10 Analogs Of The Future E-Book

Rob Chilson

• Herausgeber: Boruma Publishing
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Longtime science fiction writers Rob Chilson and William F. Wu collaborated on these ten stories, all of which first appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine. Chilson is especially known for his work in Analog, as is Wu, a finalist for multiple Hugo and Nebula awards. This collection is enhanced by their light-hearted, informative introduction and afterwords to each story.

~~~~~ Excerpt ~~~~~

Roger was dozing in his seat when he felt the familiar small hands and bony knees of his daughter climbing into his lap. He opened his eyes and put one arm around her; she, in turn, had one firm arm around Buffalo Bill’s neck. “Hi, sweetie,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Something the matter?”

Marta looked solemnly out into the starry night. The car seemed to be hovering motionless in the sky. A strange black sky, with no ground visible. Earth was invisible far below them; it could not be seen through any of their windows.

They had flown out of the shadow of Earth, thrown by their retained rotational velocity. Now Roger would keep the sun under them, charge the hull with electricity to ward off the solar wind, and pray. The thermo-electric elements kept the car cool enough, but the floor and walls were warm to the touch. The windows were edged with flame from the sunlight below.

“Where are we?” Marta asked.

Roger cleared his throat. “We’re nearly halfway to the moon, sweetie.” Luna was visible off to the right, as if on the horizon.

“Oh.” She considered the stars thoughtfully. Finally, unexpectedly, she asked, “Are we going to be like the tigers?”

Startled, Roger laughed. “Sure. You like that one?” He used a light tone, to see if she would turn playful.

Marta nodded, meeting his gaze solemnly.

Marta said sleepily, “It’s always night out here,” and touched her nose to his. He kissed her cheek.

“Do you know one about buffaloes?” she asked, cuddling.

“Uh, yeah, I know a song about where buffalo roam. Or used to, at least. Shall I teach it to you?”

“Yeah!”

“Okay.” Roger paused to get the lyrics straight and as he did, he reflected that buffaloes had been confined to zoos and parks even longer than tigers. “Oh, give me a home….”

As he sang and cuddled his daughter, Roger brooded over his position and course. He had been brooding over the course for days. They were approaching turnover time for travel to the Moon or Ell Clusters, and still piling on gee. Luna, of course, was nowhere near his line of flight. He would pass near the L-4 Cluster as space distances go, but it would scarcely be visible.

The transponder had beeped occasionally— it sounded off audibly when tweaked by questing beams, even as it responded. Now Roger shut off its responses. To have come out without filing a flight plan or with a silent transponder would have been a giveaway; the Patrol would have been all over him at once. Now, though, maybe he had left it on too long.

As it was, the transponder had beeped every fifteen minutes or so since he had first been warned of his deviation from his LEO destination. They knew where he was, how fast he was accelerating, and in what direction. Where were they?

Roger hugged his daughter, sang louder as she joined in the chorus. He couldn’t help glancing around at all the windows, expecting to see the prow of a CisLunar Patrol ship, evil menace incarnate, loom near them. If they caught him, he would lose his daughter.

He could think of nothing else to do. He could only run.

Leseprobe

10 Analogs of the Future

By Rob Chilson and William F. Wu

Artwork by Linda Cappel

Copyright © 2020 Rob Chilson and William F. Wu

Copyright Acknowledgements

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

“The Ungood Earth” copyright © 1985 Rob Chilson and William F. Wu. Analog, ed. Stanley Schmidt. CV:6 (June 1985).

“Flash to Darkness” copyright © 1985 Rob Chilson and William F. Wu. Analog, ed. Stanley Schmidt. CV:9 (Sept. 1985).

“Be Ashamed to Die” copyright © 1986 Rob Chilson and William F. Wu. Analog, ed. Stanley Schmidt. CVI:7 (July 1986).

“Fly Me to the Moon” copyright © 1986 Rob Chilson and William F. Wu. Analog, ed. Stanley Schmidt. CVI:13 (Mid-December 1986).

“High Power” copyright ©1987 Rob Chilson and William F. Wu.

Analog, ed. Stanley Schmidt. CVII:9 (September 1987).

“No Damn Atoms” copyright © 1987 Rob Chilson and William F. Wu.

Analog, ed. Stanley Schmidt. CVII:10 (October 1987).

“A Hog on Ice” copyright © 1987 Rob Chilson and William F. Wu.

Analog, ed. Stanley Schmidt. CVII:12 (December 1987).

“Diogenes’s Lantern” copyright © 1989 Rob Chilson and William F. Wu. Analog, ed. Stanley Schmidt. CIX:1 (January 1989).

“Distant Tigers” copyright © 1991 Rob Chilson and William F. Wu.

Analog, ed. Stanley Schmidt. CXI:8&9 (July 1991 Special Double Issue).

