Hubble threw the rest of the vouchers in his briefcase and slapped Don Lavin on the shoulder. “Hell with it. We’ll finish tomorrow. It isn’t exactly a balanced portfolio but——” his face was oddly young and eager when he smiled “—we put it together hi kind of a hurry. Anyway, it looks like we own a little bit of everything.”
“We’ll need it,” said Norma, nestled against Mundin’s arm. “Those old monsters in their glass bottles. . . .”
Mundin patted her hand. “I don’t know,” he said, after a moment. “They’re as good as dead, you know. They didn’t have anything to live for but power, and when we broke the market we took that away from them. We——”
He stopped. The house shivered and sang. A white flash of light sprang up outside, turned orange and faded away.
“What’s that?” demanded Norvie Bligh, a protective arm around his wife.
No one knew; and they all ran up to the battered second floor, where there was a window with glass—where there used
to be a window with glass, they found. The glass was in shards across the floor.
Across the slaggy bay, luminous even in the evening light, where Old New York had stood and rotted—a mushroom-shaped cloud.
“Green, Charlesworth,” mused Norvell. “I guess you weren’t the only one who realized they were as good as dead, Charles.”
They stood there for a long moment, watching the cloud drift out to sea, an insubstantial monument to the suicide of the Struldbrugs, but the only monument they would ever have. . . .
“We’d better get below,” said Mundin. “We’ve got cleaning up to do.”
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
frederik pohl, is a double-threat science fictioneer, being the only person to have won science fiction’s top award, the Hugo, both as an editor and as a writer. As a writer, he has published more than thirty novels and short story collections, including The Space Merchants (with C. M. Kornbluth), The Age of the Pussyfoot, Day Million and The Gold at Star bow’s End. His awards include four Hugos and the Edward E. Smith Award. As an editor, he published the first series of anthologies of original stories in the science fiction field, Star Science Fiction, and for many years he was the editor of two leading magazines in the field, Galaxy and //. He is currently science fiction editor of Bantam Books. His interests extend beyond science fiction to national affairs (his book, Practical Politics, was a handbook for party reformers in the 1972 election year), history (he is the Encyclopedia Britannica’s authority on the Roman Emperor, Tiberius) and almost the entire range of human affairs. He is currently president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and makes his home in Red Bank, New Jersey.
cyril M. kornbluth began writing science fiction for publication at the age of fifteen, and continued to do so until his early death in his mid-thirties. In his own right, he was the author of four science fiction novels, including The Syndic, a number of works outside the science fiction field and several score of the brightest and most innovative shorter science fiction pieces ever written. Some of bis short stories and novelettes have been mainstays for the anthologists and have also been adapted for television production, such as The Little Black Bag and The Marching Morons. His collaboration with Frederik Pohl has been described as “the finest science fiction collaborating team in history.” Together they wrote seven novels and more than thirty short stories. Among their works are such classics as Wolf bane, Gladiator-at-Law and The Space Merchants, which has been translated into more than thirty-five languages and has appeared on most lists of the most important science fiction novels ever written.