DRAG THAT JAG WITH A NUCLEAR FIZZ!

‘Your invitation card, sir?’

The attendant had a flame-rifle steadied across his forearm, aimed uncompromisingly at Lord’s navel. The man’s trigger finger was white around the knuckle, scar tissue gleamed in reflected light.

‘Here, uncle.’ Lord tossed a plastic card at the man, twitched his fingers and walked away towards the throng. Free-loading was becoming a tough proposition. But for all that the free-loaders would be here, eating and drinking and doping and experiencing. They were the people he’d have to watch. The regular police could handle most; but the odd man out, the hopped up fanatic, the one with the flash-grenade in his mouth talking quietly to the ambassador....

Whooosh! Bang! Back to the stars, alien.

Back to the stars, where Q’s were unimportant. Q’s? A trifling item. Merely the amount of energy needed to raise one pound of water one degree fahrenheit - multiplied by one million million million. And how we’d used up our Q’s! Two cars a family - but one simply must, my dear. Square-miles of incinerating dumps outside every city. A million years of carboniferous growth consumed in a minute - and no-one to feel the warmth in the room at the time. Empty cans tossed aside to rot.

Spencer Lord stopped at the tall plasti-glass doors to arrange his jacket more comfortably over his weapons belt. Two brightly painted women, chattering like parakeets, passed him. He caught the magnificent glitter of the elder’s ring, set with a solid piece of genuine coal, surrounded by diamonds. If he worked all his life, his soured mind nagged him, he still couldn’t have bought a ring like that with his amassed salary. Katy’d just have to make goo-goo eyes and do without. Or seduce some fat old algae-mogul, more likely.

Dig deep for that coal. Rake down for that ore. A mile down. Two. Send robots. Honeycomb the Earth. Let the steel rust, plenty more. Consumption is the god. Advertising is his prophet.

And productivity is the money.

Only the prophet oversold his god and went bankrupt.

Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette. Burn, burn, burn up that old earth. Consume, friends, consume. Sit in your neat little, tight little, snug little house and waste a thousand man-hours every time you open a door. Transmute those elements. Two atoms for one. Big, buster, big!

Something for nothing - only the something turned out to be hollow, and to have compound retroactive interest like tiger’s claws, or the wind round the poles.

And the world woke up one morning and found itself poor.

Lord stood just inside the door to the crystal walled ballroom. He kept his inner tenseness bubbling inside and an idle, indifferent outward composure. He speared a drink from a passing robot. His mouth might have drooped cynically and he might have felt very tired if the porage wasn’t coursing like a breeder reaction through his body. He stood in shadows and watched.

Costumes were everywhere. Almost as much as the absence of costume. Feathers waved above chalky faces, scented masks framed bold eyes. Lights glittered from jewellery and precious metals. Naked flesh, powdered and creamed and electro-treated, gleamed sybaritically against lush fabrics and alien furs. Gas-filled balloons drifted and, bursting, sent everyone around giggling hysterically, Lord caught a whiff of one that split near him and fought down treacherous headiness. He inserted his nasal plugs with a grimace.

Liquor spilt and stank and ran across the floor, soaking into priceless rugs. Streamers fluttered in artificial breezes. Flash bulbs plopped everywhere. People strutted and shouted, carmine lips opening and closing, unheard a pace away. Rockets soared to burst in shimmering stars against the roof. Somewhere massed bands were thumping and groaning and syncopating away almost lost in the gargantuan human uproar.

Everybody was having themselves a whale of a time.

Time: 2123.

Lord found Josiah Gosheron in the arms of a semi-clothed girl struggling in an alcove. The Sahndran Ambassador’s two aides were standing by, grinning, unwilling to help the old guy. The girl was persistent. He was having fun, too; but his wind wasn’t what it used to be.

Consider this alien.

Index: S/A/64389D.

Name: Josiah V.X. Gosheron.

Age: 83. Height: 151 cms. Hair: Red. Eyes: Brown.

Accredited Sahndran Diplomatic Corps. Responsible for treaty between Eridani and Sirius freezing Earth out. Elusive. Strong racial prejudices. Maintenance of his goodwill to Earth essential. A dangerous man (alien Int.).

SPEND THAT MONEY - BREAK THE GRAVE,

ONLY SUCKERS EVER SAVE!

Glib profiteering words, spilling from fat, rat-trap mouths: ‘We believe in the future of this great country. There are more than twenty-five million people swelling the world population each year - a potential market of seventy thousand fresh individuals per day. We must feed and clothe and house and amuse and provide transportation for them all. This company’s opening two new plants this year and three next ... blah ... production... blah... consumption...’

That’s a perfectly good idea! It’s a good thing to have children and provide for them and see they have all the things you didn’t.

Dig that Earth, provide For all; There’s no dearth, come one, come all!

A girl ran past, screaming, her hair trailing silver dust. Parts of her costume fell off as she ran. A youth pursued her, flushed, laughing. He held outstretched a hypodermic filled, ready to provide unworried dream horizons. She’d let him catch her when they were alone - or more or less alone.

Gosheron’s two aides finally pulled the squawking girl off their boss. She pouted at them, her face a solid gold-dusted mask, unrecognisable. Her hair was bleached white, coiffed and curled into a spaceship with flaring Venturis down ears, nose and nape. Every time she laughed a beacon lit up on the spaceship’s prow. She was lit up, too. Her naked arms and legs showed dozens of pin-pricks through the clogging powder, like a miniaturised moonscape.