“For Many Shall Come in My Name,” copyright © 1994 Rob Chilson and William F. Wu. Analog, ed. Stanley Schmidt. Vol. CXIV No.12 (October 1994).

Dedication

In a decision both goofy and egotistical, we hereby dedicate our mutual halves of this collection to each other.

Acknowledgements

William F. Wu: Rob and I wrote these stories over a period of many years. Our most important debt is to Stanley Schmidt, the editor of Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine who accepted all of these stories for publication. (But if you don’t like our stories, blame us. Even better, just blame Rob.)

I am grateful to many people who offered a range of friendship, affection, support, and help. In no particular order, those include Laura J. LeHew; Diana G. Gallagher, who for a part of this time was Diana G. Wu; and Chelsea Streb. Then and now, I owe gratitude for the friendship and help from my friend and colleague Michael D. Toman. I’m also indebted to Alan Brennert, a friend and remarkably accomplished writer. Also crucial to this part of my life are Lynette M. Burrows and Jeri and Rusty Solberg. Times change but my thanks and appreciation remain.

Rob Chilson: Notice how Bill puts his part first? This is not inappropriate, though not alphabetical. The stories were published as by “Chilson and Wu,” partly because I already was well-known at Analog magazine, and partly because “Chilson and Wu” flows better than “Wu and Chilson”. So, like Bill, I agree our most important debt is to Stanley Schmidt; but my personal debt to Bill is as large. If he had not agreed to look at, and even meddle with, our first collaboration, this book would not be, and our long strange trip would have been as much fun, but not as productive.

Additionally, I owe much more than this book to the various members of the nameless writers’ group Bill and I founded, particularly to three remarkable women who have been its mainstays: Alysen Tellure, Lynette Burrows, and Jan Gephardt. They, and other members of the group, did much to unsnarl my turgid prose.

Introduction

Bill Wu: Yes, we like the play on words in the title to this collection. Though digital technology has overtaken the older analog tech, the metaphorical meaning of the word works for our purposes. And, happily, all of these stories first appeared in the magazine Analog Science Fiction and Fact. That title long ago replaced the magazine’s name “Astounding Stories” from an even earlier time. So we offer these tales as possibilities that may be analogous to our future, not as predictions.

I first met Rob Chilson on three occasions, which is to say, all three times seemed to be the first time. That’s another way of saying, neither of us cared about meeting the other the first two times; we had important concerns, instead.

We didn’t care that much the third time, either.

The first time, nearly lost in the mists of my own fuzzy memory, was in 1979, at the North American Science Fiction Convention in Louisville, Kentucky, a year when the world convention was in the United Kingdom. I was in my twenties and had sold a novelette to George Scithers, editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, as it was named at the time, after my first two professional sales to British anthologies. I wanted to meet him and he was one of the guests of honor. Writer Michael D. Toman and a couple of other friends drove from East Lansing, Michigan, to get me in Ann Arbor, then we went south to Louisville.

I later came to know and like George Scithers, but this first occasion was awkward. After meeting him briefly Friday evening, I went to an open party advertised as being in one of the hotel rooms. It was the most stifling excuse for an s.f. con party I’ve ever seen.

I walked in through an open doorway; John M. Ford, who became a regular contributor to George, happened to be standing at the doorway and I’d met him the night before, too. Almost everyone else was sitting on the floor, with a few people on the sparse furniture. George introduced me, saying, “He writes for me,” which was nice to hear but a little odd, since I had sold him exactly one story. I found a place to stand and realized that no one else was speaking or moving. Everyone was watching George.

After a moment, George talked a little about the magazine. He was a retired Army colonel and his mannerisms seemed formal. Occasionally people would ask a question as though this was a class. One person actually raised his hand. George told all of us to feel free to speak right up.

No one did.

The atmosphere was infectious; I found myself with nothing to say and too intimidated to say it. While I wanted to leave, I felt I had to stay a while to be polite. After all, I planned to submit more stories to him in the future. When I decided I’d been polite enough, I thought about leaving and realized that any time anyone moved, the motion seemed to create a ripple effect as everyone looked to see what was happening. No one left.

So what does this have to do with Rob Chilson?

Someone braver than I was eventually left and I, with a polite nod to George, was sucked out in the slipstream.

I strode up the hall, deeply relieved, until I reached a spot where some guy I knew was talking to a guy I didn’t know. Back then, I was often teased for being skinny and the guy I didn’t know was around my height and about as skinny. The guy I knew—I have no memory of who that was—introduced the stranger to me as Rob Chilson. We shook hands and he asked me if “this was the way to the Scithers party.”

I coulda warned him. Any decent person would have. I, on the other hand, said, “Yeah,” and fled up the hallway. If the “party” atmosphere devoured him, so what? I gave Rob Chilson no further thought for a couple of years.

