Nova 2 Read online

  “They will. The process has been thoroughly consumer-tested. The results were favorable for marketing.”

  Ransom stood back from the desk and looked sick. “You’ve sold your soul, Amelia.”

  The woman smiled. “Souls, Ransom? You’re in our business too.”

  “No,” whispered Ransom.

  “Now then. We’re debuting UniCOMP’s participatory holovision process in sixty days. We want you to do an original script for our first public offering.”

  “No.” Ransom shook his head.

  Amelia’s voice hardened. “Ransom, you’re going to provide us with our drama.”

  “No.” Ransom backed toward the door. “I won’t. I hope nobody will.”

  “It’s what the public wants; it’s what they will get.” She motioned with her hand and the door glided open behind the poet.

  “Come back when you cool off,” she said. “But don’t wait too long. UniCom doesn’t want a last minute, slap-dash job.”

  “Shit,” said Ransom distinctly. The door slid shut.

  Alone, Amelia ruffled through the papers on her desk. “Ransom,” she whispered, almost a sigh. “If only you were a better poet.”

  COMPUTER LINK:

  EFFECTS: (optical) fuzz h-figures, then bring to focus.

  CLOSE SHOT—INTERCUT CONVERSATION

  AIR DISPERSAL: CORDITE

  DISSOLVE TO:

  Morales. In any culture there is always someone who can procure the forbidden: women, drugs, books, whatever is anathema to the established system of values. That was the role of Morales in Ransom’s world.

  “I want a bomb,” said Ransom.

  “So?” said Morales matter-of-factly. “What kind? How big? Do you want to blow up a street cafe? a car? a superson liner? Do you wish lots of pretty fireworks, or just a low-yield, unobtrusive, neutron grenade?”

  “I hadn’t really thought about that.” The poet reflected quietly. “I want a bomb small enough to conceal in my clothing, yet powerful enough to destroy a—oh, most of a three-hundred level building.”

  Morales whistled in admiration. “You don’t ask for much, my friend. But I think I can help you. What you desire has been banned by the World Council for twenty years. I believe it was called a fusion grenade or some-such.” He jotted notes on a small pad. “About a ten-kilotonner should do nicely,” Morales mumbled. “Let’s see, fully shielded from electronic detectors, of course.”

  Ransom nodded. That sounded like a good idea.

  Morales looked up from his notes. “Well, Ransom, that should do it. I won’t, of course, ask you specifically what you are going to do with this device. No, it is better that I stay as ignorant as possible in case the Peace Enforcers become involved.” He snapped the notepad shut and slipped it into his tunic.

  “Um, about the price,” said Ransom.

  “Ah yes.” He silently totaled a figure. “Eleven hundred credits should cover it nicely.”

  Ransom began making out a transfer chit.

  “Plus,” said Morales. Ransom raised his head. “A signed first edition of your Blue Mountains Above Denver ”

  “There was only one edition.” Ransom smiled. “With pleasure.”

  DIRECT CUT TO:

  A fine pair of Consumer Participation Evaluators, becoming happily inebriated in the course of their duties.

  The first CPE yawned. “This is becoming too predictable.”

  The second shrugged his shoulders. “So is Greek tragedy.” He was a short, stout man and it was hard for him to shrug. He managed.

  The first CPE, the taller one, touched his teeth to the cold rim of his glass. “Well, I’ll take a good Restoration comedy any time.”

  COMPUTER LINK.

  AERIAL SHOT—ZOOM TO CLOSE-UP OF POET ON SLIDEWALK

  EFFECTS: h-figures 5% smaller than scale

  AUDIO EFFECTS: SUBLIMINAL EXCERPTS FROM SOUSA MARCHES

  AIR DISPERSAL: ROSES

  DIRECT CUT TO:

  Ransom. He strode along with the flow of the slidewalk, doubling his rate of travel. The bomb was a solidly reassuring weight in his belt-pouch. The poet whistled a tune in exhilaration

  knowing I’m to die

  and death will be well

  for the world and me

  The slidewalk was a glass bead arch that spanned the hazy gulf between Ransom’s apartment block and the transit station. The poet felt a slight giddiness as the transparent tube swept him out into the open void between buildings. Far above him was a dull-slate sky, cloud-streaked with black. Almost at the zenith was a dimmed sun. Below was a checkerboard of the tops of lesser buildings.

