Read Online The Probability Broach by L. Neil Smith - Free Book Online Page A

among the change: an overweight penny with somebody named Albert Jay Nock staring out of it. Damn it, still busy! Seething now, I punched out MAP and 626 GENET PL. ACMe was as good as its word: a city map materialized, two pulsing amber dots explaining YOU ARE HERE and ADDRESS REQUESTED. Pretty fancy. I’d have a few suggestions for Ma Bell if I ever got the chance—
    Which I might! If Meiss had invented a time machine back in 1987, surely by now—I almost looked up “Travel Agents, Time” in the Grand Combined Directory, but didn’t want to risk getting a cartoon sore at me twice in one day.
    However, Genet Place was only six blocks away, and I was beginning to feel cocky—giddy if you prefer. Judging from the phone rates, I had a pocket full of high-caliber change—including the gold slug I’d never had a chance to turn in—and three freshly loaded guns. I’d figured out, within certain sloppy tolerances, what had happened to me. Thanks to my almost Sherlockian genius, I even had a rough idea of the history of this place—and a definite destination: 626 Genet Place. Not bad, for only an hour in Futureland!
    Shock can be a pretty wonderful thing.
    When I emerged, traffic was still heavy, and fast. Looking for a break, I glanced back the way I’d come only minutes ago. A flashing arrow at the curb spelled out PEDESTRIANS and pointed to an escalator that flowed down into a broad, well-lit area lined with shops, then became a moving walkway. Halfway through the trip, I passed a tunnel labeled, paradoxically, OVERLAND TRAIL. Here and there cheerful three-dimensional posters advertised food, entertainment—and tobacco. Prohibition was over! There seemed to be a lot of ads for various intimidating firearms, and something calling itself SECURITECH—WHILE YOU SLEEP. Was that a burglar alarm or a sleeping pill?
    I passed another TELECOM, decorated like a candy-striped guardpost, an enterprise of CHEYENNE COMMUNICATIONS. At least Wyoming had made it through Doomsday—but who’d know the difference? This booth offered background music and scenic rear-projections to convince ’em you were in Tahiti—or in a phone booth with scenic rear-projections.
    The escalator headed up again into the sunlight, dumping me out on the other side of Confederation Boulevard. Somewhere at the end of this day was a mattress and a pillow. I wished I knew where. I was weary, lightheaded, surrounded by the totally strange and the strangely familiar. I started giggling a couple times, mostly from hysteria rather than from the scenery.
    Escalator tunnels and underground shopping centers lay beneath every intersection, sometimes connected with their neighbors up and down the block. I got a lot of free rides that way, though once I rode too far and had to double back. There was almost more city below ground than above, which made sense with a thermonuclear war in the recent past.
    Forcibly reminded of certain biological facts, I stopped off at a door with appropriate markings, a model of understatement as it turned out. More than the usual monument to the ceramic arts, the rest room was an updated Roman bath: swimming pool, snack bar, even sleep cubicles for rent. I thought of Colfax Avenue hookers who’d love the setup, then noticed that such services—your choice, organic or mechanical—were available at a modest fee. To my taste, the whole arrangement looked too much like drawers in the city morgue.
    Experimentally, I fed my shirt into another slot and got it back looking almost good as new. So I turned in my pants, jacket, shorts, and socks and stood around feeling silly in my Kevlar, shoes, and shoulder holster. I found an empty shower stall and afterward discovered that the laundry had fixed my pants. It all came to about an ounce of copper.
    A few more blocks took me away from the energetic university district to a quieter residential area, elaborate in architectural extremes. Victorian and Edwardian gingerbread sat grandly between the