*****

Rob Chilson here. Bill’s account of our non-historic first meeting pretty much accords with mine. In 1979 I’d had three books published and a dozen or two stories in various magazines, starting in 1968. (It was painful to be so young.) But I’d only been to three or four conventions, though one was WorldCon ‘76 in Kansas City. I missed the best part of that con because, not having been invited, I did not go to any parties. (It was still painful to be so young!) Also, I attended as a fan, not knowing how to apply as a writer. But I attended Archon One in St. Louis as a writer, met Wilson “Bob” Tucker and other lights, and learned that I was invited to any and all parties. I’d also attended the last BYOBcon in Kansas City, in May ‘79, where I met Karl Edward Wagner and his delightful wife, Barbara. I was to meet them again at the NASFiC in Louisville. I think I had also been to my first Chambanacon in Champaign-Urbana, Ill.

I had arranged to carpool from St. Louis with some friends I’d met at Archon, and so I wasn’t as alone as I’d been at WorldCon. I had a few friends, one of whom accompanied me to Scithers’s party. Like Bill, I have absolutely no memory of who that could have been.

My memory of Scithers’s “Open House” is much like Bill’s: We were mostly young, inexperienced writers who feared to traduce the Unwritten Law. The more fearful in that the Law, being Unwritten, was also unknown to us. One false word and your career is over, we subconsciously felt. Also, our experience of authority was mostly limited to school, so we acted like a class, and being nerds, we weren’t the unruly ones. This in turn affected George, who fell into the role of teacher before a well-behaved class.

I have no idea how I got up the nerve to leave.

Our next, equally inconsequential meeting, was in Denver, WorldCon ‘81. By then I’d been to a number of regional cons, I had a number of friends, and Denvention ‘81 was my third national con. It was far more enjoyable than my first, and when I staggered into Stapleton International Airport, I’d had 19 hours of sleep in the past 5 days.

That may explain why I have almost no memory of meeting Bill Wu the second time. Or maybe he’s just not a memorable guy. I have a fuzzy image of an anonymous hotel hallway, of being introduced to a total stranger by, I think, whoever was with me. Be a kick if it was the same as the first introducer, but not likely. And the ships pass in the nighted hallway.

*****

Bill: That benighted hallway has always been fuzzy in my memory, but I remember the moment itself. I was going somewhere potentially interesting and, again, someone I knew in the hallway (I’m sure it was not the same guy as before, but he’s equally forgotten) introduced me to some other guy. It was Rob, of course, and I said, “I think we’ve met before.” He said, “Yes, I think we have.” Then I continued in my quest for that potentially interesting place and he ignored me in equal measure. “Who cares?” would express our mutual levels of interest.

In August of 1982, I moved back to the Kansas City area, where I was born and raised, but the move took up expenses that might otherwise have taken me to worldcon. I missed it that year but went to the airport to pick up someone who had gone. That guy, whom I could identify but don’t wish to embarrass by association with Rob and me, introduced me to Rob Chilson for the third time. Hey, this time the memory actually took. We shook hands in the airport for the third time, recalled that we had met previously, and then went our separate ways again. After all, who cares?

I saw Rob a number of times at the local science fiction club and the annual s.f. convention, ConQuest. We talked occasionally but not really very much. Between fall of ‘82 and spring of ‘84, I was occupied with writing a lot of fiction that never sold, rightfully so. I was also in a relationship, but never mind that now; I’m sure the woman in question wouldn’t care about being included here. Fortunately, I also was working on the book that would become my first published novel, while my fifth professional short fiction sale was published and even nominated for awards. I also sold a short story to Omni magazine, which brought about this event:

At a pre-convention party for the ‘84 Conquest, Rob and I were talking with some friends and I mentioned the sale to Omni. Rob said, “I never submitted there, because I thought it would too hard to sell there, but if he can do it, anybody can.” Much laughter followed, including mine.

That’s when I knew, five years after we were first introduced, that we could be friends. And the summer of 1984 turned out to be interesting, for sure.

*****

Rob again: My journey to our third and final first meeting began in the summer of ‘82. I had not intended to go to the Chicago worldcon that year, being impoverished, but I sold a story to a gamer ‘zine and had enough funds to buy a membership and about one-eighth of writer Robin Wayne Bailey’s room—he urged me to go, as I recall, a good decision. We had a crowded and fun convention, and the Baileys and I took the same plane home. In the airport waiting room we were approached by a teenaged boy who asked if we’d been to worldcon. We regarded him warily, for teenaged male s.f. fans can be socially inept, to put it gently. But this one was quite ept.

And as we deplaned at Kansas City, the lad was met by his mother, who had been driven to the airport by William F. Wu.

I looked at him with dawning recognition: Do I know that guy? After many minutes of conversation, we decided that we had…met.