  The transit depot was congested, as usual. Ransom gently maneuvered through the throngs of commuters until he found the correct level and proper gate for the Burbank tube.

  The trip was not spectacular: the hiss of the air being evacuated from the tube, the initial crackle of the propulsion field, the soft glow of artificial illumination as the car traversed the light and darkness of spaces and buildings. Abruptly the car arced out into a vast open space where reared the arrogant thrust of the UniCom Tower.

  “Burbank Exit El-three, UniCom,” intoned the car’s automated conductor.

  Ransom disembarked and stood, fists on hips, looking up at the endless tiered levels of UniCom.

  The fear came from deep inside him. Not just intellectual apprehension. This was visceral fear—gut-level. Fear and regret. Regret

  at never seeing another nightfall or sunrise. Regret at never loving another woman. Regret at never writing another poem.

  But with the fear was something exalting. Ransom’s mercurial mood flickered to elation. There was something melodramatically grand about this confrontation. On one side of the board were ranged UniCom, Amelia Marchin, the UniCOMP holovision process, all the resources of a multibillion credit corporation. Like one of my scripts, laughed Ransom inwardly. In opposition was Ransom: bulky, shaggy-bearded, ebullient, with a bomb in his pocket.

  It’s hardly fair to you, Ransom addressed the tower. A lone man is always the fiercest of opponents.

  There was no hesitation in his stride as the poet moved toward the entrance to UniCom. It seemed to Ransom that he was stepping almost in time with the half-heard cadence of some distant brass-band march. He drew a deep breath. There were roses in the air. Victory roses

  better lilies, for the bier of my enemy

  and for my coffin too.

  “Amelia Marchin,” said Ransom to the security guard. “I’m expected.”

  The guard subvocalized into a throat-mike, received an answer. “Certainly, sir. Take lift eight, please.”

  Ransom floated up the indicated shaft. One barrier crossed. Morales had assured him that the device was sufficiently shielded to escape any form of detection other than physical search. And the latter was unlikely in the extreme; in this civilized age, nobody would carry a bomb with them to a business appointment. Yet a small premonitive worry twinged at Ransom’s conscious. Something was wrong.

  The poet had to transfer to a different lift at the two-hundredth level. Again he spoke the shibboleth “Amelia Marchin” and once more he was motioned upward. Another guard in a blue uniform was waiting for him at level three hundred.

  “This way, sir.” He turned and Ransom followed. “Please enter, sir.” The guard held a door open. Ransom entered. It was dark. The door sighed shut behind him.

  The room was completely lightless. Ransom stumbled forward. “Amelia, what the hell are you doing?” Illuminators in the ceiling glowed softly on. The poet looked around. He was in a circular room, about twenty meters in diameter, featureless except for a carved wooden table standing in the center. There was a scrap of paper lying on the table.

  Ransom walked to the center of the room, his heels echoing on the tiled floor. On the table was a note, carefully hand-printed. It read:

  Dear Ransom,

  Another poet wrote you a message four and a quarter centuries ago.

  Shakespeare:

/>   As You Like It: II, 7, lines 139-140.

  Best,

  Amelia Marchin

  He knew the reference. Melancholy Jacques. “All the world’s a stage . . .” Ransom stood frozen, looped in ice coils of upwelling horror. His hand went to his belt-pouch, fumbled it open, rummaged inside.

  A block of wood.

  The poet screamed a long animal cry of anguish, of pain, of betrayal: a wail that keened up and up until it flared incandescently, like a bomb.

  DISSOLVE TO:

  THE CREDITS INTERWOVEN THROUGH A FLICKERING PROCESSIONAL MONTAGE OF FACES

  MORALES

  Morales looks up from the book of poems. He offers a Latin, shoulder-shrugging sigh. “Life,” he says, “is like that.”

