unlikely name
of Armstrong, no less. And his faithful sidekick, Buzz. And
good old Mike holding the fort, Jesus.) That made him nearly
a century old. His doctors were good, the best. It was no
miracle to live a hundred years, not these days. But he wasn't
a kid anymore, as he demonstrated occasionally with Lois.
The attacks were not particularly subtle, but they were
civilized. That meant that nobody called you a son of a bitch
to your face, and the assassins carried statistics and plati-
tudes instead of knives and strangling cords.
Item. A bill had been introduced in Washington by good
old Senator Raleigh, millionaire defender of the poor. Stripped
of its stumbling oratorical flourishes, it argued that undersea
development was now routine and therefore that there should
be no tax dodges for phony risk capital investment. That
little arrow was aimed straight at one of Sam's companies
at several of them, in fact, although the somewhat dim-witted
Raleigh probably did not know that. Sam .could beat the bill,
but it would cost him money. That annoyed him. He had an
expensive hobby.
Item. Sam retained a covey of bright boys whose only job
it was to keep his name out of the communications media.
They weren't entirely successful; your name is not known to
a billion people on a word-of-mouth basis. Still, he had not
been subjected to one of those full-scale, no-holds-barred, dy-
namic, daring personal close-ups for nearly a year now. One
was coming up, on Worldwide. The mystery man revealed!
The richest man in the world exposed! The hermit trapped
by fearless reporters! Sam was not amused. The earth was
sick, blotched by hungry and desperate people from pole to
shining pole. There had never been an uglier joke than pin-
ning man's future on birth control. A sick world needs a
target for its anger. Sam's only hope was to be inconspicuous.
He had failed in that, and it would get him in the end. Still,
he only needed a little more time,,,
Item. The U.N. delegate from the Arctic Republic had
charged that Arctic citizens of Eskimo descent were being [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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