(I never sold a word to Omni.) We met occasionally at meetings of the local club, where, having nothing else in common, we talked writing. (Writers have been known to do this.) I particularly remember one conversation because Bill had this hacking racking cough that left him so breathless all he could do was gasp, “Yeah,” in answer. Most intelligent and interesting conversation I ever had with him. We also met at a little writers’ conclave founded by Robin Wayne Bailey, where we ate hamburgers (ah, Gunter’s of fond memory!) and also talked writing. The upshot was a decision to collaborate. Whose idea was it? Well, if you like the stories here, it was my idea. If not, it was Bill’s.

THE UNGOOD EARTH

When Howard Hampton came up on the porch and knocked, Jimmy Li was sitting bleakly in the kitchen of the old Bigelow house. The younger man looked around dully, started to get up, then recognized his neighbor.

“Oh, it’s you; come on in, How.”

Jimmy was the only one who had called him “How” in forty years.

“Hope I’m not disturbin’ you,” he said. “The boys dropped in and I decided to make m’self scarce.” The screen door banged behind him.

“Not at all. Get you anything?” Jimmy had slumped back into his chair.

“No thanks,” said Howard, seating himself at the table. The pink-checked cloth was covered with papers: bank statements and some kind of advertisement, looked like a real estate ad.

“What’s eatin’ you?” he asked the younger man.

Jimmy Li was in his early fifties, though he looked younger with his short, still-black hair. He was chunky and muscular in his overalls. A city boy, he’d been to a regular college, not ag. Had had some fool notion of retiring and living on a farm; he’d told Howard it had something to do with distant Chinese ancestors. Howard had taken more interest in the younger man’s struggle than he had in his own. His help had paid off; the boy’d become a competent farmer.

Those distant Chinese must’ve passed on something; Howard’s grandsons lacked a quarter of Jimmy’s feel for the land.

“Don’t know if you saw this,” said Jimmy, pushing the ad toward him.

Howard glanced at the glossy brochure. “Come to think of it, my son John showed me somethin’ like this. Foolishness. I chucked it.”

“I’m afraid I don’t have the option,” said Jimmy. His dark face, darker from the sun these past two years, was glum.

Howard glanced uncertainly at the ad. National Chemical, Inc., had developed a new dry-land reed with these tailored genes they had, which braced itself not with cellulose, but with some damn kind of plastic fiber. They wanted to lease land and hire farmers to farm it, raising these things—their way.

Poor sort of farmer that lets anybody tell him how to farm his own land.

“Broke?” Howard asked.

“Yeah. Well, not at the moment. If my probeans come in like I hope they will, I’ll make expenses and a small profit, on paper. That’s a real help when it comes to borrowing. But you and I know it’s a downhill slide. Each year I wind up with less in my account.”

Howard understood all too well. Even when you deducted all expenses for things like new vehicles and equipment, you still found you had gone in the red. It was a fact of life; farmers sold wholesale and bought retail, and who could compete with the food factories?

“So you’re sellin’ out?”

“Haven’t made up my mind. I can still wait till next year, but not longer than that; by then NCI will have leased all the land it will want. And there won’t be any other market; once NCI leases most of the land here, their competition will look elsewhere. So if I don’t sell before then, I’ll be stuck.”

Since Howard hadn’t considered taking up their offer, he hadn’t thought about it before. But now that Jimmy mentioned it, he could see that this offer was only good for this year or next. It hadn’t been easy for Jimmy. It’d been a lone fight, except for Howard. His wife Lily had refused to accompany him to the country.

“Well. Reckon I’ll miss you.” Howard spoke slowly, watching him, but got no rise out of the other man. Jimmy just looked at him, haggard.

“And I’ll miss you—unless I take this leasing offer.”

Howard couldn’t conceal his distaste for the idea. “Not my kind o’ farmin’.”

“Mine, either.” Jimmy grimaced. “How long do you think you can hold out, as an old-time farmer?”

“What do you mean?” Howard asked carefully. He had given much thought to that lately.

Jimmy sighed. “I spent twenty-five years in business, mostly in the food industry, learning all about marginal businesses among other things, and trend analysis. I’ve tracked this trend back as far as 1960.”

Howard blinked at him, shaken.

“Yeah. It was a better, simpler life then. But modern problems were already visible, though the cloud, as they say, was no bigger than a man’s hand. In that year, the American public spent a mere 19 percent of its income on food. In 1970, it spent a mere 17 percent. At that rate it would have hit zero in 2045 or thereabouts. Think that’s bad? It’s worse than that.”

Jimmy got up and crossed to the fridge, pulling out two bottles of beer. “It’s worse than that. Because it dropped to 15 percent, not in 1980 as you might expect, but in 1978—and the trend followed that curve from there. It could actually hit zero by 2010!”