  THE TALLER CPE

  The taller Consumer Participation Evaluator raises a glass in toast to his friend. “Life is art.”

  THE SHORTER CPE

  “No,” says his companion. “Art is life.”

  UNICOMP

  UniCOMP hums ruminatively. “Art is ultimately undeflnable,” flashes on the read-out screen.

  AMELIA

  Amelia Marchin smiles gently as she looks down at the world from her office on the three-hundredth level of the UniCom Tower.

  “Life,” she murmurs, “is only sometimes real.”

  RANSOM

  Ransom says nothing.

  FADE OUT.

  The Old Folks

  by James E. Gunn

  James Gunn is a lean, quiet mid-westerner who teaches at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, and is a little tired of people knowing that town only as the one Quantrill raided. He writes a deceptively simple, apparently nostalgic, story about the midwest of legend—that soon proves to have a most sharp sting in its tail.

  They had been traveling in the dusty car all day, the last few miles in the heat of the Florida summer. Not far behind were the Sunshine State Parkway, Orange Grove, and Winter Hope, but according to the road map the end of the trip was near.

  John almost missed the sign that said, “Sunset Acres, Next Right,” but the red Volkswagen slowed and turned and slowed again. Now another sign marked the beginning of the town proper: SUNSET ACRES, Restricted Senior Citizens, Minimum Age—65, Maximum Speed—20.

  As the car passed the sign, the whine of the tires announced that the pavement had changed from concrete to brick.

  Johnny bounced in the back seat, mingling the squeak of the springs with the music of the tires, and shouted above the engine’s protest at second gear, “Mommy—Daddy, are we there yet? Are we there?”

  His mother turned to look at him. The wind from the open window whipped her short hair. She smiled. “Soon now,” she said. Her voice was excited, too.

  They passed through a residential section where the white frame houses with their sharp roofs sat well back from the street, and the velvet lawns reached from red-brick sidewalks to broad porches that spread like skirts around two or three sides of the houses.

  At each intersection the streets dipped to channel the rain water and to enforce the speed limit at 20 m.p.h. or slower. The names of the streets were chiseled into the curbs, and the incisions were painted black: Osage, Cottonwood, Antelope, Meadowlark, Prairie . . .

  The Volkswagen hummed along the brick streets, alone. The streets were empty, and so, it seemed, were the houses; the white-curtained windows stared senilely into the Florida sun, and the swings on the porches creaked in the Florida breeze, but the architecture and the town were all Kansas—and the Kansas of fifty years ago, at that.

  Then they reached the square, and John pulled the car to a stop alongside the curb. Here was the center of town—a block of greensward edged with beds of pansies and petunias and geraniums. In the center of the square was a massive, two-story, red-brick building. A square tower reached even taller. The tower had a big clock set into its face. The heavy, black hands pointed at 3:32.

  Stone steps marched up the front of the building toward oak doors twice the height of a man. Around the edges of the buildings were iron benches painted white. On the benches the old men sat in the sun, their eyes shut, their hands folded across canes.

  From somewhere behind the brick building came the sound of a brass band—the full, rich mixture of trumpet and trombone and sousa-phone, of tuba and tympani and big, bass drum.

  Unexpectedly, as they sat in the car looking at the scene out of another era and another land, a tall black shape rolled silently past them. John turned his head quickly to look at it. A thin cab in the middle sloped toward spoked wheels at each end, like the front ends of two cars stuck together. An old woman in a wide-brimmed hat sat upright beside the driver. From her high window she frowned at the little foreign car, and then her vehicle passed down the street.

  “That was an old electric!” John said. “I didn’t know they were making them again.”

  From the back seat Johnny said, “When are we going to get to Grammy’s?”

  “Soon,” his mother said. “If you’re going to ask the way to Buffalo Street, you’d better ask,” she said to John. “It’s too hot to sit here in the car.”

