"EB - Edward L. Ferman - The Best From Fantasy & Science Fiction 23rd EditionUC - SS" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine)

During the week of September 23, seven thousand Ozos were shipped to domestic and Canadian addresses supplied by Smith: five hundred to electronics manufacturers and suppliers, six thousand, thirty to a carton, marked "On Consignment," to TV outlets in major cities, and the rest to private citizens chosen at random. The instruction booklets were in sealed envelopes packed with each device. Three thousand more went to Europe, South and Central America, and the Middle East.
A few of the outlets which received the cartons opened them the same day, tried the devices out, and put them on sale at prices rang-
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ing from $49.95 to $125. By the following day the word was beginning to spread, and by the close of business on the third day every store was sold out. Most people who got them, either through the mail or by purchase, used them to spy on their neighbors and on people in hotels.
In a house in Cleveland, a man watches his brother-in-law in the next room, who is watching his wife getting out of a taxi. She goes into the lobby of an apartment building. The husband watches as she gets into the elevator, rides to the fourth floor. She rings the bell beside the door marked 410. The door opens; a dark-haired man takes her in his arms; they kiss.
The brother-in-law meets him in the hall. "Don't do it, Charlie."
"Get out of my way."
"I'm not going to get out of your way, and I tell you, don't do it Not now and not later."
"Why the hell shouldn't If
"Because if you do I'll kill you. If you want a divorce, OK, get a divorce. But don't lay a hand on her or I'll find you the farthest place you can go."
Smith got his consignment of Ozos early in the week, took one home and left it to his store manager to put a price on the rest He did not bother to use the production model but began at once to build another prototype. It had controls calibrated to one-hundredth of a second and one millimeter, and a timer that would allow him to stop a scene, or advance or regress it at any desired rate. He ordered some clockwork from an astronomical supply house.
A high-ranking officer in Army Intelligence, watching the first demonstration of the Ozo in the Pentagon, exclaimed, "My God, with this we could dismantle half the establishment—all we've got to do is launch interceptors when we see them push the button."
"It's a good thing Senator Burkhart can't hear you say that" said another officer. But by the next afternoon everybody had heard it
A Baptist minister in Louisville led the first mob against an Ozo assembly plant. A month later, while civil and criminal suits against aU the rioters were still pending, tapes showing each one of them in
10 Damon Knight romismg or ludicrous activities wen widely distributed in the
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area.
The commission agents who bad handled the orders for the first Oa» were found oat and had to leave town. Factories were fire-bombed, but others took their place.
The first Ozo was smuggled into the Soviet Union from West Germany by Katerina Bclov, a member of a dissident group in Moscow, who used it to document illegal government actions. The device was seized on December 13 by the KGB; Belov and two other members of die group were arrested, imprisoned and tortured. By that rims over forty other Ozos were in the hands of dissidents.
Yon are watching an old movie, Bob and Ted and Carol and Alice. The humor seems infantile and unimaginative to you; you are not interested in the actresses' occasional seminudity. What strikes you as hilarious is the coyness, the sidelong glances, smiles, grimaces hinting at things that will never be shown on the screen. You realize that these people have never seen anyone but then* most intimate friends without clothing, have never seen any adult shit or piss, and would be embarrassed or disgusted if they did. Why did children say "pee-pee" and "poo-poo," and then giggle? Yon have read scholarly books about taboos on "bodily functions,'' but why was shitting worse than sneezing?
Cora Zickwolfe, who lived in a remote rural area of Arizona and whose husband commuted to Tncson, arranged with her nearest neighbor, Phyllis McII, for each of them to keep an Ozo focused on die bulletin board hi the other's kitchen. On the bulletin board was a note that said "OK." If there was any trouble and she couldn't get to the phone, she would take down the note, or if she had time, write another.
In April 1992, about the time her husband usually got home, an intruder broke into the house and seized Mrs. Zickwolfe before she had time to get to the bulletin board. He dragged her into the bedroom and forced her to disrobe. The state troopers got there hi fifteen minutes, and Cora never spoke to her friend Phyllis again.
Between 1992 and 2002 more than six hundred improvements and supplements to the Ozo were recorded. The most important of these
was the power system created by focusing the Ozo at a narrow aperture on die interior of the Sun. Others included the system of satellite slave units in stationary orbits and a computerized tracer device which would keep the Ozo focused on any subject
Using the tracer, an entomologist in Mexico City is following the ancestral line of a honey bee. The images bloom and expire, ten every second: the tracer is following each queen back to the egg, men the egg to the queen that laid it, then that queen to the egg. Tens of thousands of generations have passed; in two thousand hours, beginning with a Paleocene bee, he has traveled back into the Cretaceous. He stops at intervals to follow the bee in real time, then accelerates again. The hive is growing smaller, more primitive. Now it is only a cluster of round cells, and the bee is different, more like a wasp. His year's labor is coming to fruition. He watches, forgetting to eat, almost to breathe.