Howard stared at him, the open bottle forgotten in his hand. “That’s impossible! Who’d grow food if they couldn’t sell it? Who’d process it, pack it, transport it?”

“What’s the world’s largest market for food?”

“Th’ gov’ment. But—”

“Quite. How long has it been since you’ve sold wheat—corn—beans—millet—on the open market? Ten years?”

Howard was silent, but he made it more. It startled him, thinking back, to realize how long it had been since he could make a profit with commodity foods on the open market. Whole protein beans, now, he still could sell—but already there was agitation in the industry for the Department of Agriculture to raise its floors there, too; the market price was falling steeply. That was why John’d shown him that thing from NCI—and no doubt why Jimmy was looking it over.

“So you think the government will buy up all the food and give it away?”

“Already a third of the food we grow is sold to and given away by the government. Practically everybody qualifies for it. Some of it’s eaten by poor people overseas, but unfortunately every big city on earth these days has modern sewage treatment facilities.”

The modern way to treat sewage was to sterilize it, then feed it to algae, then do things with the algae: it made good but nowadays too expensive fertilizer; it could be used as the starting point for a thousand chemicals that used to be made from oil; or it could be made into food, or fed to yeast and the yeast made into food.

Butter and cheese and milk, fake flour, cornstarch, flaked potatoes, pea soup, fake meat from textured vegetable protein, fruit juices, vegetable soup stocks, pasta—why, the list was endless and getting longer every day.

“The world just doesn’t need farmers anymore,” Jimmy said sadly.

“And so now they’re turning farms into plastic mines,” Howard snorted.

Jimmy sighed. “My father was an engineer, and his father was a doctor. Beyond that, I forget. But far enough back, in southern China, my folks were peasants—which is to say, farmers. I guess my family never lost some of that thinking, because my folks used to say, only land has permanent value. And that everybody has to eat, so the people who grow the food support the entire society. Somehow or other, that sunk in. I’ve always wanted to be a farmer. Only now it’s too late. It’s the food factories that really feed the public. Farms nowadays are basically producers of luxury goods. The real money is in the parks and dude ranches. Even dude farms!”

Those where Howard’s own sentiments. But—”Folks’d never eat all that fake stuff if they could get real food,” he growled.

Jimmy shrugged unhappily and set his bottle down. “My grandkids prefer the fake stuff, especially meat. I don’t mind eating chicken myself—even killing my own, now you showed me how—but not rabbits. Or cows.”

Howard frowned, drank beer. It was a common attitude. All his life long he’d known peole who were too fine-haired to eat, say, rabbit or squirrel, at least not any they’d known personally. Stubbornly he said, “Yeah—but the fake stuff just don’t taste right.”

“Tasting right is a function of what you’re used to—what you ate when you were growing up. My grandkids are growing up on the fake stuff; it tastes right to them.”

That was a new thought; Howard was shocked by it. Why, there must be a whole generation growing up that maybe wouldn’t want real food if it could get it!

“My God,” he said softly, despairing. “How can the farmer make a livin’?”

Jimmy dropped his gaze to the floor and shook his head.

*****

Howard had crossed Jimmy Li’s fields and was half across his own before he raised his head. This was a field of protein beans, his major crop for the past six years; on the back side he had a field of the new genetically altered corn to sell to the government to cover expenses. This would be the last year for that; they were cutting the floor back down in staple foods, because the food factories could feed the population so much more cheaply that farmers no longer had any support from the taxpayers.

Now probeans were going the same way—first the price falls under competition from the food factories, then the gover’ment steps in and subsidizes the farmer till the taxpayers howls, then the farmer’s got to scramble.

Turn the whole world into a goddam amusement park next…

The beans looked good, the shoulder-high plants sturdy, the ripening beans at the tips where the harvester could get at them turning ripe straw-yellow. Across the field Howard found the old footpath among the trees along the creek. Walking silently from an old hunter’s habit, he came up behind a line of those aspen that in Missouri are called “red birch.”

Voices sounded from beyond it, speaking casually.

Through the trees he saw his son John and two of “the boys,” his grown grandsons Bill, John’s son, and Allen Wade, Susie’s boy. “In those days this field and the corn field were in pasture.” John jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Man could raise cattle in them days and make a livin’.”

“They don’t need stock raisers at all now, or so I read,” said Bill. “They can cut off and culture bits of the carniculture, so they will never have to kill another cow—when they go to full production.”

Howard had read that. It would kill the ten-thousandth of a market there had been for livestock.

Carniculture had beaten back textured vegetable protein. They cut a cow—or pig or chicken or rabbit or peacock—into, say, ten thousand pieces and put each piece into a suitable nutrient medium. Pretty soon the piece was as big as the animal it came from, pure firm meat, no bones, fat only if wanted. The nutrient medium was made from protein beans—only now they were making it cheaper in the food factories.