  John opened the door and extracted himself from the damp socket of the bucket seat. He stood for a moment beside the baked metal of the car and looked up each side of the street. The oomp-pah-pah of the band was louder now and the yeasty smell of baking bread dilated his nostrils, but the whole scene struck him as unreal somehow, as if this all were a stage setting and a man could walk behind the buildings and find that the backs were unpainted canvas and raw wood.

  “Well?” Sally said.

  John shook his head and walked around the front of the car. The first store sold hardware. In the small front window were crowbars and wooden-handled claw hammers and three kegs of blue nails; one of the kegs had a metal scoop stuck into the nails at the top. In one corner of the window was a hand mower, its handle varnished wood, its metal wheels and reel blue, except where the spokes had been touched with red and yellow paint and the curved reel had been sharpened to a silver line.

  The interior of the store was dark; John could not tell whether anyone was inside.

  Next to it was “Tyler’s General Store,” and John stepped inside onto sawdust. Before his eyes adjusted from the Sunshine State’s proudest asset, he smelled the pungent sawdust. The odor was mingled with others—the vinegar and spice of pickles and the ripeness of cheese and a sweet-sour smell that he could not identify.

  Into his returning vision the faces swam first—the pale faces of the old people, framed in white hair, relieved from the anonymity of age only by the way in which bushy eyebrows sprouted or a mustache was trimmed or wrinkles carved the face. Then he saw the rest of the store and the old people. Some of them were sitting in scarred oak chairs with rounded backs near a black, potbellied stove. The room was cool; after a moment John realized that the stove was producing a cold breeze.

  One old man with a drooping white mustache was leaning over from the barrel he sat on to cut a slice of cheese from the big wheel on the counter. A tall man with an apron over his shirt and trousers and his shirt sleeves hitched up with rubber bands came from behind the counter, moving his bald head with practiced ease among the dangling sausages.

  “Son,” he said, “I reckon you lost your way. Made the wrong turn off the highway, I warrant. Heading for Winter Hope or beyond and mistook yourself. You just head back out how you come in and—”

  “Is this Sunset Acres?” John said.

  The old man with the yellow slice of cheese in his hand said in a thin voice, “Yep. No use thinking you can stay, though. Thirty-five or forty years too soon. That’s what!” His sudden laughter came out in a cackle.

  The others joined in, like a superannuated Greek chorus, “Can’t stay!”

  “I’m looking for Buffalo Street,” John said. “We’re going to visit the Plummers.” He paused and then added, “They’re my wife’s parents.”

  The storekeeper tucked his thumbs into the straps of his apron. �
��That’s different. Everybody knows the Plummers. Three blocks north of the square. Can’t miss it.”

  “Thank you,” John said, nodding, and backed into the sunshine.

  The interrupted murmur of conversation began again, broken briefly by laughter.

  “Three blocks north of the square,” he said as he inserted himself back in the car.

  He started the motor, shifted into first, and turned the comer. As he passed the general store he thought he saw white faces peering out of the darkness, but they might have been feather pillows hanging in the window.

  In front of the town hall an old man jerked in his sleep as the car passed. Another opened his eyes and frowned. A third shook his cane in their general direction. Beyond, a thin woman in a lavender shawl was holding an old man by the shoulder as if to tell him that she was done with the shopping and it was time to go home.

  “John, look!” Sally said, pointing out the window beside her.

  To their right was an ice-cream parlor. Metal chairs and round tables with thin, wire legs were set in front of the store under a yellow awning. At one of the tables sat an elderly couple. The man sat straight in his chair like an army officer, his hair iron-gray and neatly parted, his eyebrows thick. He was keeping time to the music of the band with the cane in his right hand. His left hand held the hand of a little old woman in a black dress, who gazed at him as she sipped from the soda in front of her.

  The music was louder here. Just to the north of the town hall, they could see now, was a bandstand with a conical roof. On the bandstand sat half a dozen old men in uniforms, playing instruments. Another man in uniform stood in front of them, waving a baton. It was a moment before John realized what was wrong with the scene. The music was louder and richer than the half-dozen musicians could have produced.