His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction

“Hey! Here’s a hot one from New York! A diesel tug run wild in the harbor while the crew was below and shoved in the port bow of the luck-shury liner S. S. Placentia. It says the ship filled and sank taking the lives of an es-ti-mated 180 passengers and 50 crew mem-bers. Six divers was sent down to study the wreckage, but they died, too, when their suits turned out to be fulla little holes.

“And here is a bulletin I just got from Denver. It seems—”

Barlow took off the headset uncomprehendingly. “He seemed so callous,” he yelled at the driver. “I was listening to a newscast—”

Tinny-Peete shook his head and pointed at his ears. The roar of air was deafening. Barlow frowned baffledly and stared out of the window.

A glowing sign said:

MOOGS!

WOULD YOU BUY IT

FOR A QUARTER?

He didn’t know what Moogs was or were; the illustration showed an incredibly proportioned girl, 99.9 percent naked, writhing pas-sionately in animated full color.

The roadside jingle was still with him, but with a new feature. Radar or something spotted the car and alerted the lines of the jingle. Each in turn sped along a roadside track, even with the car, so it could be read before the next line was alerted.

IF THERE’S A GIRL

YOU WANT TO GET

DEFLOCCULIZE

UNROMANTIC SWEAT.

“A*R*M*P*I*T*T*O”

Another animated job, in two panels, the familiar “Before and After.”

The first said, “Just Any Cigar?” and was illustrated with a two-person domestic tragedy of a wife holding her nose while her coarse and red-faced husband puffed a slimy-looking rope. The sec-ond panel glowed,

“Or a VUELTA ABAJO?” and was illustrated with— Barlow blushed and looked at his feet until they had passed the sign.

“Coming into Chicago!” bawled Tinny-Peete.

Other cars were showing up, all of them dreamboats.

Watching them, Barlow began to wonder if he knew what a kilo-meter was, exactly. They seemed to be traveling so slowly, if you ig-nored the roaring air past your ears and didn’t let the speedy lines of the dreamboats fool you. He would have sworn they were really crawling along at twenty-five, with occasional spurts up to thirty. How much was a kilometer, anyway?

The city loomed ahead, and it was just what it ought to be: tower-ing skyscrapers, overhead ramps, landing platforms for helicopters— He clutched at the cushions. Those two copters. They were going to—they were going to—they— He didn’t see what happened because their apparent collision courses took them behind a giant building.

Screamingly sweet blasts of sound surrounded them as they stopped for a red light. “What the hell is going on here?” said Barlow in a shrill, frightened voice, because the braking time was just about zero, and he wasn’t hurled against the dashboard. “Who’s kidding who?”

“Why, what’s the matter?” demanded the driver.

The light changed to green and he started the pickup. Barlow stiffened as he realized that the rush of air past his ears began just a brief, unreal split second before the car was actually moving. He grabbed for the door handle on his side.

The city grew on them slowly: scattered buildings, denser build-ings, taller buildings, and a red light ahead. The car rolled to a stop in zero braking time, the rush of air cut off an instant after it stopped, and Barlow was out of the car and running frenziedly down a side-walk one instant after that.

They’ll track me down, he thought, panting. it’s a secret police thing.

They’ll get you—mind-reading machines, television eyes every-where, afraid you’ll tell their slaves about freedom and stuff. They don’t let anybody cross them, like that story I once read.

Winded, he slowed to a walk and congratulated himself that he had guts enough not to turn around. That was what they always watched for.

Walking, he was just another business-suited back among hundreds.

He would be safe, he would be safe— A hand gripped his shoulder and words tumbled from a large, coarse, handsome face thrust close to his:

“Wassamatta bumpinninna people likeya owna sidewalk gotta miner slamya jima mushya bassar!” It was neither the mad potter nor the mad driver.

“Excuse me,” said Barlow. “What did you say?”

“Oh, yeah?” yelled the stranger dangerously, and waited for an an-swer.

Barlow, with the feeling that he had somehow been suckered into the short end of an intricate land-title deal, heard himself reply bel-ligerently, “Yeah!”

The stranger let go of his shoulder and snarled, “Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah!” said Barlow, yanking his jacket back into shape.

“Aaah!” snarled the stranger, with more contempt and disgust than ferocity. He added an obscenity current in Barlow’s time, a standard but physiologically impossible directive, and strutted off hulking his shoulders and balling his fists.

Barlow walked on, trembling. Evidently he had handled it well enough.