“There’s just no way a farmer can compete, I mean a regular dirt farmer, Dad,” said young Bill. “Factory farming, now, is no assurance either, because they can make plastics and things out of sewage and algae, too. But there’s a limit to the kind of capacity the factories have, and if they’re making food, they can’t make plastics.”

“There’s still a market for fruit,” said John quickly.

“Diminishing,” said Allen. “The major market was fruit juices and things like pies, and the food factories have moved in.”

Howard faded back and presently turned off on a little-used path hidden between bushes. Despite the blurring of his vision he bent under the trees along the creek and touched the earth. Deer tracks; big doe and a fawn. They got fat on probeans.

There was a footbridge here, a mere plank laid across from bank to bank. A two by six, what they called a five by fifteen nowadays. Howard hadn’t crossed it in a year or so and bent again to check the ends for rot. They were laid on rocks and besides, he’d used artificial wood—rayon fiber in rayon foam, with clay mixed in to discourage termites. It was sound; he crossed swiftly.

There was an old log not far from the board. It had been here since he was a young man, a meter thick in those days but sunk to half that now, soft and punky. He seated himself on it, put elbows on knees and chin on the backs of his hands. It was cool and dim in the cavern of the trees.

It wasn’t merely that they wanted to sell his land. God knows, that was nothing new. This leasing business was a blind, their way of getting him to accept the inevitable. Sell and retire! But “the boys” had not been raised on the farm as John had been, and he had been, and his father Morris had been. It was nothing new, that they should counsel selling it, even in a sneaky round-about way like this.

No, what caused this slamming about the breastbone had been what Jimmy Li had said. For years the boys’d been saying farming was playing out and he’d refused to listen. But Jimmy knew his stuff, and besides—once the trend was pointed out—

And now here in the cool shade cave his heart was burning faintly. He grinned dryly, looking out at the sun-blasted field outside. No doubt his old body was trying to give him a way out, but modern science had closed that door. His heart wouldn’t fail.

After a bit his breathing slowed and he stood up. But he stood with head hanging, arms dangling, like an old cow run too far.

Always, since the days of flint and clay sickles, there had been farmers. In time of “the breaking of Nations,” as the poet Hardy had said.

But—free food?

Who could compete with free food?

The shiny cities with all their vulgar artificialities had eaten him. His heart had tried to stop, horrified, at the prospect of the loss, not of a farm, but of a way of life.

*****

In the yard he glared at Bill’s sporty airboat and snorted. Never catch him up in one of those things. It was sleek, a shiny green, not made of metal as he well knew, but of one of the fortalics that’d chased metal out of most high-strength applications. It looked like a breathless bit of tomorrow against the house beyond.

The house had been stylish and expensive when new. His father had built it to his mother’s plans in the glory days of farming, before food factories and tailored genes. It was made of wood, on a foundation of squared stones, neatly sided and painted white. The shutters were green with a design on them and there was a little of what his father’d called “fiddle-dee-dee work” around the gables; those were the only decorations. Brick chimneys they didn’t need anymore, but he could remember the scent of wood smoke from them. Trees and lilacs in the yard, and a porch, with a porch swing. The house was old enough to be comfortable and homey, but in excellent condition.

On the step he paused. Bill’s wife Fiantha had a shrill voice—city folks seemed to get louder with each generation.

“It’s not as if the land can be made to pay for many more years. And a deal like this doesn’t come along every year.”

“Johnnie wouldn’t want to break his heart,” said John’s Tinette. John and Tinette ran the farm these days, with Howard a junior partner. “Even keeping the house and yard—”

Howard stamped and scraped noisily on the mat and they broke off. When he entered they exchanged glances as transparently as children and changed the subject. The other men appeared presently and a meal was served. Howard as usual was taken by surprise by this. The women hadn’t gone off to the kitchen, and he didn’t know how they’d cooked it.

He decided to jump their guns, and while Tinette was still serving he said, “Been think’ about sellin’ the land again?”

Even John, who knew him, looked startled. “How’d you know?”

“Figures. Only reason the boys come by.”

Bill flushed and Allen looked angry.

“Well, you know the state of affairs. Haven’t had a good profitable year for ten, ‘leven years. How long can we go on like this?”

Not past 2010, he wanted to tell them, but only nodded tersely, swallowed stewed corn.

“Fruit’s a possibility, but I don’t like it any better’n you. It’s a fully developed market, and long ago you warned me against going into a fully developed market. Now, I’m of no mind to sell the land. But this deal with NCI—”

“How long a lease they talkin’ about?”

It was the first show of interest he’d made. “Ten years, with option for another ten.”

“And it’d say that if they didn’t like plastic reeds, they could switch you to some other crop? And you’d have to do just what they say?”

