"Kit Reed - Judas Bomb" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reed Kit)

JUDAS BOMB
Kit Reed
A favourite, and very rewarding, device of science-fiction writers is
the reductio ad extremum. First, a present-day movement or trend is
isolated. Secondly, it is visualised as running riot. Thirdly, we are offered
some sort of judgment, overt or implied, on the desirability of the
situation so imagined, and of its outcome. Kit Reed's story belongs to this
category, and is notable not only for its visualisation (which makes for
great vividness and excitement) but also for the way in which its final,
fairly definite, moral verdict is subtly shot with pathos. For the time
being Daddy-o may be in subjection to the Hypos and the Judases, but
they can no more win against him ultimately than a flick-knife can win
against… well, a Bomb. They, after all, are just bodies - bodies crippled,
at that, by self-imposed taboos and fetishes. Daddy-o is a mind.


It happened, in the days when the young ruled, that Washington got a
bomb. The Hypos found out about it when one of the Judas Gang got
swell-headed and started to brag. He stepped over the marker into Hypo
country around Delaware, and the Hypos got him and he didn't brag any
more. Little Easter, Franko's man, took care of him, and while Little
Easter was working on him he said the Hypos had better lay off because
Washington had a bomb. Little Easter finished what he was doing and
then he told Franko and the Hypos held a council of war. ,
From Buffalo and Philadelphia and Albany the Hypos came, and they
parked their 'cicles in ramshackle Rockefeller
Centre, Franko's pad, and they parleyed, sitting crosslegged in the
deserted square where skaters had glided before the gangs moved out of
the neighbourhoods into the city and the country and the world. They sat,
in silver-sheen jackets sewn for them by the squares, and they talked
about the bomb, oblivious of the beer cans, the garbage, the cigarette
butts that littered the ground and piled high in the corners.
Franko said, "You know what they're gonna do with that bomb."
Netta Rampo was tall and broad and tough. She was from Trenton, and
she ran the Hypettes. She made a gesture. "That's what they'll do."
 "Oh, man, worse'n that. They're not gonna use it on us. We don't bug
them half as much as the Comradskis. They'll find a way to drop it over
there. Then———" Franko ground his boot heel into Netta Rampo's hand.
"That's what'll happen to us." She didn't even wince. "It'll be the last
rumble, man. We'll get it from all over - Kiev, Leningrad, Peiping - they'll
be plantin' bombs like appleseed, and it'll be the end."
Billy from Philly, sprawled on his elbows, kicked at the dirt. "So?"
"So we gotta stop 'em." Automatically, Franko zipped and unzipped his
jacket. Twenty heads turned toward him. Twenty pairs of eyes coldly
looked him up and down. "We gotta get a bomb. We gotta get that bomb."
They talked long into the night, and it was decided that one of them
would have to do the job - alone. They wrangled on, and every once in a
while one of them would interrupt Franko and Little Easter would get him
and it would be very quiet after that.
"Okay," Franko said at dawn. "We gotta decide who's going. Netta's out