Read Online The Wonder Effect by Frederik Pohl - Free Book Online Page B

After a moment Pat said reflectively, “Sorry about the book. Should have opened it.”
    “He didn’t notice,” said Will, wiping his hands. He had touched the old man’s fingers.
    “No. Hate crying, though.”
    The doctor said, “Nice of you. Helped him, I think.” He picked up the phone and ordered a demolition crew for the house. “Monument?”
    “Oh, yes,” said another child. “Well. Small one, anyway.”
    The .doctor, who was nine, said, “Funny. Without him, what? A few hundred thousand dollars and the Foundation makes a flexible world, no more rigid adults, no more-“ He caught himself narrowly. The doctor had observed before that he had a tendency to over-identify with adults, probably because his specialty had been geriatrics. Now that Elphen DeBeckett was dead, he no longer had a specialty.
    “Miss him somehow,” said Celine frankly, coming over to look over Will’s shoulder at the quaint old murals on the wall. “What the nurse said, true enough. He loved us.”
    “And clearly we loved him,” piped Freddy, methodically sorting through the contents of the dead man’s desk. “Would have terminated him with the others otherwise, wouldn’t we?”
     
    NIGHTMARE WITH ZEPPELINS
     
    THE ZEPPELIN dirigible balloons bombed London again last night and I got little sleep what with the fire brigades clanging down the street and the antiaircraft guns banging away. Bad news in the morning post. A plain card from Emmie to let me know that Sam’s gone, fast and without much pain. She didn’t say, but I suppose it was the flu, which makes him at least the fifth of the old lib-lab boys taken off this winter. And why not? We’re in our seventies and eighties. It’s high time.
    Shaw said as much the other day when I met him on the steps of the Museum reading room, he striding in, I doddering out. In that brutal, flippant way of his, he was rather funny about how old Harry Lewes was standing in the way of youngsters like himself, but I can’t bring myself to put his remarks down; they would be a little too painful to contemplate.
    Well, he’s quite recovered from that business with his foot that gave us all such a fright. Barring the ‘flu, he may live to my age, and about 1939 bright youngsters now unborn will be watching him like hawks for the smallest sign of rigidity, of eccentricity, and saying complacently: “Grand old boy, G.B.S. Such a pity he’s going the least bit soft upstairs.” And I shall by then be watching from Olympus, and chuckling.
    Enough of him. He has the most extraordinary way of getting into everybody’s conversation, though it is true that my own conversation does wander, these bad days. I did not think that the second decade of the twentieth century would be like this, though, as I have excellent reason to be, I am glad it is not worse.
    I am really quite unhappy and uncomfortable as I sit here at the old desk. Though all the world knows I don’t hold with personal service for the young and healthy, I am no longer a member of either of those classes. I do miss the ministrations of Bagley, who at this moment is probably lying in a frozen trench and even more uncomfortable than I. I can’t seem to build as warm a fire as he used to. The coals won’t go right. Luckily, I know what to do when I am unhappy and uncomfortable: work.
    Anyway, Wells is back from France. He has been talking, he says, to some people at the Cavendish Laboratory, wherever that is. He told me we must make a “radium bomb.” I wanted to ask: “Must we, Wells? Must we, really?”
    He says the great virtue of a radium bomb is that it explodes and keeps on exploding-for hours, days, weeks. The italics are Wells’s-one could hear them in his rather high-pitched voice-and he is welcome to them.
    I once saw an explosion which would have interested Wells and, although it did not keep on exploding, it was as much of an explosion as I ever care to see.
    I thought of telling him so. But, if he believed me,