Gosheron guffawed, belly shaking. He flung the girl a credit note. He was dressed like an ancient Indian Rajah, spattered with jewels, turban cunningly wound round a stator field generator. His sword looked like it had been built round a flame-rifle. An alien. A Terran hater. A dangerous man.

Lord’s life meant nothing measured against the need to keep this alien alive and happy.

This alien Ambassador represented solar systems where Q’s were still unused. We’d had ours. We’d been using about .004 Q’s a year up till 1850, taking it from the muscles of animals and men. The next hundred years we used four Q’s. Then we had twenty-seven Q’s of coal and oil left but why worry? Atomic power, buster, use your noggin!

‘Waste not, want not.’ That was a laugh. Consume friends, consume. Oh, sure, salvage where you can. A little later: ‘Salvage is a national effort.’

Then, reluctantly: ‘The scrap-iron industry is the largest in the world.’

Panicking: ‘Salvage is a major aim of all citizens.’ Finally, terror-stricken:

‘Salvage is the new god!’ But - consume, friends, consume!

A robot waiter trundled by and Lord hefted another Nuclear Fizz. This was an Advertising Convention, advertising the world to the aliens - and Katy was off somewhere with a goon from beyond the stars. Lord gulped the drink.

DRINK! DRINK! WOOD AL-CO-HOL!

The Advertising Industry have their eye teeth invested. You can’t suddenly cut off an entire industry, with ramifications extending into every part of the economic set-up, with a casual: ‘Sorry, Mac’ Not a multi-billion credit organisation. Not with that power. Power to keep things running. Power to ensure that the advertising business stayed in power even when there was a worldwide shortage of nearly everything.

Gotta live, you know. Play you eighteen holes, George, then we can talk things over at the nineteenth. Sure you know how it is, old man, times are tough; but there’s still the good old atomic power.

Yeah, there’s still the good old atom.

All five hundred seventy-five Q’s of it.

That didn’t last long.

Someone had smuggled in an erotibomb. Lord heard it go off over by the conservatory. He turned to watch, fingering the filters in his nose, and from his position in the alcove was able to see over the milling heads below. Ushers rushed from all directions wearing gasmasks. They shepherded the crowds, surrounded the area. A number of entwined couples were carried out. Lord didn’t smile.

He was searching the throng, looking for signs he knew he couldn’t possibly see. You couldn’t tell an assassin by his expression, not with all those plastic facials about. And, too, he was looking for Katy.

What colour hair would she have tonight? What face would she wear?

What brand of porage had she hit?

SHOOT THAT PORAGE, SMOKE THAT TEA,

VROOM AND ZOOM ON A BLIND D.T.!

The Synthetics Industry had climbed to power. Inevitably, they’d taken over when resources ran thin. Them - and the solar-erg boys. But there was one ever-replenishing resource that had to be handled with kid gloves.

Trees.

Re-afforestation, afforestation, priority. Terran global super-priority. Grow those trees, uncle, else you’ll shiver. Bubble that algae, buster, else you’ll starve. Split those atoms, fella, else you’ll freeze. Synthesize.

SYNTHI, SYNTHI,

I’M A LITTLE SYNTHI,

AREN’T WE ALL .... ?

Over in a corner, drawn apart from the coruscating bedlam, a group of men talked with the cigar-spurts of conscious authority. Moguls of the Trees. Forest Lords. Big browed, spectacled atom-jugglers. Chlorella Kings.

‘... forest fire in Asia that...’

‘Don’t be obscene!’

‘Fires exist, they snatch profits. Grow up, pal!’

‘.... new hexo-laminated ply peeled off. The ship disintegrated. Need a new bonding resin ...’

‘... Wembley’s plastic weld ...’

‘... finished ‘er, George! Two hundred stories. Less than a hundred tons of metal. Should last fifty-seventy years before the weather breaks through ...’

‘I need a drink.’

DRINK, DRINK, WOOD AL-CO-HOL!

Down beyond the main ballroom the crystal walls seemed to bulge with the crowd, shimmering and reflecting colours and landscapes, moonscapes, alien scapes as a shadow mime in mood and feeling complementary with the music’s thrum.

Lord felt confused looking in that direction. Someone shot an immense chandelier loose. It crashed down, scattering people like sparks. A girl’s clothes caught fire. Extinguishers foamed automatically from the floor. She ran, naked, laughing, foam flecked, plucked three feathers from a fan, used them, rejoined the fray.

They’d formed a snake-hipped line, were singing and stomping, collecting more people, winding round the ice-columns soaring to the roof.

‘We’re doomed, doomed, pigging in the tomb.’

Time: 2136.

Noise and colour and heat made an almost solid cloud in the wide room. Make-up was running down painted faces. Can’t afford a custom re-facial. But, darling, new plastic faces at giveaway prices! Last you twenty years. After that ... You’re a big girl, now. You’re on your own, sister.

From the shouting crazy line a man reeled like a yo-yo spun off its thread. He stumbled towards the alcove. Lord drew back, tensing. The drunk’s wide Chinaman’s sleeves flapped and his imitation pigtail bobbed. Lord didn’t know the guy.

Index: T/Y/876398/R.

Name: Grunewald Abduol Sloane.

Age: 29. Height: 168 cms. Hair: Brown. Eyes: Brown.

Known revolutionary. Prison record. Member of Earth for Terrans party. Cardio-dope addict. Security Rating XX. A dangerous man.

Beyond the alcove and Lord and the Chinaman the noise drained away in his senses, as though this razor-sharp scene were contained in a balloon, as though everything fined down. Rockets burst silently, hooters whistled and shrilled soundlessly and vacuous mouths opened and shut like fish trapped in four glass walls.

YOU’LL NEVER NEED A PADRE