"Joe Haldeman - Four Short Novels" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

this remorseless getting and spending laying waste our years.
Wars were all fought in Death Valley, with primitive hand weapons, and the United States grew
wealthy renting the place out, until it inevitably found itself fighting a series of wars for
Death Valley, during one of which O’Malley himself finally died, charging a phalanx of no-longer-
immortal pikemen on his robotic horse, waving a broken sword. His final words were, famously, “Oh,
shit.”
Death Valley eventually wound up in the hands of the Bertelsmann Corporation, which ultimately
ruled the world. But by that time, Manny’s advertising had been so effective that no one cared.
Everybody was in uniform, lining up to do their bit for Bertelsmann.
Even the advertising scientists. Even the high management of Bertelsmann.
There was a worldwide referendum, utilizing something indistinguishable from telepathy, where
everybody agreed to change the name of the planet to Death Valley, and on the eve of the new
century, A.D. 3000, have at each other.
Thus O’Malley’s ultimate ad campaign achieved the ultimate victory: a world that consumed
itself.

The Way of All Flesh


EVENTUALLY IT CAME TO PASS that no one ever had to die, so long as just one person loved them.
The process that provided immortality was fueled that way.
Almost everybody can find someone to love him or her, at least for a little while, and if and
when that someone says good-bye, most people can clean up their act enough to find yet another.
But every now and then you find a specimen who is so unlovable that he can’t even get a hungry
dog to take a biscuit from his hand. Babies take one look at him and get the colic. Women cross
their legs as he passes by. Ardent homosexuals drop their collective gaze. Old people desperate
for company feign sleep.
The most extreme such specimen was Custer Tralia. Custer came out of the womb with teeth, and
bit the doctor. In grade school he broke up the love training sessions with highly toxic farts. He
celebrated puberty by not washing for a year. All through middle school and high school, he made
loving couples into enemies by spreading clever vicious lies. He formed a Masturbation Club and
didn’t allow anybody else to join. In his graduation yearbook, he was unanimously voted “The One
Least Likely to Survive, If We Have Anything to Do with It.”
In college, he became truly reckless. When everybody else was feeling the first whiff of
mortality and frantically seducing in self-defense, Custer declared that he hated women almost as
much as he hated men, and he reveled in his freedom from love; his superior detachment from the
cloying crowd. Death was nothing compared to the hell of dependency. When, at the beginning of his
junior year, he had to declare what his profession was going to be, he wrote down “hermit” for
first, second, and third choices.
The world was getting pretty damned crowded, though, since a lot of people loved each other so
much they turned out copy after copy of themselves. The only place Custer could go and be truly
alone was the Australian outback. He had a helicopter drop him there with a big water tank and
crates of food. They said they’d check back in a year, and Custer said don’t bother. If you’ve
decided not to live forever, a few years or decades one way or the other don’t make much
difference.
He found peace among the wallabies and dingoes. A kangaroo began to follow him around, and he


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