“Yes.” John banged his cup down. “It’s hardly a new proposition! Farmers’ve been raising food for canneries and doin’ it just their way for a hundred years!”

“Mebbe so.” Howard studied it for a few minutes, eating sullenly. He shook his head at last, stubbornly. “Just not my kind o’ farmin’.”

Nobody said anything, though Fiantha’s sigh was comment enough.

It was nice of them to hold the house and yard out of any deal. Oh yeah, not selling the land—that was a crock. Once he’d spent a year farming for NCI, they’d figure it easy to persuade him to sell, at least the boys would. They didn’t realize that the house meant less to him than the fields. The fields were his independence. And even his independence meant less than his way of life.

Which was doomed.

He looked up. “You boys just never understood, not either of you. Should’a been raised on the farm, then you’d know. The place never was nothin’ to you but a summer amusement park. Bein’ a farmer’s more than a job…”

But it was no use; they couldn’t understand. The generations of men of the soil that lay behind him, those of his blood and those others back to the stone age—they’d junk it all like…

“So it all ends with me,” he said bitterly.

They ate in silence till Tinette got up to bring the pies.

“What’s that?” Bill’s head jerked up.

Wind.

“My boat! I want it in the lee of the garage—the wind might get under the wings.”

It would take a tornado to lift the airboat. Electric arcs in those stubby flanges sucked air down from above and blew it out underneath. But Howard jumped up at another thought.

“The beans! The rain’ll knock’em off—specially if there’s hail!” He set off at an old man’s lope.

“Dad! Don’t worry about them—”

“Shag yourself out, boy! It’s a month’s crop!”

“Uncle John? Is it important?”

“No, Fiantha. Few of them will fall; they’re not quite ripe, and they’re designed for Midwestern thunderstorms. Besides, it’s only a month’s crop, out of three or four in the season. Gov’ment insurance’ll cover it. But let him go.”

“It’s getting dark out there!”

John Hampton smiled faintly. “The old man’s not afraid of the dark.”

Howard was hardly conscious of the cloud-shadow dusk. He ran by “Dear John,” the antique gasoline-powered John Deere he’d been so proud to drive as a boy. The modern tractor stood near it. It hummed alive at his thumb against the lock, and he backed it up to the multiharvester in the shed. They coupled like railroad cars and Howard hopped down to set the harvester for probeans.

Coming out of the shed to climb onto the tractor, he looked at the sky for the first time. It was still light where the clouds had not hidden it, and he was treated to an awesome vision: the wide pale sky, the massive black clouds lowering upon him, rushing out of the west; the trees lashing in the wind and showing the undersides of their leaves; already an occasional flash of lightning in the clouds.

It was the face of his old enemy, but he paused a moment to savor the sheer spectacle of it.

Then he advanced the exciter, the carbon-14 and strontium-90 atoms began to die at a faster rate within the tractor’s can, and power came humming forth. The tractor skimmed for the fields through the watery light. Howard hit the headlights as they turned into the first row.

The harvester swung arms out and began to comb the beans from the bushes; he drove between the close-set rows rather than straddling them. A stream of white flowed into the cart. They’d have to be dried after the rain, but no problem.

The clouds came on like the end of the world and the wind lashed around the cab. He closed the side windows and the noise subsided. The tractor charged, humming down the row at a run through air that smelled of rain.

The land can’t be made to pay for many more years, Fiantha had said.

How long can we go on like this? John had said.

Howard’s eyes stung and the row blurred ahead of him.

Bein’ a farmer’s more than a job, he’d argued. But the hard facts ignored him.

The world doesn’t need farmers any more, Jimmy had said.

Jimmy’d been like another son to him—and now he too was ready to sell out. Again Howard felt the pain around his old heart.

One dazzling blaze of lightning lit the field white and the rain was on him like a giant’s foot. Howard flinched at the rage and the roar. The rain instantly turned his windshield opaque white. As he hit the wipers he heard the rustle and grind of the bushes and knew he’d veered into the row.

Swearing, he tried to back, and the harvester got cross-wise. He didn’t have adequate lights back there and he swore again. The front tires skidded as the rain lashed down on the sloping field. Growling a little in irritation and haste, Howard swung down, snatching a flashlight loose and aiming it aft to see just what kind of predicament the harvester had gotten itself into.

It wasn’t supposed to happen, but the deadman switch was an irritation—you often had to stand up to see what you were doing—and Howard had disconnected it. Now the tractor began to creep forward. It couldn’t move fast without someone to advance the exciter, but it would attempt to hold this speed.

Alarmed, Howard jerked away from the tall wheel rolling slowly toward him. Between the rain in his eyes and the mud underfoot, he slipped. He hit his head against the frame and stars shot through his vision. Then he was down, his head under the tractor, his feet under the bean bushes, and the flashlight pointing offside. The wheel was advancing toward his midriff and chest and he jerked up, hit his head on the frame again, and subsided.

