Hugh Cook - Heroes Of The 3rd Millennium

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2024-11-24 0 0 26.47KB 14 页 5.9玖币

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HUGH COOK

HEROES OF THE THIRD MILLENNIUM

THE REELING FLICKER OF days slowed, steadied, froze. A quick look around. The

time machine was sitting on grass. Beyond the grass: buildings. It was,

recognizably, Central Park. Manhattan. With a huge sigh of relief -- so far, no

nuclear war -- Jack Fabrax dismounted, clambering down onto the grass, lugging

the heavy suitcase after him. God, what a weight! The time machine flickered and

dissolved. It would return in precisely seventy-two hours.

There was a slight risk involved in sending the time machine back to 1962.

Conceivably, Kevin Culdaneath would work out what had happened. Conceivably,

Kevin would climb aboard the time machine and chase Jack into the year 2003. But

Jack wanted to have the option of going back to 1962. In case things didn't work

out as expected in this brave new world, the world of the Third Millennium.

Jack was sweating profusely by the time he had manhandled the suitcase to the

street. He stood there, watching for a taxi. But did they still have taxis in

the Third Millennium? And would his greenbacks be valid currency? He had more

than half expected shiny flying machines, the U.S. dollar replaced by the credit

or some such thing, and the people to be walking round in fancy aerodynamic

robes, or nothing at all.

But, outwardly at least, everything looked amazingly normal. The automobiles

were styled differently, but were conceptually similar. And people still wore

pants, shirts, shoes. Jack himself was dressed in a charcoal gray suit, a white

shirt, a conservative tie, and nobody looked at him twice. A guy in a suit just

like his walked by, talking to someone using a two-way radio, a dandy little

gadget small enough to fit easily into the palm of your hand.

"Taxi!"

Jack had it all figured out. He would get the taxi to drive him round town. He

would chat with the cabby and find out the latest.

The cab driver was a Negro. A really black Negro. Totally black -- an amazing

blackness which seemed to shimmer into blue. A woman. She had weird scars on her

face, patterned scars like a sergeant's chevrons. Someone cut her? Then why

didn't she have plastic surgery?

"Empire State Building," said Jack.

"What?"

"Empire State! The building!"

No dice. The Negress asked a couple of questions, but her English was barely

intelligible. She had to be drunk. Angrily, Jack got out of the cab, hauled his

suitcase out onto the sidewalk, slammed the door. How could anyone possibly not

know the Empire State Building? Could it have been demolished? Torn down? Lost

to memory? No, impossible.

Three taxis later, Jack finally found a driver who spoke English. Sort of. The

cabby was from Afghanistan, wherever the hell that was, and took him along

approximately familiar streets -- the city's basic layout was still the same--

to the Empire State Building. Outside the building, there were soldiers in

strange blotched uniforms who carried weapons which looked strangely light, like

children's toys.

Despite having figured out that inflation would brutalize his meager cash

reserves, Jack was shocked by the cab fare. He bought a paper, a copy of the New

York Times, meaning to check first the date, second the news, and third the

stock market prices. He really wanted to know -- and know fast -- just what his

stock certificates were worth.

The date? Thursday 6 November 2003. The right date, then. The stock market?

Well, it still existed. Against all the odds, the world had survived the threat

of nuclear war -- so far -- and the stock market was still in operation.

However, Jack could find no listings for his stocks. Okay then, maybe the

companies had changed their names. No problem. Work on that later.

How about the news? Well, that was problematical. Sport was sport, that much was

the same. Sport was still sport, food was still food, fashion was still fashion

and crime was still crime.

But. Apart from that, the news was unintelligibly weird, full of people and

places and words and countries he had never heard of. Al Gore, Newt Gingrich,

Nelson Mandela, Jason Race, Argan Vlastavich, Michael Jackson, Madonna and the

Artist Formerly Known As Prince -- who were these people? And if there was some

guy "formerly known" as Prince, why the hell not say who he was now?

And what was HIV? And the Internet? And cyberspace? Ah, this makes sense. Ebola

fever-- a disease, evidently. Some kind of plague. But --Bangladesh? A place,

evidently. A city? A country? And how about this? African American. What's that?

Okay. The woman in the taxi. Straight out of Africa -- that would explain that

total skin. An American straight out of Africa, an African American.

Then he found an article he did understand. About Germany. Nazis in Germany had

demonstrated in Berlin, had fought with the police, had desecrated Jewish

graves. Reading this, he went cold. The hairs stood up on the back of his neck.

Germany! Not East Germany or West Germany but just straight Germany.

In that moment of shock, a glimmering of understanding came to him. He had not

arrived in the future at all. Instead, he had been precipitated into an

alternate universe. In this alternate universe, there had been no Hitler, no

Holocaust, and Germany had not been divided into two separate countries. In this

alternate universe, the terrors of Fascism belonged not to the past but to the

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