In your mother's study after she dies, you find an elaborate chart of her ancestors and your father's. You retrieve the program for it, punch it in, and idly watch a random sampling, back into time, first me female line, then the male ... a teacher of biology in Boston, a suffragette, a corn merchant, a singer, a Dutch fanner in New York, a British sailor, a German musician. Their faces glow in the screen, bright-eyed, cheeks flushed with life. Someday you too will be only a aeries of images in a screen.
Smith is watching the planet Mars. The clockwork which turns the Ozo to follow the planet, even when it is below the horizon, makes it possible for him to focus instantly on the surface, but he never does this. He takes up his position hundreds of thousands of miles away, then slowly approaches, in order to see the red spark grow to a disk, then to a yellow sunlit ball hanging hi darkness. Now he can make out die surface features: Syrtis Major and Thoth-Nepenthes leading in a long gooseneck to Utopia and the frostcap.
The image as it swells hypnotically toward him is clear and sharp, without tremor or atmospheric distortion. It is summer in the northern hemisphere: Utopia is wide and dark. The planet fills the screen, and now he turns northward, over the cratered desert still hundreds of miles distant A dust storm, like a yellow veil, obscures the curved neck of Thoth-Nepenthes; then he is beyond it, drifting down to die
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edge of the frostcap. The limb of the planet reappears; he floats like a glider over the dark surface tinted with rose and violet-gray; now he can see its nubbly texture; now he can make out individual plants. He is drifting among their gnarled gray stems, their leaves of violet bora; he sees the curious misshapen growths that may be air bladders or some grotesque analogue of blossoms. Now, at the edge of the screen, something black and spindling leaps. He follows it instantly, finds it, brings it hugely magnified into the center of the screen: a thing like a hairy beetle, its body covered with thick black hairs or spines; it stands on six jointed legs, waving its antennae, its mouth parts busy. And its four bright eyes stare into his, across forty million miles.
Smith's hair got whiter and thinner. Before the 1992 Crash, he made heavy contributions to the International Red Cross and to volunteer organizations in Europe, Asia and Africa. He got drunk periodically, but always alone. From 1993 to 1996 he stopped reading the newspapers.
He wrote down the coordinates for the plane crash in which his daughter and her husband had died, but never used them.
At intervals while dressing or looking into the bathroom mirror, he stared as if into an invisible camera and raised one finger. In his last years he wrote some poems.
We know his name. Patient researchers, using advanced scanning techniques, followed his letters back through the postal system and found him, but by that time he was safely dead.
The whole world has been at peace for more than a generation. Crime is almost unheard of. Free energy has made the world rich, but the population is stable, even though early detection has wiped out most diseases. Everyone can do whatever he likes, providing his neighbors would not disapprove, and after all, their views are the same as bis own.
Yon are forty, a respected scholar, taking a few days out to review your life, as many people do at your age. You have watched your mother and father coupling on the night they conceived you, watched yourself growing in her womb, first a red tadpole, then a thing like an embryo chicken, then a big-headed baby kicking and squirming. You have seen yourself delivered, seen the first moment when your
bloody head broke into the light. You have seen yourself staggering about the nursery in rompers, clutching a yellow plastic duck. Now you are watching yourself hiding behind the fallen tree on the hill, and you realize that there are no secret places. And beyond you in the ghostly future you know that someone is watching you as you watch; and beyond that watcher another, and beyond that another. . . . Forever.
from Competition 13" Excerpts from myopic early sf or Utopian novels
It was after a Popular Concert which had included all of Bach's Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello that I ventured to remonstrate with my Mentor.
"Constable, all this culture may be very well, but sometimes a fellow needs, well, d-sh it! What dd ordinary people nowadays do foe amusement?"
He frowned slightly. "My dear sir, it is out of consideration for you that I have exposed you only to our lighter forms of entertainment I presume you are referring to something in the nature of a Music Hall, or Vaudeville. I assure you that, since the advent of Universal Education, even the popular taste has become too refined to tolerate the foolishness of sentimental songs and lurid melodrama. Also, please do not use again the expression you have just uttered. I mean the one beginning with the letter D. Our twentieth-century society has grown unaccustomed to language of such violence."
—David T. J. Doughan
We sped through the city in what I judged to be a locomotive, although there were no tracks. "What new wonder shall I see?" I mused, for many were the sights shown me already. My guide, an illustrious professor, halted the machine.
"In this mill, fine white flour is made. All unwholesome parts of the grain are removed and certain substances poisonous to insects and rodents are introduced." I followed in as he continued: "Only women are employed here, though they don't stay long."
"Why not?" I shouted over the din, my eye caught by a certain face.
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