What flashed before his eyes was not his whole life, but the simple fact that he couldn’t escape. He was floundering around in the mud, he was old and stiff in the joints, and though the tractor was moving slowly, it was too close. It’d walk up over his belly and chest and down his shoulder, maybe missing his head, but surely stopping his heart, modern medicine or no. And behind it was the harvester’s narrower wheel to finish the job.

Well…so be it.

Relaxing, he took his last deep breath, let it out slowly. The wheel buried the flashlight in mud and he closed his eyes.

After eight or nine seconds he opened them.

The wheel had rolled up to him and stopped. The tractor didn’t say anything; it was not one of these newfangled ones that could talk. But it was smart enough not to run over him.

Howard lay and looked up at it, mud soaking him, and debated whether to get up or not. But the damn thing probably had an alarm built into it and would like as not begin yelling for help if he lay here too long.

He eased out from under and sat up, conscious of the mud, the rain. He hit the big driver with his fist. “Damn a world where a man can’t even die with dignity!”

He sat there for a while, wiping off mud and pondering his choices. It was nearly intolerable to get back into the cab, muddied as he was, but it was the least undignified thing he could do. There was mud on his head.

“Should’ve retired long ago,” he said vindictively, pulling himself to a stand beside the tractor. It quivered and backed ten centimeters like a live thing, having him so near its wheel. “Let them worry about feeding themselves, they’re so smart!”

He kicked the driver and it backed again.

*****

It was dark and the rain had slacked off to a steady drizzle when he had the last of the beans in the bins. Howard stomped into the house, ignoring Tinette’s gasp at his muddy clothing; she could guess he’d fallen. He looked at them sullenly.

“Before you start another round of argument, let me tell you here and now that I’ll never permit the land to be sold. Never! So if the only reason you can find to come out here is to git me to sell, you don’t need to come back ever again! Hear?”

Startled by this assault, Allen said stoutly, “It’s not the only reason, but never mind that—leasing isn’t the same as selling—”

“It’s as good as, when they run the land! Besides, you were just usin’ that as an excuse—next thing you know, you’d’ve been around again urging us to sell. Right?”

Bill had the grace to nod reluctantly; Allen flushed in acknowledgement. Fiantha swelled with anger, but had better sense than to intervene in an argument between men—that surprised Howard.

“Well, forget it—there’ll be no leasing, neither! Not to no damn chemical company. This is a farm, not a doggam plastic mine!”

Bill still had no better sense than to try to argue with him—in that mood. Howard blew up and ordered them off the farm, forgetting he no longer was sole owner. But John, half behind him, nodded, troubled, and the boys arose reluctantly.

“Rain’s slacked off,” Howard said sullenly. “You shouldn’t have any trouble flying out.”

He went to his room where any spiteful comments from Fiantha could not be heard. He’d shared this peaceful oasis with Marian for so many years; before that it was his parent’s room. It was much as Marian had left it; he looked dully at the crocheted cover on the chair, the doily and vase of silk flowers. Looks like a preserved room in a damn museum: the good old days! Howard kicked off his overalls and put them in the basket Marian had bought for muddy clothes. Presently he heard the scream of the airboat, the howl of its departure. Howard waited in his underwear. But John didn’t come. He was prepared for argument, for defense of the boys, for urgings to agree to the leasing of the land. Instead, he heard John and Tinette depart for bed.

That was a relief, but a let-down. The emotions of his struggle in the dark and the mud had worn off, leaving him melancholy. Hell of a way for a farmer’s life to peter out, he thought, stepping into a warm shower. He came out, put on clean overalls, hesitated for a time, and went out to his car. It wasn’t late yet.

Jimmy Li’s light was still on, he saw. Lily Li had refused to accompany her husband to the country, though his children sometimes visited, with their children. Those grandkids’d been looking forward to spending the summer with him. His grandkids had never much cared for it, though he could remember the pleasure he’d gotten from starting Allen on “Dear John.”

“How!” said Jimmy, swinging wide the door and stepping back. “What brings you over so late?” He sounded concerned, but glad for the company.

“Dust-up with the kids,” he said grimly. “Ordered’em off the place. Jimmy, was I right or wrong? But they got no business tellin’ us to sell or not to sell, bein’s they never lifted a finger about the place. It ain’t nothin’ to do with them.”

“True enough. So you’re not selling—or leasing, I take it?”

“Nope, not neither one. I’ll be a farmer till I die.”

Jimmy nodded slowly. “Unless you go broke and have the farm sold out from under you.”

“Unless I go broke, of course.” He spoke without concern, accepted coffee, drank. Jimmy was looking at him in surprise.

“You don’t seem troubled by the prospect.”